Defining borders

[Drublic]

I see there have been questions about how city borders have been defined.

I wonder, are there som kind of standard issue criteria for where the city stops?

Which methods do they use to define city borders?

Any reflections or knowledge about resources on this subject?

[Spartan]

This depends on how you looks at it.

Generally the term "city" means a governmental body. In this case the city stops at the city limits.

"City" can also be more broad, like a metro area.

I'd say its contextual as to which is being discussed.

[Brickell]

Municipal Borders.

City

County

Informational Borders

Metro

Urban Areas

For instance, there's the City of Miami. Quite small actually.

But for the most part, everything in Dade County is considered Miami as well.

They work together on a lot of things to further the name, Miami.

Then there's the Miami Metro area which includes Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, each of which includes many cities. There's no official need to work together but sometimes they do, ie the South Florida Regional Transporation Council.

When we talk about cities we are most often refering to the Metro area.

Then there's the Urban area, which is the extent of urbanized area. This would include the eastern sections of the metro area.

[Aessotariq]

I see there have been questions about how city borders have been defined.

I wonder, are there som kind of standard issue criteria for where the city stops?

Which methods do they use to define city borders?

Any reflections or knowledge about resources on this subject?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Are you talking about the legal description of a city? A city's limits are usually prescribed in law, usually as a city ordinance or a state statute. When you're talking about a "city" as in a municipal corporation, i.e., a public body with a mayor and council/commission/etc., a city's boundaries are usually a long list of descriptions that delimit the city's boundaries. "They," the powers that be, can use a combination of different things to legally describe what is part of their city, like Census tract numbers (you can look at a map of your state and see that it's divided into thousands of Census tracts), the boundary could be the edge of a street, a body of water (river, lake, etc.), property stakes or survey markers, even latitude and longitude now that we have global positioning satellites, etc. It takes many, many pages of "due west along XXXXX street for xxx miles, south to XXX Lake", etc., to accomplish this.

Counties are subdivisions of states, and their boundary descriptions are part of state law. Florida has some very odd-shaped counties, So some county boundary descriptions are very long. It takes about 874 words to define Miami-Dade County, Florida, and about 965 words to describe Bradford County, in northeast Florida.

Because there are urbanized areas that are both within limits and in unincorporated areas (within a county, for example), I always capitalize "city" or "county" when I am referring to the legal body of that name.