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Isn't a rural town an oxymoron?
Not in American usage. Rural town means it's not part of a larger metro, or at least not connected to it/too far for reasonable commuting. America would use the term 'farm town' for what you're envisioning(which may not be a town), a 'rural town' might be supported by tourism, mining, a single large employer, etc. A major city is something with suburbs and a suburb is attached to a major city(but may or may not have a population that commutes there for work; some suburbs have more people commuting in from the city than out to the city) and an exurb is a town detached from the major city but economically dependent on a large portion of its population commuting there. A 'village' sounds like something thirdworlders live in.
It probably has something to do with American farming patterns and pervasive automobilization. To me a large employer like a mine or a factory automatically means "urban", because people will start settling next to it, and supporting businesses will follow. And the fewer households have cars, the more the town will need more of these local businesses to function.
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In my state, towns and cities are incorporated; villages are not. There are some very affluent villages that are filled with people who just don’t want to mess with another layer of government.
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I grew up in a farming town in the fly over states. We had a both a "Town of Bumfuckville" and a "Village of Bumfuckville" as two separate incorporated municipalities. The town was technically the larger outlying land, and the village was the area around the main-street, the branches, and a few of the neighborhoods surrounding it. No clue why it incorporated like that, but while they were technically distinct legal municipalities they did play together (along with other towns) for the school district.
It's practically a tradition in some parts of the country. (Pennsylvania townships are incorporated, unlike townships in some other states.)
NJ townships are also incorporated (and are by far the most common form of municipal government), but a few of the borough/township splits have joined in the past few years, notably Princeton (home of the eponymous university)
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Oh that's hilarious. Is there a technical distinction between a Township and a Town?
It appears not.
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To me no; town I would define as a locality that has most of the services needed for day-to-day life, a core that spans a few streets rather than one, but doesn't have the businesses and services that would truly make it independant. A town would have for instance pharmacies, supermarkets, maybe some chain stores like a walmart, a few restaurants, probably a high school, medical clinics but no hospital, no mall, no airport, no nightlife outside of local bars, minimal public transport. I expect people from a town make a trip to a city in a 1-2 hours drive radius a few times a year when they want to go on real "shopping" trip, need to go to a hospital, etc... There usually aren't any higher education institutions in towns either, so the kids often end up having to move when they start studying at that level.
A village, to me, has a handful of businesses, rarely spread on more than one street: a gas station, a local diner, a very small grocery store, maybe an elementary school, maybe a bar or two but everyone there goes to the nearest town in a 15-30 minutes radius for their real actual groceries every week, and to a city as often as the townfolks do.
I would even posit that the the village/town/city distinction is sometimes completely distinct from rural/suburban/urban. There are small cities in my province that exist essentially as service hubs for the surrounding countryside. They are a bit denser than a typical suburb but the economic engine is not the city. One of them, for instance, has a large veterinary hospital, the biggest agricultural school in the province, etc...
Note that the UN definitions place the thresholds for "city" at 50,000 people, "town" at 5000, and "village" at 500. (And my aforementioned "mega-city" starts at 500,000.)
This is even worse, especially in New Jersey, where we've got weird stuff like Metutchen (pop 15,000) entirely surrounded by Edison (pop 110,000). Edison is just dense suburbia.
To clarify, both UN and US definitions operate on density-based "urban areas" rather than on legal boundaries.
Someone made maps for that here. This makes a large part of the NY metro area one enormous city of 14M. Edison is near the bottom left but I can't tell for sure if it's in or out. Might be useful for some purposes but definitely doesn't map to what Americans would consider 'a city'. (Then again, NYC itself doesn't either)
The official UN maps are here (includes basemap with labels) and here (includes per-city information pop-ups). The official US map is here.
It's in, right on the edge.
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I prefer the UK system, where the rules are made up and, on the basis of fairness, Wales gets an automatic city for each Jubilee. Unfortunately, they realized they also needed a more sensible taxonomy, which does ruin the fun a bit.
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I get why they would, because other definitions are fuzzy and open to interpretations, even though in practice most people I know can tell which one a place is by looking at what its core looks like.
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Yes in the context of rigorous density-based definitions, but no in the context of employment and surroundings. Literally just yesterday, I attended a municipal council meeting where somebody referred to the municipality as part of "rural Pennsylvania" even though it's suburban under the UN definition and urban under the US definition.
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