Town

Search for "Town" on Ebay? Click here!

Town

A town is a type of settlement ranging from a few to several thousand (occasionally hundreds of thousands) inhabitants, although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas; the precise meaning varies between countries and is not always a matter of legal definition. Usually, a "town" is thought of as larger than a village but smaller than a "city", though there are exceptions to this rule. The words "city" and "village" came into English from Latin via French. "Town" and "borough" (also "burrow", "burgh", "bury", etc.) are of native Germanic origin, from Old English burg, a fortified settlement, and t?n, an enclosed piece of land.The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, Erin McKean (Editor), 2096 pages, May 2005, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-517077-6

Origin of the word and use around the world

The word Town is related to the German word Zaun [tsown ? English] and the Dutch word tuin [toin ? English]. The German word Zaun comes closest to the original meaning of the word, being some sort of wooden fence or wall. In English and Dutch the meaning of the word has converged with the space these fences used to enclose. In English that was a small city which (way into the 18th century) couldn't afford or wasn?t allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and build a palisade/stockade instead (lots of early English settlements in America are a good example of that). In Netherland this space was a garden, more specific the richer ones which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of palace 't Loo in Apeldoorn which was the example for the privy garden of William and Mary at Hamptoncourt). In Norse/Norwegian [http://www.dokpro.uio.no/perl/ordboksoek/ordbok.cgi?OPP=tun&bokmaal=S%F8k+i+Bokm%E5lsordboka&ordbok=bokmaal&alfabet=n&renset=j "tun"] means the (grassy) place between a farms houses.

In Old English and Old Scots, "Town" (or "toun", "ton", etc.) originally meant a fortified municipality, whereas a borough was not fortified. But that distinction did not last long, and "Edina Burgh" or "Edinburgh" - modernly called a "city" - was a fortified "town" from its founding.

In modern American English, a town is usually a municipal corporation that is smaller than a city but larger than a village. In some cases, "town" is an alternate name for "city" or "village" (especially a larger village). Sometimes, the word "town" is short for "township." Some US states designate towns and townships as political subdivisions of Counties. In general, towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry, commerce, and public service rather than primary industry such as agriculture or related activities.

A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, as in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities that are far smaller than the larger towns.

The modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, and migration of city-dwellers to villages have further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.

Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be clearly non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.

The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach adopted: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are very, very much smaller than that.

Age of Towns scheme

Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor proposed a classification of towns based on their age and pattern of land use. He identified five types of town:Goodall, B. (1987) The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography. London: Penguin.

• Infantile towns, with no clear zoning

• Juvenile towns, which have developed an area of shops

• Adolescent towns, where factories have started to appear

• Early mature towns, with a separate area of high-class housing

• Mature towns, with defined industrial, commercial and various types of residential area

Australia

In Australia, the status of a town is formally applied in only a few states. Most states do define cities, and towns are commonly understood to be those centres of population not formally declared to be cities and usually with a population in excess of about 250 people.

The creation and delimitation of Local Government Areas is the responsibility of the state and territory Governments. In all states and the Northern Territory each incorporated area has an official status. The various LGA status types currently in use are -

• New South Wales: Cities (C) and Areas (A)

• Victoria: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Boroughs (B) and Shires (S)

• Queensland: Cities (C), Shires (S), Regions, Towns (T) and Island Councils (IC)

• South Australia: Cities (C), Rural Cities (RC), Municipalities/Municipal Councils (M), District Councils (DC), Regional Councils (RegC) and Aboriginal Councils (AC)

• Tasmania: Cities (C) and Municipalities (M)

• Western Australia: Cities (C), Towns (T) and Shires (S)

• Northern Territory: Cities (C), Towns (T), Community Government Councils (CGC) and Shires (S).

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Town". The list of authors you can find on this page.