City At Night

Distinction between cities and towns
There are probably as many different ways of conceiving what a city is as there are cities. A simple definition therefore has its attractions. The simplest is that a city is a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1977, p. 39.
The difference between towns and cities is differently understood in different parts of the world. Indeed, many languages other than English often use a single word for both concepts (German Stadt, Dutch stad, Swedish stad, Danish/Norwegian by, etc.). Iberian languages typically use a three-way designation (Catalan: “poble”, “vila”, “ciutat”; Galician: “aldea”, “vila”, “cidade”; Portuguese: “aldeia”, “vila”, “cidade”; Spanish: “pueblo”, “villa”, “ciudad”—respectively “village”, “town”, “city”); Italian: “villaggio”, "paese" “città”—respectively “village”, "town", “city”; , but other Romance languages don’t (French: “village”, “ville”).
Even within the English-speaking world there is no one standard definition of a city: the term may be used either for a town possessing city status; for an urban locality exceeding an arbitrary population size; for a town dominating other towns with particular regional economic or administrative significance. In British English city is reserved for very large settlements, smaller ones are called town or village. In the US city is used for much smaller settlements.