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Layout and feel. Jacksonville has over 700K people but its not a real city, its flat out country.. meanwhile Baltimore has 621K people and is a real city.
Being a real city doesn't have that much to do with the population count IMO, it has more to do with its layout and feel. If it's densely built with pedestrians in mind (not cars) and it has a well-defined city center that draws people from other parts of the city as well as people from other surrounding towns for work/entertainment then it's a real city IMO. Per my definition I'd consider Berkeley just as much of a real city as San Francisco or Oakland even though it's only 114,000 people; it's densely built and draws people from the surrounding region.
On the other hand, Arlington, Texas has over 370,000 people. But it's an "all suburb" city, with no well defined urban core, and no mass transit at all. Hence it lacks any sense of place.
Being a real city doesn't have that much to do with the population count IMO, it has more to do with its layout and feel. If it's densely built with pedestrians in mind (not cars) and it has a well-defined city center that draws people from other parts of the city as well as people from other surrounding towns for work/entertainment then it's a real city IMO. Per my definition I'd consider Berkeley just as much of a real city as San Francisco or Oakland even though it's only 114,000 people; it's densely built and draws people from the surrounding region.
EDIT: I also agree with annie_himself that real cities have self-contained economies.
Being a real city doesn't have that much to do with the population count IMO, it has more to do with its layout and feel. If it's densely built with pedestrians in mind (not cars) and it has a well-defined city center that draws people from other parts of the city as well as people from other surrounding towns for work/entertainment then it's a real city IMO.
That's a silly way to measure a "real city" imo, because it's based basically on characteristics of cities that grew before the automobile became popular. That can be one factor, but not the only factor.
I grew up in a small city with around 50,000 people, some of the surrounding citires had more. To me 500,000 seems enough, maybe 1 million sometime in the future.
Being a real city doesn't have that much to do with the population count IMO, it has more to do with its layout and feel. If it's densely built with pedestrians in mind (not cars) and it has a well-defined city center that draws people from other parts of the city as well as people from other surrounding towns for work/entertainment then it's a real city IMO. Per my definition I'd consider Berkeley just as much of a real city as San Francisco or Oakland even though it's only 114,000 people; it's densely built and draws people from the surrounding region.
EDIT: I also agree with annie_himself that real cities have self-contained economies.
I don't completely agree because the pedestrian-centric "hipster" fad is relatively recent and prior to it people would have had no problem saying an auto-centric city was a "real city." Asheville, NC is much as you describe Berkeley. It's dense, organic, funky, and draws people, but I would still call it a town.
I don't completely agree because the pedestrian-centric "hipster" fad is relatively recent and prior to it people would have had no problem saying an auto-centric city was a "real city."
That's not true. You think everything is about hipsters .
Most people on the East Coast have been saying Phoenix and the like aren't "real cities" for a while now. Obviously a lot of people don't agree with that but in many ways I do.
For me, a metro over 2.5 mil is sufficient, but I think that number comes from the places I have lived or visited -- all large places.
If I lived in some hamlet in the middle-of-nowhere, Iowa, I might consider the Des Moines metro 'large' just because I haven't lived or visited somewhere even larger.
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