I looked into this, and Ft. Collins is a "Home Rule Municipality" under state law, meaning it can name itself either a town or city. It seems to have chosen to be a city, so you're right.

Around the world, it seems that there's one consistent criterion for something being a city: it must have self-rule and a certain amount of government structure. Some places (notably not the US) have population requirements, but those tend to be really low (100-1,000 people)[1].

I personally appreciate the headline saying "town" in a colloquial sense, because I don't think of 170,000 as "huge" and it's significant that it's not a large city doing this.

For context, Ft. Collins is not in the top 150 most populous US cities, and to even reach the top 50, it would have to more than double in size.

1. https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-a-city-and-a-to...

>I personally appreciate the headline saying "town" in a colloquial sense

But that's the problem. It's not a "town" in a colloquial sense for anyone who grew up outside of major metro areas. If 170k is not enough, then there are no cities in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, nor South Dakota.

Well, I'm inclined to agree with that claim...

And you would be wrong. There are many cities in those states that contain all of the components of larger cities (universities, self-governance, public transit, international airports, etc).

The difference between 100k and 1 million residents is much less significant than the difference between 10k and 100k.

> it seems that there's one consistent criterion for something being a city: it must have self-rule and a certain amount of government structure.

What do you mean by self-rule? Singapore is autonomous, but that's definitely not the norm for cities. Almost all of them belong to larger states.

No US city has self-rule even at the level below the federal government. Washington, DC comes closest, but it is technically ruled directly by the federal government (in a manner that is not true for cities that belong to states). China has four "province-level" cities, but is generally accepted to have many more than four cities.

> What do you mean by self-rule?

Typically at the municipality level, self-rule means the ability to make and enforce your own laws, as long as they are not inconsistent with the laws of higher government levels, without needing explicit permission of those higher government levels.

This is completely unrelated to what "self-rule" means at other levels and in ordinary speech. Why the special definition for cities?

It's a legal term. There are lots of legal terms that have different meanings in the law than in ordinary speech.

In the law, what does it mean for a country to enjoy "self-rule"?

We're not talking about the concept of national sovereignty here, we're talking about a concept derived from self-governed British colonies, which generally ran themselves unless the crown needed to step in for some reason.

This is the concept at play at the municipality level that is being discussed. The cities run themselves unless the state has to step in for some reason. Just as the states run themselves unless the federal government needs to step in for some reason.

This is as opposed to say, a village, which in New England at least is defined as a population center which is not self-governed, but under the direct control of a larger municipality within which it lies.

But British cities, towns, villages, hamlets, and farms also generally ran themselves unless the crown needed to step in for some reason. They still do, and this is also true of everywhere else in every other legal regime. The colonies only differ in that they're so far away that the crown generally can't step in even when it wants to.

Jews in medieval Europe were generally subject to Jewish law and not subject to the law that applied to the rest of the city. That's self-rule.

Well, the concept of an independent city - that is, one that isn't contained within any county - does exist in the U.S.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_city_(United_State...

Of course, Washington DC could be considered one example, although the above Wikipedia link begs to differ because DC isn't a state. However, there are a few dozen more, most of which are in Virginia.

Such a city is still under two higher levels of government; it's hard to call that "self-rule".

Also, this kind of administrative definition of "city" causes weird conflicts. It's easy for a city, such as Los Angeles, to be much larger than the county it's nominally located in, such as Los Angeles county. Conceptually, it's also easy for a city to be its own county, which is a different status than "not contained in any county" -- but in practice where this is supposedly the case, the city will not actually match the county boundaries, instead being noticeably bigger or smaller.

I conclude that, in order to make the claim that cities usually have self-rule, the people who would like to make this claim adjust their definition of self-rule so that it covers the things they're already sure are cities, rather than having a definition of self-rule in mind and observing that, by apparent coincidence, most "cities" turn out to have it.

In the context of a city, self-rule means the place has a mayor and a city council. It can pass local ordinances, have a local sales tax, and provide services to the constituents.

Not all places start out with those things. The rules differ by state, but generally, you need a certain population, a percentage of whom must petition the higher authorities (which you mention), and then vote as a community to create the create the infrastructure and take care of themselves.

At that point, they lose a lot of the benefits provided by those higher levels, like the county and state service providers of fire, police, and garbage disposal for example.

Virginia has pre-emption of pretty much all matters of law. Cities and counties can only pass zoning ordinances.

For example, it's not possible for a VA city or county to make something a crime, unless there's a specific law on the state level allowing them to.

Here in New England, the distinction between a city and a town is whether it is governed by a town meeting style government with selectmen, or by a city council style government with or without a mayor. In MA at least, you cannot choose to be a city unless you have at least 12K in population.

The board of selectmen were always interesting in my town (at least to me, I didn’t really understand it as a child). Not sure if we are over the 12K minimum, but I doubt anyone would call us a city even if we were.

Municipal ISP would have been cool, but I think power would be a better option first. A neighboring town (either Mansfield or Medfield) as municipal power and compares to us during storms they do great (as in fast response times and efforts to not lose power).

My father served on the board of selectmen for my town when I was growing up. He was so miserable during that time, it taught me to never, ever go into politics.

I can imagine. By ‘interesting’ I should have clarified: it’s like watching a bunch of kids argue over who can take care of a pet rock better, but in reality the rock is a cat being neglected in the corner.

Not all selectmen are terrible, but it only takes a few bad eggs to make it hell for everyone.

I should also note that analogies are not my forte.

>>Around the world, it seems that there's one consistent criterion for something being a city: it must have self-rule and a certain amount of government structure.

It used to be in the UK you needed a Church of England Bishop (and a cathedral) but now you have to apply to the Lord Chancellor.

To add flavour in the guise of figures:

The largest city in the UK is (Greater) London, population ~9M. This is an outlier. The next largest is Birmingham, population ~1M. The smallest city (by population) is St Davids, population ~1800. This is also an outlier.

Most cities are 100k to 1M. However, there are a decent number of towns >100k.

The largest town is Reading, population 230k.

There possibly isn't a smallest town worth defining - there's no objective divide between villages and towns.

> I don't think of 170,000 as "huge"

Interesting, that's pretty big from my perspective.

I grew up in a suburb of a big city (~750k, ~4M metro), and my city was ~60k people. I currently live in a city of <50k. I never considered either to be huge, but definitely not small. The biggest city in my county is a little over 100k people, the "big city" in my area is just under 200k, with the metro area being just over 1M.

My 30k city has its own fiber network, and several neighboring cities have banded together on a fiber project. When I see "town", I think of something smaller than my own city, not something nearly as big as the "big city" in my area.

For contrast: My rural hometown of around 15,000 (not tiny but still 10 times smaller than Ft. Collins) built its own fiber network in the mid-90s. It still runs today and has expanded to include many of our smaller neighboring communities of 400-10k people. Now that the city has grown to about 20k we have larger ISPs moving in. They lease the city's infrastructure so we have a municipal fiber network with multiple competing private options. You get fancier hardware and more channels with the private companies but I find the local ISP more reliable and I have one bill for internet, power, gas, water, and waste.

Way better setup than when I was in I was in ATL and forced to use Comcast. Plus there aren't any data caps.

What town is this?

Yeah but everyone in Ft. Collins is a cow herder so this town label is still appropriate.

(sorry this is a bad intra-Colorado rivalry joke, please ignore)

Sko Buffs!

But also Fort Collins has a lot of beer production, so they are ok in my book. It’s still not Boulder though...

Careful not to spill your quinoa smoothie on your bespoke Macbook when you type your comments.

You're gonna make fun of people for being healthy and rich? I think you just self-owned.

Where I’m from in a “folksy” rural area you can get gigabit internet service to your farm for $75 a month. But it is not a particularly interesting story.

Honestly I'm glad they didn't go with "Colorado City", since Colorado City is a town... in Arizona.

And quite the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_City,_Arizona

My little village (around ~1200 people I believe) in Central New York is currently exploring its own municipality owned internet. They sent out surveys to all the residents a few months back to see if there's a large enough interest.

anything less than 6-7,000 people is a village.

The 8th largest city in my state has a population of 16,000.

The western US is funny- I could name maybe 5-6 'cities' in Montana, but the largest barely has a large enough population to fill a football stadium.

When last I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, they told me that on football Saturdays, the stadium was the second-most populous location in the state, after Omaha. "Last" was over thirty years ago, so this may have changed.

Living in a giant state with just over a million people definitely changes one's perspective on city versus town.