Social Order and Change in Village, Town and City

Most societies can be divided broadly into rural and urban sectors, and because the conditions of everyday life differ sharply between them, so do the forms of social order that hold each together and the kinds of social change that matter most in each. Sociologically, the distinction between a village and a town or city is not primarily about size -- large villages and small towns can be hard to tell apart on population alone. The real distinguishing factors are population density (the number of people per unit of area) and the share of agriculture-related activity in the local economy: villages are more spread out and depend heavily on agriculture, while towns and cities are denser and dominated by non-agricultural economic activity. The difference between a town and a city, by contrast, is mostly administrative and a matter of scale, and official terms like "urban agglomeration" (a city plus its surrounding suburbs and satellite settlements) and "metropolitan area" (multiple cities forming one continuous urban region) build on this basic distinction. …