Cities are really just a conglomeration of small towns. The bigger the city, the more small towns clustered together and the less likely you’re going across the city to get what you want. It’s not just that there are goods and services available, it’s that they are available near you and there is no need to venture too far from your neighborhood to get them. In a midsize city, there may just be one or two providers of a service, but in a larger city, there will be one or two per neighborhood. I live in DC, which I consider a big small city and I don’t often feel the need to venture too far for my neighborhood most days. If I can’t walk to it, I probably don’t need it.
Yeah, I meant major league sports. The midsize cities may have minor league, but for a professional league football, basketball or baseball team you usually need a big city. There are exceptions obviously (Green Bay), but for example most NFL teams are either based in a large city, or if the team is named for a state or reigion, their stadium is based in a large city.
By skyscraper I’m using the definition in wikipedia. Yeah, Omaha has a skyscraper. FWIW, the metro population of Omaha is 924,000 people, making it a large city by the definition of the OP.
For the definition of cities, I’m using the metro area of a city, not just the borders of a city.
There are exceptions to what I said, but for the most part I think I’m right.
As far as “metro areas” go, I consider something definitely part of the metro area if it is both integrated enough and obscure enough that you would just say you’re from the metro area if someone from far away asks where you’re from. So if I lived in Lackawanna I’d just say I’m from Buffalo to anyone not from Western NY/Erie, but if I lived in Niagara Falls I wouldn’t.
Now, there are exceptions for famous subdivisions: the boroughs of NYC are part of NYC, but the other way around seems pretty rigid.
Now, if you lived so far outside the city that you felt you had to say “I live outside of [city X]”, then that part is not in the metro area IMO. For Buffalo that would be somewhere before Darien and Irving but I’ve never lived in Buffalo so I don’t know exactly where that line is.
I think people who live in the central part of the large cities tend to think of the suburbs as separate cities. Someone who lives in downtown Houston, for example, might consider someone living in one of the suburbs as not being from Houston, but as being from Sugarland or Pasadena or whatever other suburb they live in. As someone from a smaller city I tend to just lump the central city and suburbs all in to the same city unless I can identify a place that is “the country” somewhere between them. In my view, for example, San Antonio and Austin have both expanded far enough toward each other that they are pretty much the same city. I don’t think the people who live there have the same view.
Yeah, I admit I’m always a little irked when someone tells me they’re from DC too and it turns out they live somewhere out in Virginia, or Maryland. I realize that I’m in the minority on this.
I disagree. the people who live in the suburbs pump money into the economy of the larger city, which increases demand for consumer goods. Hence the differences between large and midsize cities. There is enough consumer demand that the quantity and specialty of consumer products (skyscrapers, professional sports teams, esoteric ethnic restaurants, very specific specialty stores, etc) is higher in large cities due to the quantity and diversity of consumer demand in a big city. but you should include the metro area, because a lot of people in the metro area work and spend money in the large city proper.
This is a pretty good summation, IMO.
I grew up in Green Bay, which has had about 100,000 people or so for the past few decades, and a metro area that’s about 300,000, so it seems to fit under the definition of “mid-sized city.” Unless it’s a Packer Sunday, or there’s a snowstorm, you can pretty much get anywhere in the immediate area (by car) in 15 minutes or less – and anything that takes more than that to get to is seen as “a long drive” by at least some locals. The restaurant situation in Green Bay is better (or, at least, a bit more diverse) now than it was when I was growing up there, and there’s now a performing arts center which draws touring musicals, but the cultural landscape there is still dominated by the Packers.
I then went to college in Madison, which is bigger (250,000, though it was only around 180,000 when I was there), and has a lot more in the way of culture – though, I’m not sure how much of that is a function of city size, versus the presence of a large university. Traffic was definitely more of a noticeable issue there than it was / is in Green Bay, but you could still get from one side of town to the other in under a half-hour, most of the time. In my final year there, i was living in an apartment on the far west side of the city, and driving downtown to campus; the drive would often take 20 minutes during rush hour, and I’d complain about how bad traffic was. In retrospect, I had no idea what I was talking about, as I then moved to Chicago, where the amount of traffic, and how long it could take to get somewhere, simply blew me away.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the people who live in the city don’t see suburbanites as residents of the city, which was the point.
Large cities have functional mass transit systems that people use, and driving is seen by many residents as optional.
Mid-sized cities have transit systems that people don’t use because they’re underfunded and crappy and then they complain about paying taxes for transit systems because no one uses them. They drive everywhere and bitch about not being able to find parking because the closest spot they could find was two whole blocks away from their destination.
IMHO the definitions of differences based on size are hard to pin down. Be that as it may, from my travels I have been to a lot of large cities and a lot of smaller/mid-sized cities.
The differences I notice are that I feel that for smaller/mid-sized cities, I can wrap my mind around the whole place. And by that I mean I can basically figure our where everything is and understand the layout. There may be 3 or 4 shopping areas (1 high-end, one bohemian), maybe a couple of entertainment areas, there’s maybe 20-25 important restaurants, the rich people live in those 2 areas, and over there is the area you don’t want to go to - and that’s it, you’ve got it figured out. Go any farther and you are out in the country. Examples would be: Portland OR, Madison WI, St Louis MO, Lansing MI, San Francisco CA.
Whereas with the large ones, no way. They just keep going and going, there is too much to master, there are uncountable downtowns and shopping areas and rich areas and poor areas and neighborhoods and suburbs, too many restaurants and entertainment options, etc etc. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Washington DC.
I tend to think large cities have their own orbit, meaning they are not part of the orbit of another city. For example, Oakland (pop ~400,000) has all of the things Wesley Clark listed, but while it has all the trappings of a large city, it falls within the orbit of San Francisco (pop ~900,000). San Jose (close to 1 million pop) as well. Most would not think of San Jose or Oakland as a “large” city, the same way they would think of San Francisco. The whole thing is just known as the “Bay Area”.
Sacramento, near where I live, has all the things listed, and is far enough from the SF Bay area that it may be in it’s own orbit, but I don’t think it is a “large” city, even when the metro area is included.
In southern California, there are many cities with all the items listed, but all of them fall within the orbit of Los Angeles or San Diego (no matter hard hard Anaheim tries to be it’s own large city).
So, I don’t know is there is an easy way to differentiate “large” vs “midsize” cities.
You nailed it here. I live the same distance from Milwaukee and Chicago, but have been to Milwaukee a dozen times in the past year, Chicago once. I know it’s not in the OP’s definition of midsize vs. large, but I see MKE as midsized.
Diven the option to watch a Brewers-Cubs game, for example, Wrigley has the atmosphere but Miller Park is much more accessible without the insane traffic and parking hassles, and generally costs us less. If a band I love is touring, or there’s another downtown event in both places, I always choose Milwaukee because I can figure out where I am more easily, I can almost always find free street parking within walking distance of the venue, and the bars and restaurants aren’t nearly as crowded-feeling, as a general rule.
There’s very little I’ll ever need that I can’t get in MKE or another similarly sized city.
Population in the city limits is totally meaningless when the city limits obviously have nothing to do with the breadth of the CITY. It is absurd to pretend Boston is a smaller city than El Paso, or that Atlanta is smaller than Fresno.
I made the mistake of making assumptions about city population than metro population. However, a smaller city with a huge metro population is really just surrounded by a massive sprawling suburbs.
Yeah, where is the line drawn for metropolitan areas? Where do suburban populations stop being included in the metropolitan populations of the larger cities of which they are suburbs? Seems like a very blurry line to me. Take Detroit for example. It is surrounded by suburbs and these suburbs continue in most directions for many miles. Is Flint considered a suburb of Detroit? Why or why not?
That really depends on the history of how the region developed, though. Boston, for example, has several inner suburbs that are more densely populated.
Chicago and New Orleans are remarkably similar.
Both cities are great and have great, friendly people. Both have great food.
Both have good areas and bad areas. Expensive neighborhoods and cheap ones.
I honestly cannot think of a single difference which I could pin on large vs small. (New Orleans 390,000).
Good definition, but it only works from an outsiders perspective of the city. If you live in the city, the issues you mention aren’t really issues.
To me (and growing up around the NYC area):
1 Large cities self contain mid sized cities, though one is usually primary
2 Have massive traffic problems, parking is expensive and may require looking for some time.
3 Have intercity, commuter and innercity rail systems.
4 Spill over their boarders (Such as the commercial skyscrapers in Jersey City across the river from Manhattan)
5 Don’t die out fast, takes lots of drive time to get away from it’s influence once you left the city/ have massive suburbs.
6 Prices are higher for almost everything and much higher for some things such as tolls and parking
Midsized cities:
1 Usually have one center
2 May have rush hour traffic, but usually OK, parking is usually available and reasonable
3 Have a bus system, perhaps small rail, light rail, or be along a big city rail line.
4 You enter the city boarder before you are really in the city
5 Unless a bedroom city to a major city, they die out fast, bedroom areas are more rural not surburban.
6 Prices are not higher then the surrounding area.
I don’t know if they “aren’t really issues,” so much as residents of large cities just have them factored into how they live. Conversely, when someone who lives in a large city travels to (or moves to) a smaller city, they’re often (pleasantly) surprised by how quickly one can get to places*, but can feel that the options for restaurants, nightlife, etc. are lacking.
*- for driving, anyway. If you more commonly use public transit in a large city, you may feel that smaller cities are underserved in this area.