Talk:Iringa

message: IRINGA is NOT derived from LILINGA meaning fort.
Iringa is cool half the year, then very cold the other half of the year.
Best bars are LUSAKA BY NIGHT and SOWETO in a suburb called Kihesa.  Try Ulanzi beer for $0.10 a bucket (depending on what season it is).
Each pork at Mama Siyovelwa's (ask a taxi driver) - but be aware that it takes 4 hours to get your food and you get so hungry you eat the table whilst waiting.
Iringa has the best internet service in East Africa - go to IRINGANET, but not during the month of Ramadhan as the guy in charge has a nicotine deficiency and will bite your head off.
There is no significant nightlife in Iringa - you would have to be really scared of the natives to drink in bottom's up. The Friday night disco at Ruaha International is good if you're 14 and want to get drunk for the 1st time.
Uhindini is a nice place to walk down, and the market is historical and fun.
Riverside campsite is good for sneaking off with other people's wives.
: Thanks, although this kind of information is probably better off at somewhere like Wikitravel (a travel-guide), rather than here. Regarding "LILINGA", web sources include  and . Are they mistaken? — Matt Crypto 16:39, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Various

message: Is Iringa "offically designated a city"? The Tanzania article currently states that "For administrative purposes, Tanzania is divided into 26 regions...Ninety-nine district councils have been created to further increase local authority. These districts are also now referred to as local government authorities. Currently there are 114 councils operating in 99 districts, 22 are urban and 92 are rural. The 22 urban units are classified further as city (Dar es Salaam and Mwanza), municipal (Arusha, Dodoma, Iringa, Kilimanjaro, Mbeya, Morogoro, Shinyanga, Tabora, and Tanga), and town councils (the remaining 11 communities)." —' that somewhat implies that Iringa is not a city in the same legal sense as Dar or Mwanza. This page also states, albeit somewhat unclearly, that "Mwanza and Dar es Salaam are two cities in Tanzania so far". (If it is not a city in the legal sense, I would argue that the most idiomatic English language description would be "town", but that's less important.) — Matt Crypto 19:56, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In the East African nations which were formerly British colonies, city status is in the gift of the government.  In Tanzania, as Matt says, only Mwanza and Dar es Salaam have city status, even though other settlements may be colloquially referred to as cities. Warofdreams talk 23:54, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: City status

message: Started afresh as I came to this via an old link on the talk:Africa-related notice board page.  Just wanted to observe that reference to British English usage might not be the only relevant one.  In the U.S. application of the term "city" varies wildly.  In the state of Massachusetts where I grew up, a municipality can apply to be a city rather than a town if it has 30,000 people or more (affects forms of government).  In the western U.S., where I now live, it is common to find municipalities of 500 to 1000 people called cities (to me from an anthropological perspective they probably ought to be villages), while conversely people will refer to settlements of 5000 or even 10,000 as "small towns."  Bet the more Anglophone countries one looks at, the more variety one finds.  
Anyway, from my particular cultural POV, a settlement of 100,000 is definitely a city, at either the upper end of "small city" or lower end of "medium sized city," even if colloquially it would also be a town at times.  The three largest cities in the U.S. state of Connecticut (Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport) all have between 100,000 and 150,000 people.  Hartford is the state capital & historically a nationally significant financial center (insurance industry), New Haven is an intellectual center due to Yale University & used to have a good deal of manufacturing, Bridgeport is a former industrial town in decline.  Yes I know I said town, because as Matt says, both terms imply urban.  
Yet on balance I think Malangali has the better case about the significance of a settlement of this size in Tanzania or any primarily rural country.  
Possibly this could be helped by context:  how rapidly has Iringa grown since 1950 or 1970?  Portraying the dynamic of urban growth could go a long way to avoiding the problems Malangani raises of minimizing the modernity of Tanzania (& Africa more broadly).  Likewise, does the 100,000 figure refer strictly to the munipal area, or does it include peri-urban settlements as well?  Again this helps in conveying scale as well as dynamics.  Likewise again, since there seems to be evidence that Tanzanians use both terms, maybe the article should too, and try to say something about which they use when, which could convey something about Tanzanian views of urbanness, which could be useful.  
Finally, I'd suggest that "urban area" itself might be a useful term at times.  Chris Lowe 02:55, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  City status revisited