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I think these photos show the broad categories very well. There would still be some fine-tuning needed to account for urban residential areas and low-density suburbia, and to determine the best category for non-suburban towns as discussed early in the thread, but these three photos get across the basic idea very well.
For my views, I was trying to pick archetypes of each category; one where it's very clear which category they belong.
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Looking at that picture 313Weather posted for rural brings to mind several posts in this thread in which any population density under 1,000/sq. mi. was listed as "rural." I'd be interested in knowing whether the people who suggested that number are longtime urbanites. My speculation that the 1,000 number was suggested by people not highly familiar with non-urban landscapes results from the fact that you need a much lower number as the threshold between suburban/exurban and rural, at least if by rural you mean something like the picture 313W posted, or Nei's picture of Hadley, MA. 1,000/sq. mi. is more like large-lot suburban, not farm country.
My photo isn't in Hadley, it's in Deerfield, I must have typed Hadley in google maps and then scrolled around. You bring up an interesting point about the 1000 people per square mile threshold; I think the number comes from a government agency not clueless city dwellers (though whatever agency set that threshold might be full of clueless city dwellers). 1000 people per square mile is pretty low density. At the census tract level, a suburb full of one acre homes would be about or slightly higher than that density. Not too many suburbs are lower density than that, though some wealthy ones are. I guess the 500-1000 range is as you said, scattered large lot homes. Too dense to have lots of agriculture or undeveloped land. New England seems to have a lot of examples of these, probably because a lot of land is useless or marginal for farming. Not a fan of these areas, they consume lots of land feel kinda rural but are dense enough to destroy the rural ambiance and create traffic. One of my bigger gripes about sprawl is that it creates horrible bicycling. Long stretches of these exurbs aren't fun for biking, and not as nice looking as farmfields, forests and occasional farmhouses. Without much sprawl, I can leave my somewhat dense, walkable city and within a few miles get to rural country. That Deerfield link is a great spot for road biking.
The small independent city I live (technically part of a small metro but there's a lot of open land between it and continuous suburbia, I'm on the very edge of the metro) in doesn't really fit quite with any of the three categories. I could divide within the city limits, the "urban" parts (generally older areas with lots of multifamily and single family on very small lots; especially within walking distance to stores), the "suburban" parts (mostly more distant single family homes) and the "rural" parts (mostly undeveloped land). But, the since the urban parts are quite small, the densities required would less than for a large metro. The cities density is around 800 per square mile, so much of the land must be rural.
The threshold for rural will be different depending on the region. Rural areas in Europe are generally denser, and set up with more people living in a rural village rather than scattered. Rural densities in China are typically around 1500 per square mile, as the farm plot sizes are tiny.
For my views, I was trying to pick archetypes of each category; one where it's very clear which category they belong.
I think you picked some good archetypes. Those pictures give good overall pictures of the types of settlement.
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Rural densities in China are typically around 1500 per square mile, as the farm plot sizes are tiny.
I guess that's what happens in a country with China's huge population. The houses in the areas they consider rural must have little or no yard around them, with each household's farmed land being not much larger than a good-sized vegetable garden.
1500 ppsm might allow for a bit more farm than that, but it's definitely very small by North American standards. Say each farm has 6 people (2 grandparents, 2 parents, 2 kids), that's 250 farms/sq mile or about 2.5 acre farms.
I think in these Chinese rural areas, as well as rural areas of Taiwan, Japan and India, and maybe some parts of Europe, the farmers live in farming villages/towns which feel urban (except for the sound of chickens and what not), but the areas outside them are much less dense.
Not sure how common this is elsewhere, but there is something similar near Leamington, Ontario on a smaller scale. Holland Marsh in Ontario and rural parts of Niagara Region in Ontario (orchards and vinyards) might be around 100-200 ppsm.
So, I'm supposing we'll never really be able to settle on a definition of urban, suburban and rural based on density alone (that's universal for cities or regions, let alone globally)?
Maybe usage then, and "feel" or lifestyle is a better way to mark things?
I think you picked some good archetypes. Those pictures give good overall pictures of the types of settlement.
Thanks.
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I guess that's what happens in a country with China's huge population. The houses in the areas they consider rural must have little or no yard around them, with each household's farmed land being not much larger than a good-sized vegetable garden.
It's probably enough for subsistence but not much more. An enormous population lives in rural China and its been slowing declining as people move to cities for factory jobs; it's been a major source of China's growth.
Likely all the houses are close together and the fields outside of where the houses are. Much of rural Europe is like that. Look at this French village (population about 2000):
I can't imagine any North American town being this dense. It's almost a city in miniature. There are detached houses soon a bit further out, but then it abruptly turns to rural. These residents are living at densities higher most American city dwellers, but the settlement is small and sleepy looking. Does the city mouse vs country mouse fable relevant for density preference anymore?
Here's a webpage that describes a city neighborhood as suburban:
Bayside - Neighborhood Profile of Bayside, Queens, New York
Bayside, in northeastern Queens, is a suburban neighborhood with city amenities and city taxes (often $6,000 a year less than neighboring Nassau County). Walk down Bell Boulevard, Bayside's crowded main thoroughfare, and it's hard to believe that just one block away are wide, green streets and one-family homes.
Was a contender one year for best communities for Money Magazine, but lost out to Louisville.
With all due respect, "About.com" is hardly a solid source.
Well, Money Magazine made the right decision if they were looking at small towns. A piece of NYC is not a small town no matter how much someone might think it is and want it to be.
I think in these Chinese rural areas, as well as rural areas of Taiwan, Japan and India, and maybe some parts of Europe, the farmers live in farming villages/towns which feel urban (except for the sound of chickens and what not), but the areas outside them are much less dense.
Urban areas of India have lots of cows. Generally meandering in the roads. Also in the road are oxcarts, camels, trucks with religious phrases on the back, scooters darting back and forth, pedestrians, bicycles and even cars.
Well, Money Magazine made the right decision if they were looking at small towns. A piece of NYC is not a small town no matter how much someone might think it is and want it to be.
It was for "best places to live" not "best small towns". Looking at it more careful, it was listed as a contender — 96 places in New York State counted, contender seems like it's most places in a metro, so it was meaningless. Whoops. People living in Bayside have a postal address as "Bayside, NY" not "New York, NY" so the magazine counted Bayside as location with 47,000 people not in a location of 8 million people. And weird...this looks like it belong in California, or maybe Europe....
Though, I don't suburbs are really small town; a small town I think as something more independent. Might depend on what suburbs you're looking at; Long Island is mostly continuous suburbia with some little centers here and there; I don't think anything there belongs as "small town".
It is in the city by definition, but is it urban (which was what the thread title is about)? Two very different things.
For example, this is in the city limits but clearly not urban:
The question of whether to separate cities and suburbs by city limits or more by areas that share form and function may depend in part on a person's area of concern. You're not going to be so interested in areas outside city limits if you are a city official planning the distribution of services that serve only city residents, for example if you are managing the city's school system. You're likely to be concerned with areas that cross city boundaries if you're working on a project which involves regional infrastructure, such as a metro-wide transit system. In between would be those who manage services used by people present within the city whether or not they are city residents, such as police departments.
The question Nei and Katiana have been discussing has more to do with perception than practical issues. I can see how one's view on this could depend on that person's experiences with any city or cities with which the person is especially familiar. In cities where much of the area within city limits has a more or less suburban character, Katiana's view works. If single-family houses and small neighborhood commercial districts are the predominant land uses outside the immediate city center, with areas sharing this character spreading in a continual expanse through the city's middle and outer districts and then on beyond the city limits, you can't readily separate city from suburbs on the basis of land use characteristics. City or suburbs, it's all the same. You could drive out away from downtown and never know just by the appearance of the landscape around you when you had left the city limits. It's convenient to simply go by official boundaries, and say that once you leave the city limits you are in the suburbs.
This distinction will also be simple in an old city which fits BajunYankee's earlier assertion that the official boundaries of densely built older cities tend to correspond fairly closely with the areas that have a dense urban look. After you pass through the city's outer districts of large apartment buildings and tightly packed single-family houses with tiny yards or no yards, and you begin to enter areas where the houses have two-car garages and more than a few feet of space between them, and are surrounded by yards large enough for backyard gatherings and for kids to run around and play tag, you can easily enough view this as the transition between city and suburbs if the city's official limits happen to closely approximate the boundary between these two forms.
But what about BajunYankee's "East Coast exception," Boston? Below are links to photos of several cities outside of Boston's city limits, which continue to be densely built and urban despite their official location outside of "the city":
Cambridge:
Directly across the river from Boston
Population density, 16,000+
Lynn
Approx. 12-13 miles from downtown Boston (close to the northern edge of the unbroken urban landscape
that spreads out from downtown Boston; some parts of Lynn are actually a couple of miles farther from
downtown Boston than are the most distant neighborhoods within the city limits)
Population density 8,000+
In these and other small cities that make up the urban core adjacent to Boston, you're likely to have more of a sense of being "in the city" than you will if you move over a couple of miles from the fringes of areas like those above and start seeing scenes like these:
All the pictures in the second set of links are in towns located in the transitional zone between urban and suburban, and are not far, sometimes within a longish walking distance, from scenes like those in the first set of links. Many neighborhoods on the fringe of that heavily urban zone that spreads out to the north of Boston's official city limits are miles farther from downtown Boston than they are from scenes like those in the second links, yet still look very much like outer districts of "the city." In a case like this, it's difficult to be so sure that "the city" ends at the city limits.
I think this is true to some degree in most older cities. Boston is the exception mainly in terms of the large spread of urbanity that extends beyond the city limits, and how this compares in size with the city proper (those urban "suburbs" actually add up to a bit more land area than Boston's city limits), but most older cities have at least a few adjacent areas with an urban character located just beyond their city limits. This is sometimes true even in the case of smaller, or at least mid-sized cities. In Rhode Island, Pawtucket and East Providence both are extensions of the urban mass centered in Providence, even though they are independent cities. If you did not know the area but were just passing through, you would never know when you had passed out of Providence and into Pawtucket. You'd be likely to have the sense of still being "in the city" until you left Pawtucket and began to get into less densely built areas more characteristically suburban in appearance.
I tend to think of metropolitan areas as being unified single cities in practical terms, even though they are officially made up of many separate political subdivisions. When I say that I view a metro area as effectively being all one city, I'm talking strictly in terms of functioning, and I'm talking more about MSA's than CSA's, the latter not usually being self-contained enough to function as a single city.
This gets back to the question in the opening post, about why the Census Bureau uses a population density of 1,000/sq. mi. as the threshold for urban, even though most would likely view this as suburban, and fairly low-density suburban at that. The Census Bureau uses this definition of urban to identify the core zones of metro areas. They delineate metro areas on the basis of function, specifically commuting patterns, and the close connections that function creates between sub-sections of a broad local region. Most likely they use 1,000/sq. mi. as the density that defines "urban cores" because this enables them to compare the non-fringe sections of all U.S. metro areas, both those centered around older cities with much more dense cores within the official core zones, and Sun Belt metros where population density thins out significantly even fairly close to the central city. Because even the near-centers of many Sun Belt metro areas have no more than moderate population density, it would be much more difficult to make meaningful comparisons between metro areas if the Bureau, when identifying metro area cores, limited their use of the term "urban" to those areas most people would consider truly urban.
So, I'm supposing we'll never really be able to settle on a definition of urban, suburban and rural based on density alone (that's universal for cities or regions, let alone globally)?
Well some numbers are easy to decide and then there are gray areas depending on the location. A neighborhood at 20k / sq mile is not really suburban and definitely not rural. And so on. Outside North America, the divide would be rather different (probably large density ranges that don't really exist )?
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