From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader)
Subject: Cities, metropolitan areas, etc. (was: Largest cities by area)
Followup-To: rec.games.trivia
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 23:37:36 GMT

This thread comes from rec.games.trivia; I have added a cross-posting
to the local groups tor.general and ont.general, but directed followups 
back to rec.games.trivia.  Followups of specific local interest might
better go only to one of the local groups.

> > > I prefer not to discuss suburbs,
> > > etc., since they're impossible to define consistently.
> > And so are cities. Some places are divided into a number of
> > small cities and boroughs like London. Others takes the whole 
> > and a lot of wasteland around it. You call that consistent?

Well, this inconsistency is exactly why the question is interesting
from a trivia point of view.  If you take the point of view that the
"city" is the entity whose formal name is something like "City of"
and the name used for the whole metropolis, then you get the result
that the city of Sydney (N.S., Canada) is hardly smaller in population
than Sydney (N.S.W., Australia); while London (Ont., Canada) is actually
larger than London (England, U.K.).  On the other hand, as noted,
cities like Jacksonville (FL, U.S.A.) and Juneau (AK, U.S.A.) encompass
all of their suburbs and more besides.  Another one of this type is
Honolulu (HI, U.S.A.), which encompasses the whole island of Oahu.

This "city proper" view actually makes a certain amount of sense, because
typically cities are designated as having legal powers in certain areas,
and so what we are comparing is the number of people or the amount of
territory under a single government at that level.

On the other hand, a number of urban areas have a formal two-level
government, where the higher-level (metropolitan) government takes some
of the "city" powers, and the lower-level (borough) government takes
others.  In some places the term "city" is used for the metropolitan
government; New York is an example.  In others, and I think this is
more common, it is the borough-level entities, or maybe just some of
them, that use the name "city"; Toronto works this way, and so did
London (England, U.K.) before the metropolitan government was abolished
for political reasons in 1986.

The third interpretation is that of the continuous built-up area, or
some similar definition relating to economic interactions; in other
words, it includes suburbs, even if they share no government with the
city center at all, as with Detroit (MI, U.S.A.) and Windsor (Ont.,
Canada).  In the US and Canada and presumably other countries, the
census bureau uses definitions like this (though I expect they always
stop at national boundaries for obvious reasons!) to yield what's called
here a "census metropolitan area".  My Rand McNally New International
Atlas includes a worldwide list of city populations, and these give
both the "city proper" and "metropolitan area" values; the mapmakers
says that they derived the latter by a set of consistent definitions,
thus applying the same principle as the "census metropolitan area" on
a worldwide basis.  Presumably other cartographic and similar companies
have also done this.

Personally, I take the point of view that the two things that count
are this latter type of metropolitan area, and the thing that calls itself
a "city".  For trivia purposes it's a somewhat arbitrary choice what you
use, but you should be careful to specify which one you're using!


> Another case like this, although I don't know
> the exact details, is Toronto.  Any Ontarions want to fill us in?

That's generally spelled "Ontarians", though I have seen the other
spelling and the corresponding word for the city is "Torontonians".

I'll go into this in more detail than necessary, since trivia types
may be interested in some of the terminological details, which differ
considerably from place to place.  Until 1954, Ontario was divided
into counties (in the urban/agricultural south) and districts (in the
mostly wilderness north).  Counties were subdivided into townships
(normally rural areas, typically about 50 square miles) and municipalities.
A township adjacent to or surrounding a municipality would often be named
for it.  Municipalities were classified into villages, towns, and cities,
with successively larger minimum population requirements.  (Redesignation
is optional even when the population minimum is met.)  Within a township
there can be "unincorporated villages", which are simply concentrations
of residents with no municipal government.

All of these divisions are creations of the provincial government, which
can change them without reference to any other government if it wishes--
just as in the UK the national government could abolish the Greater London
Council.  Fortunately, the province has not been that arbitrary here.

Toronto was first designated as a city in 1834, and changed its name
from York (named for the English city, of course) at the same time.
The surrounding township and county retained the name of York.  The
city annexed its suburbs several times in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, until it was entirely south of the remains of York township.

By about 1920, new suburbs were forming in the southern part of York
township.  The people in one of these suburbs decided that they didn't
want to be annexed by the city, but didn't want to remain associated
with the rural part of the township either, and permission was granted
to split the township into two.  The populous one kept the name York,
while the one with the larger area became North York.  Soon afterwards,
the township of East York split from North York in the same way.  Each of
these townships effectively consisted of a single unincorporated village.

In 1954 the province created a two-level government by forming the
Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, known locally as Metro for short.
This encompassed the City of Toronto, 7 towns and villages around it
(Long Branch, New Toronto, Mimico, Swansea, Weston, Forest Hill, and
Leaside), as well as the 5 adjacent townships of York County (Etobicoke,
York, North York, East York, and Scarborough) which by this time all
included considerable suburban development.  A number of other place
names existed at the time within those townships and are still accepted
today as postal designations, such as Islington and Downsview, but these
simply were large unincorporated villages (after 1954, anyway; I'm not
sure if their status changed then).

Later, around 1970, the province began creating additional two-level
governments by redesignating several existing counties as Regional
Municipalities.  These each include a larger area than Metropolitan
Toronto and I don't know whether they have exactly the same powers as
it does or not, or exactly the same as each other for that matter.
They definitely do have some city-type powers which counties do not
have; for example, they can operate police forces, whereas townships
are policed by the Ontario Provincial Police.  (In Canada, provinces
can elect to have police forces or not; the RCMP fills that role in
the other provinces, but polices only federal installations in provinces
that have a police force.)

York County was a special case, though, because it already contained
Metropolitan Toronto.  When York became a Regional Municipality, it
lost that part of its territory.  Thus the province is now divided into
districts, counties, regional municipalities, and Metro.

At about the same time (I think it was 1972), the province decided that
the former population concentrations in Metro outside of Toronto no
longer existed, and abolished the 7 towns and villages that had been
there.  Each was amalgamated into an adjacent township or the City of
Toronto.  At the same time, the townships were redesignated as boroughs;
even there outer reaches were mostly urban by this time.

Later, one by one, 4 of the 5 boroughs applied for city designation and
were granted it.  (East York decided to remain as "Canada's only borough".
I've heard it said that the word sounds more peaceful and rural.
Presumably the people saying this have never heard of the Borough of
Manhattan in New York.)

Which brings us to the present status, where we have the City of Toronto
(formerly York, but never a city under that name), the City of York
(named for Toronto when it was York), and the Regional Municipality of
York (likewise), all mutually disjoint.  Whee.

The City of Toronto has a population a little over 600,000, still the
largest component of Metro but not by much.  Metro has about 2.3 million,
and I believe the census metropolitan area runs to about 3.8 million.

ALL numbers and facts in the foregoing are FROM MEMORY, but should be
substantially correct.
-- 
Mark Brader			"Without nuclear weapons we will be nothing
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto		 more than a rich, powerful Canada...."
utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com		-- A Walk in the Woods, by Lee Blessing

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