What differentiates a large village from a small town? What exactly are their definitions? A few answers.
What is the origin and definition of the word “ville”?
It is not always easy to distinguish a town from a village… especially since the word ville derives from the Latin villa, which means a farm! In the past, the villa indeed referred to an agricultural estate or a house located in the countryside.
This term then took two parallel directions, giving rise to the words :
- villagium, then designating the farm as we know it;
- ville, which referred to a “group of houses”.
Thus, the city is far from being a recent notion, and it covers indeed different realities depending on where in the world one lives. In France, the city is understood as a place where populations gather to carry out certain activities: commerce, craft trades, and service provision.
Agricultural activities, for their part, are the domain of villages. Moreover, the city is characterized by a concentration of housing organized along streets, which can be numerous depending on the size of the cities.
What is meant by village?
But this definition is also tending to disappear… For in many villages, one also finds concentrations of housing and various activities related to commerce, crafts, and services. Just like in cities.
Yet a village remains linked to the countryside and to the agricultural activities that are overrepresented there. But again, this distinction is far from being sufficient. In general, it is the number of inhabitants that is taken into account to distinguish a village from a city.
The figure used by INSEE for this criterion is 2,000. Beyond 2,000 inhabitants, therefore, the commune is considered a (small) city. However, there is also a nuance here.
Indeed, some municipalities with more than 2,000 inhabitants can keep the designation of village if the residents are dispersed around the center, and not concentrated in the heart of the commune.
In summary, city and village, what distinction?
The number of inhabitants and their distribution thus provide a consensus for clearly identifying a city from a village. Another criterion also enters into this distinction: housing density.
If the housing in the center of a commune exceeds 2,000 occupants, it means there is a dense housing stock capable of housing a significant number of people. As mentioned earlier, a densely built-up population of fewer than 2,000 souls constitutes a village; beyond that, we speak of a city.
What about the distinction between village and bourg? INSEE introduces here the criterion of the distance between two dwellings. When there are fewer than 200 meters between two homes, we speak of a bourg. Beyond that, we speak of a village, provided the other criteria mentioned are also met.
City, village and commune: what are the differences?
The commune is in fact the smallest administrative subdivision that exists in France. A commune can thus be either a city or a village, and it is necessarily administered by a mayor.
Today, to distinguish the different typologies of urban areas, INSEE refers to the notions of rural communes and urban communes, based on a density grid.
Low-density communes are described as rural, and communes with intermediate or high population density are called urban.
