Originally Posted by eschaton
There are basically five setups for core cities in the U.S.
Highly Incorporated States: Nearly every (or in some cases every) bit of land not in a city is incorporated within a town. This makes expansion of cities pretty nearly impossible, as towns will only merge with cities if the population of the town votes in favor, which never happens any longer. This is the primary reason why if you look at a map of any of the New England states, all of the cities (except for Boston and maybe Providence) are about the same size in land area as towns. New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania suffer from this to a lesser extent. The good side of this is you end up with "sensible" boundaries, but it leads to a high level of municipal fragmentation.
Landlocked: This is a common configuration in older (read Rust Belt) areas of the Midwest, where the old survey township system was technically unincorporated, but in practice in the late 19th/early 20th century, more and more surrounding communities independently incorporated until a city was surrounded by "suburban cities" - which could not be merged in without the expressed support of the local population.
Sprawled: In a lot of areas with unincorporated county land, a core city is allowed to annex property as long as the owner okays it, with no local vote allowed. This leads to really weird "patchwork" expansion of cities, which often offer access to municipal services like water to help foster new development. These cities end up with often crazy borders, with lots of tiny enclaves of "non-city" relatively deep inside, and weird tentacles extending far into undeveloped land. This is common in the Sun Belt, but it can also be seen in newer Midwestern cities (Columbus, Kansas City, Madison, etc).
City-County Merger: A growing move in the modern era in the South/West is to consolidate city and county government. This has taken place in Jacksonville, FL, Louisville, KY, Indianapolis, IN, and Nashville, TN among other places. Somewhat confusingly, in these cases there is often one or more independent suburbs which retain self-government within the city-county. These tend to be cities which look big on paper, but don't feel that large, since most of the land area is comprised of former "suburbs."
Independent Cities: This is a special case where cities are not part of any county. This includes NYC (which technically covers five counties), San Francisco, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Denver. Oh, and every single city in Virginia. This happened by one of two ways - either through an early and complete consolidation between the city and the county (so that the whole city is urbanized) or through a breakoff of the cities from the counties. Unlike the city-counties mentioned above, they don't tend to "feel smaller" than the topline population suggests.
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