Cities, Towns, and Villages: What Makes Each Place Different?

Imagine two places. Place A has towering skyscrapers, thousands of cars, busy markets, and millions of people rushing around. Place B has a small church, a handful of cottages, open fields, and about 200 people who all know each other's names. Which place sounds more like home to you — or more like somewhere you have visited? Think about it for a moment before we explore what makes these two places so different.

Geographers sort settlements by size and by the services they offer. A settlement is any place where people live together. Settlements come in different sizes: from tiny villages, to larger towns, to huge cities. A village is a small settlement, usually in the countryside. Villages often have fewer than a few thousand people. They might have a school, a shop, and a place of worship — but not much more. People in villages often know their neighbours well. There is usually lots of open land, such as fields and forests, nearby. A city is a very large settlement with hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of people. Cities have many services: hospitals, universities, airports, shopping centres, and lots of transport links such as buses, trains, and underground railways. Buildings in cities are often tall and packed close together. Land is expensive, so people live in flats as well as houses. Here is a useful rule of thumb: the bigger the population, the more services it needs, and the more likely it is to be called a city. Tokyo in Japan is one of the world's largest cities, with over 13 million people. Compare that to a village like Eyam in England, which has only around 1,000 people. Some places sit between villages and cities — we call these towns. Towns are bigger than villages but smaller than cities. They usually have a market, more shops, and a secondary school.