Is There A "Correct" Urban Taxonomy?

How are different "kinds" of urban settlements related?

One question I like coming back to from time to time is, what exactly are villages, towns, and cities? Are these just the same thing, at different sizes and/or phases of growth? Or are they actually different sorts of places? If you had to write a taxonomy of urban settlements, what would it look like?

Maybe these different kinds of settlements are different from each other in the way that a child is different from an adult, but still the same creature? Here’s another analogy that would describe the same basic relationship, I guess: a sapling versus a tree. (However, that would imply that a city is sort of the “true” form of a town, which I don’t exactly mean.)

Here’s a fun way to think of it: a city is like a band that gets big, a town is like any of the many bands that stay local and don’t go big. With fame comes more resources to innovate, which can reveal a lot of talent that is latent but not developed in other bands. Or, maybe, spurs talent that really wasn’t there, or couldn’t be discerned. Which aren’t quite the same thing. The same may be true of places and communities.

For example, think of how the Beatles got really big, before they did some of their more sophisticated and avant-garde stuff that we think of now as Beatles music. Isn’t it possible that had some of the other less successful bands blown up like that, they might have ended up being “the Beatles” in this groundbreaking, creative sense?

In other words—it isn’t possible to look in the early 1960s at all of those British rock bands and know that the Beatles were going to become the Beatles. As far as any observer could be concerned, all those bands were basically the same. And yet as they grew, their differences developed. Their talents developed. Were they the same thing that ended up different, or were they different things that started out looking the same?

Similarly, looking at the very first iterations of a bunch of towns and cities, you wouldn’t be able to discern which ones would grow into “big cities” and which ones would remain “small towns.” I take that to mean we’re basically looking at different maturity levels, or something like that, of the same creature. But I’m not sure it necessarily means that.