In the United States, I’d probably name Oregon City, the famous end of the Oregon Trail and the first city founded west of the Rocky Mountains during the pioneer era. Its population is only 37,000.
we have a town called “Fucking” with only a few hundred people living there. the town sign gets stolen once a month
I thought they changed their name? Isn’t it called “Fugging” now?
yeah it looks like it, I’ve searched for “bad fucking” on Google maps and it returned Fugging
In the US it must be Springfield because there’s so fucking many of them that they named a TV show after it.
named a TV show after it
The Springfields?
Okay, I spilled my coffee. I’ll be giggling all day.
Hallstatt - Austria
The city so beautiful that the Chinese copied it.
For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)
A good number of these are examples where most people don’t actually know that the name comes from a town. I feel like they shouldn’t count.
This is probably the most iconic for sure.
Gibraltar has a population of 32,000, which by some definitions is too small to be considered a city.
Gibraltar is a city?
I am American, so low bar, but there are dozens of us.
It’s a city, it’s a really big rock, it’s a maritime port, it’s the only wild monkey population in Europe, it’s a 2½ mi2 British Overseas Territory whose status is perennially contested by Spain.
The New Orleans French Quarter is easy to spot.
Wąchock in Poland, (in)famous for being the place where tons of jokes happen, population around 2800.
Also Jeruzal, though known under its fictional of Wilkowyje, the place where famous TV show “Ranczo” was made, population around 340.
Here in Illinois is Woodstock, at ~25,600 (2020 per Wikipedia). It was the town where Groundhog Day was filmed. There’s even some small road signs here and there mentioning it for the rare tourist who comes to see it. Smallest place in the state I can think of, though there’s smaller towns that have been used for movies.
Some upcoming off-brand Hallmark x-mas movie will feature local tourist trap town Long Grove IL, pop ~ 8,300 (2020 per Wikipedia). The director grew up near there so knew about it and thought it’d be perfect for his movie.
Bobcaygeon, population 3,500.
I think people really overestimate how much everybody knows about the US.
I’d say there’s a large population that only know NYC, LA, and Chicago.
Used to be Dallas was pretty famous- Kennedy shooting, cheerleaders, and a titular TV show.
I’d say Salem, Massachusetts (pop just under 45k) is pretty famous thanks to the witch trials.
Van Halen and Spring Break dictates that everyone knows Panama city.
Population of under 36,000.
“Panama isn’t about a city, it’s the stage name of a stripper from Albuquerque!”
- David Lee Roth
It doesn’t matter that it isn’t actually about the city. That doesn’t change that people think of and know Panama the city due to the song. They either know it because they think it’s about the city, or they know it because they’re like you with their “actually”, which shows that you and anyone else who knows it’s about a stripper still knows of the city.
I thought it was about the country
Winnipeg, Canada (pop. 850k) has a famous namesake in Winnie the Pooh (who was named after Winnipeg) and has been in the Simpsons.
850k isn’t really small though.
It’s still small for a city, especially a capital city. However, it’s bigger than Regina 😄
It’s about the same population as San Francisco.
Your “small city” has more people than 5 US states
It has more people than anywhere that has less people.
PANAMA!
Van Halen, spring break, population 35,600.
In the UK and a city? Probably Liverpool and because of The Beatles.
A Town? Well it certainly used to be Lockerbie where Pan-Am flight 103 crashed after a terrorist bombing just before Christmas 1988. It was on it’s way from London to New York.
Probably not known by the younger generations though.
If you mean people from my country… All of them.
New Zealand only has like 10 actual cities. It is not some great feat of memory to know them all.
What’s your population threshold for city, here? Are there just a ton of rural people? It feels like a major country.
50k people
Looking at this list some are dubious. e.g. Hibicus Coast (#9) has been swallowed up by Auckland (#1), I would have called it a part of Auckland, much like Manakau City, which isn’t on the list.
Lower Hutt (#6) and Upper Hutt (#18) are on the list but Petone is not, geographically they are part of the same long valley and can almost all be considered part of Wellington like Manakau City is part of Auckland.
But you also get places like Masterton (#28), feels city like, since it is the largest settlement in the region but really it is a big town, it takes up a huge area though. Mainly services the farming communities around it.
Wow. And you still have >5 million people? This list goes all the way down to what I’d call not quite villages, but very small towns (although your link is broken, you need to add the Wikipedia part).
Thanks, fixed the link.
When you consider that the top 5 on that list take up 50% of the population. Auckland continues to grow, and at 30% of the population already, it has an crazy effect on the economic decisions in the country.
It is also growing geographically, eventually Auckland and Hamilton will merge somewhere around Huntly (#50).
Huh, so it does. It looks like it shouldn’t at first, my bad.
Have you had any luck with the urban sprawl? We’ve brought in a bunch of urban densification stuff recently in Canada, and NZ was cited as an example to follow.
Auckland is the definition of sprawl.
A bunch of laws were past on the last few years to combat it, but we find see the effects for decades to come.
I remember going to Auckland in the 90s and being amazed how low everything was considering it’s size. Wellington was vertical. Auckland was horizontal.
At least, that’s how it felt.
Matamata is really nice.
I don’t know about the smallest, but I’ve always thought that Santa Fe, New Mexico has an outsized influence on everything from food to art to architecture and culture. I visited last year and it was much smaller than I envisioned, partly because there are local regulations on building height to keep from ruining the charm of the city.
For NM I’d say Roswell; 5th largest city (48k population) but well known b/c aliens
