Even just townhouses which are still "single family" buildings on their own land are roughly 4x denser than detached houses.
Someone walking through a six-story downtown is, by such a measurement, traveling faster than a car traveling at ~90 mph through suburbia.
(Of course, a car can't travel that quickly through suburbia.)
In the worst flat in these terms I ever had in a city over here was 10 minutes walk to the next grocery shop and this was a dirt cheap flat on a loud main road.
Even parts of the town where you have mostly residential housing will have the occasional small shop, grocery store, gas station or similar. If I understood zoning in the US correctly this kind of mixing is at times even forbidden?
To be fair this exists in many of areas in the US as well.
From my suburban single family home in a small town in California I can easily walk to all those things in a few minutes, including 24x7 supermarket, another nicer supermarket, plenty of restaurants, movies, stores of nearly all kinds, playgrounds, sports fields, etc.
People definitely call Ventura, CA “the city” and its 100k.
In the UK “city” status is conferred by being on the government’s list of cities and isn’t automatic based on size or presence of a Cathedral or anything else.
See: Tom Scott on YouTube “the town which forgot to be a city” - https://youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg
The province of Friesland famously has 11 cities, but many of those are tiny, and it doesn't include several of the largest towns that are not technically cities.
> In Sweden, the concept of "city" was removed in 1971. Everything became just municipalities.
> This annoyed Stockholm, so in 1983, Stockholm municipality simply renamed itself "Stockholm Stad" (Stockholm City). That pissed Malmö and Göteborg off, and they also promptly renamed themselves to be cities. Today 14 municipalities n Sweden claim to be cities.
It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).
I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than your Spanish example but it is perfectly possible to have all these services at this scale as well!
I live in a "mid sized" european city (500k), about 2km from the center, and the _only_ think I use my car for is getting out of the city. Within 10m walking I have pretty much everything I need, and within 20m of public transport (ironically, walking can be quicker for the short distances), I have pretty much everything I _want_!
It's right in the middle, close to the central district. It's got everything. From barbers to art galleries, from Portuguese cuisine to folklore shops, from luthiers to really good schools. A bustling art scene, clean streets. A huge shopping centre a nice park and an international transportation hub are all in in walking distance (<10 min), while the district itself manages to stay cozy and friendly.
I have friends who haven't left the borders of this "village" during Covid, it's really got everything. Part of a big city while being not part of it at the same time.
Also, I come from a 20k small town (so right between the two examples above) and had a very similar experience there, apart from everything the world has to offer being easily accessible once you decide to hop on a tram or your bike.
In the village I grew up in (then 40k, now 100k), every neighbourhood had a shopping mall with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a few other shops, surrounded by 3 primary schools (one public, one protestant, one catholic). The same everywhere. Don't expect any bars, though. Or restaurants other than Chinese. I believe the town had one disco that served several neighbouring towns as well.
I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town but it is only a few times a day.
The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).
In comparison I grew up in a sprawling small town in the US midwest which has embraced even more sprawl since I moved 30+ years ago and I hate going back. Its just souless and unwalkable as it has endless land to expand into and no plan to keep it human scale.
I went to school out there and have friends from the surrounding areas, it's nice if you're wanting something more rural but still near things. The key to it is a lot of the towns were built 100-200 or so years ago, when it actually was necessary to build close to each other in community.
Aye, but I bet GP's home town in Spain is much more pleasant to walk in from November to March ;-)
That aside, there are some real gems among Western Mass towns! I wonder, with all the empty land in this country (even in places very hospitable to human life), if it's possible to found new towns built in the "European" model of a central plaza surrounded by multifamily, mixed-use developments within walking distance? Were I a billionaire, this is the sort of stuff I would explore.
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
I guess to me, the real difference is density and how much there is to do. A city has a bar on almost every street corner, a village, no matter how big, does not.
In North Carolina there is a "city" called Brevard with a population of just under 8,000 but you also have the "town" of Cary with population 170,000.
Of course there is still the issue of how the words are commonly used vs their actual legal definition but if you ask 100 different people the difference between a city and town, you'll get 100 slightly different definitions. Someone that grew up in New York City will have a very different definition than someone that grew up in Wyoming 50 miles from the nearest gas station. At the end of the day, there's just some vague notion that cities are bigger than towns.
Although we can't trust the cognates, as 'stad' is related to English 'stead', which meant a settlement of any size.
... I suppose the modern equivalent is a CBD.
From the front door I can throw rocks at 2 more cafes, another restaurant, a launderette, a playground and a car dealer. There is a basket ball court out the back.
Nothing special about my 7 storey block, but when a certain density is reached things start to work really well
As a pre-teen, I could go to any of my friend's houses to do tabletop roleplaying all by myself. If my mother needed a break from parenting, she had three different siblings living within a quarter mile. When your average building is 6 stories tall, and your typical street is 30 feet wide building to building, a quarter mile circle holds a lot of families! In comparison, my neighbor from across the street in the US suburbs is 60 feet away, door to door, and a quarter mile circle won't get me to 300 front doors, total.