Irish so-called "cities"

Stephen15 wrote: »

Theres only three real cities in Ireland and those are Dublin, Cork and Limerick four if you include Belfast. Dublin being the only fair sized city the rest are reletively small. Galway and Waterford are only large towns.

If we're including the north, drop Limerick and replace it with Derry.

I could be mistaken but I thought that the Dublin city council area (Ballymun to Ranelagh, Navan road to the coast) had a population of 552,000. If that's the case, the 'city' population is artificially reduced by excluding Blanchardstown, Swords, Palmerstown, Stillorgan, etc which are definitely part of Dublin.

blue note wrote: »

I hear people say this a bit. Where does it come from? Is there a link to a definition or something? Is it a dictionary thing, a government thing, is it an old british thing? Or is it just something people from kilkenny say because they have a cathedral and a city charter. Serious question by the way. I am curious as to why people believe this. Is there some, none or loads of truth behind it.

There is truth behind it but now irrelevant. Still, it's where our "classic" cities come from.

Oxford English Dictionary in the early 1800s designated those large settlements with a Church of England cathedral as cities - Dublin, Cork, Derry, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny (and Athlone and Cashal, note the lack of Galway!) Belfast became a city in the late 1800s.

Basically, a CoE cathedral and a charter (in which the settlement is referred to as a city - can also do what Armagh did, which was by pointing at some 1700s Parlimentary writs in which Armagh was referred to as a city and saying "thankee kindly, that's us sorted". I think there was some sort of population number taken into account, but I don't know what it was.

City status actually -meant- nothing different from borough or any other regional settlement. It was purely an honorary thing. So from modern perspective, all it means is the chance for some large settlements to thumb their noses at the smaller or newer ones.

Mutant z wrote: »

Limerick feels much more like a city than Galway does, which looks more village like in comparison.

A "village" that seems to be a lot more successful at attracting companies to locate there than Limerick is, strange one that.

AllForIt wrote: »

I read somewhere and I'm not sure if it's correct, that Dublin has one of the biggest continuous urban sprawls in Europe in terms of distance, not population.

These are the city outline of other major cities overlapped onto Dublin area. The urban density of Australian cities is about 4 times lower than Dublin hence Perth footprint being so large with the same population. I watched the BBC documentary on super cities and having Dublin the size of London would not be a bad thing. Super cities act as a catalyst for their own growth and create more of an internal economy. Ireland needs more tax payers etc given the low population density of the country- as long as it didn't have the two tram and buses as transport infrastructure and had the same structures as London etc (wishing). Also Dublin pop density 50% of London per square kilometre and 25% to Paris.

Anything larger than London is pure misery with LA stretching from Dublin over to Westport. The breath of Ireland is too short for Greater New York area.


http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47797 Perth
http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47798 Sydney
http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47802 London
http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47799 Greater Paris
http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47800 Los Angeles
http://mapfrappe.com/legacy.html?show=47802 Tokyo

Very happy with the cities of Ireland, there's a social buzz in them, unlike other places like Manchester, Perth and LA. Also Manchester has 1.4m more people living in it but same level of overall GDP at $90bn.

blue note wrote: »

I hear people say this a bit. Where does it come from? Is there a link to a definition or something? Is it a dictionary thing, a government thing, is it an old british thing? ... Serious question by the way. I am curious as to why people believe this.

Can't give you a link right now, but the definition you're thinking of/you hear people referring to was based on Norman law, so it applies only to Britain, Ireland and some vestiges of French mediaeval urbanisation.

Yourself isit wrote: »

But Paris is much more compact.

Yeah, but Paris is not considered to be a city by the French - it's referred to as la Ville de Paris - a (big) town.

Yourself isit wrote: »

As I said Metropolitan areas in the US can incorporate multiple cities (like the bay area or new York metro) or rural areas like greater Boston.

Wiki says metro Dublin is 1.3M and greater Dublin is 2M. The latter presumably includes commuting towns and counties. (Bray for instance).

In terms of footprint Dublin is far too large. For its population

There's a lot of confusion around definitions between city, urban, metro, and greater.

The city proper is based on the city council area. This, being somewhat arbitrary, can be very misleading. In the UK the council area of Sheffield makes it one of the largest in the UK, while Birmingham's council area is twice the size of Manchester. Where it's useful is in comparing the population of the historic core and Dublin is reasonably big. Remember, in the 18th century Dublin was one of the largest cities in Europe. By this measure Dublin is not far behind Boston and bigger than Manchester. Dublin city centre is quite large for a city of its size.

The urban area is the contiguous urban settlement - the area that is connected without any gaps of countryside . By this measure Dublin falls significantly behind the largest UK cities. But in England many of these urban areas are made up of many large towns that have their separate identity like the mill towns surrounding Manchester. So a large urban population may not be directly correlated with the vibrancy of the main city.

Metro area is a far more nebulous concept and there are often wildly varying estimates. Roughly you could consider it the area in which people commute to work within that city. Dublin's metro area is usually given a very generous definition. The definition of the Greater Dublin area includes Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. But if you took that radius and placed it around many English towns you'd have a population of many millions and in some areas tens of millions.

One of the consequences of this I think it in things like hobby groups that there is a much smaller population to draw on. Compare say setting up a hiking club in Manchester compared to one in Dublin.

Stephen15 wrote: »

Belfast is the the only proper city up north

I'm from Northern Ireland and I would agree totally with this.

Newry is an absolute dive and was only given city status to appease the shinner heads after (unionist) Lisburn was going to be given city status. (Or vice versa)

Lisburn and Armagh are the same and Londonderry is also just a rather unappealing largish town (by NI standards anyway)

Belfast feels like a city. A smallish one by world comparison perhaps but a city nonetheless. The rest of the 4 so called cities in Norn Iron have young wans in tractors parked up on the main st on a Saturday night eating a bag of chips ffs.