Town Totally Explained

Everything about Town totally explained

A town is a type of settlement ranging from a few hundred to several thousand (occasionally hundreds of thousands) inhabitants, although it may be applied loosely even to huge metropolitan areas. 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 tūn, an enclosed piece of land.

Origin of the word and use around the world

In Old English and Old Scots, "Town" (or "toun", "ton", etc.) originally meant a fortified municipality, whereas a borough wasn't fortified. But that distinction didn't 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's 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 isn't 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:

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). ==

Further Information

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