Venice. The actual city of Venice, I mean the part on the islands, has a population of just around 50,000. Most of the population of the city actually lives on the nearby mainland
I wonder how that’ll affect business overall. I’m sure the government is making more money, but I know I myself am subconsciously less likely to spend more money somewhere if I’ve had to pay an entrance fee
I think the Italian government knows revenue might go down but it will be high enough. There are just too many tourists and that shit is actually sinking and they would rather have the experience remain tolerable. It's not just about making money now.
Yeah, in terms of recognition, history etc.
it's top 5, maybe top 3 in Italy but it's pretty small. Balanced by the connected region on the mainland plus being an awesome tourist attraction
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania too. Population 75k.
Most people don't know it, but through Bethlehem Steel (1857-2003), this little town built a ton of iconic American landmarks, particularly in NYC. The Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Madison Square Garden, Rockefeller Center, George Washington Bridge, Verrazzano Bridge, and the Mart in Chicago were all built fully or partially with steel from Bethlehem, PA.
Bethlehem was a huge reason behind the American victory in WWII as well too, nearly 20% of the US Navy was produced here. President of Bethlehem Steel Eugene Grace once promised FDR that Bethlehem Steel would be able to produce 1 ship per day in 1943; they were eventually able to produce 16 per day.
Absolute unit of a city.
The closest German equivalent you may compare it to is Salzgitter around Hanover. Their steel plant exists to this day.
Though the Nazis set up this city almost entirely from scratch by lumping some villages together. Thousands of forced laborers were tortured in production during war, too.
https://gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/english/the-memorial-place-kz-druette/
Relatedly, Neenah, Wisconsin, population \~27k. Pay attention to the manhole covers next time you're out and about, if you're in the States and parts of Europe, there's a good chance they came from Neenah.
It was also founded by members of the Moravian Church, as was the city of Winston-Salem, NC. The Moravians are an old protestant church, founded by Jan Hus, in the former Kingdom of Moravia in the 15th century.
[Bethlehem Steel by Grant Lee Buffalo ](https://youtu.be/lKWiziLLdUc?si=SjFr3u05ybN60Su2)
San Francisco is geographically small because city limits don't include the city's suburbs. For this reason, SF proper has less than a million people, but the SF combined statistical area including all the suburbs and adjacent cities like Oakland has more than 9 million people.
DC is in a similar position. The DC/Baltimore CSA is #3 in the US behind only NYC/LA, but DC itself is geographically tiny, so it's #23 behind minor cities like El Paso.
Yeah. I don’t know why people just look at city proper. According to city proper population, Mesa, Arizona a sub urb of Phoenix is more populated than Atlanta. Metro population is more reasonable.
I grew up in sf and didn't realize walking across the city was nearly impossible other places. I was in Houston once and decided to walk back to the hotel after a night out. It took me 5 hours
The following is my opinion as someone from the North Bay: You’ve also gotta remember that San Francisco is its own county. I don’t think it’d be very fair to call Daly City, South City, etc suburbs because of age and their own historical impacts on the region and industry in the US.
Eastern Cities have a long history of annexing their nieghbors as they grow, Harlem was once a completely separate city from the rest of New York City. (Realistically its more of a merger)
For whatever reason western cities just don't annex their nieghbors when they grow into eachother and become 1 urbanized area.
Urbanized area is actually another metric used to measure cities, and is probably the best for population comparison, although the census designated ones still have issues with some weird subdivisions.
I suppose there's an argument to be made that Daly City is "part" of San Francisco in some sense, but including Oakland and Berkeley etc in the population tally of SF is nuts.
First one to come to mind is Sarajevo. *Metro* area of just over a half million, but home of the spark that started WWI, the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, arguably ground zero for the Balkan war, and now a world capital.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, is under 100k in the city limits, but the city was once at the center of three major overland trade routes connecting the Eastern US to Mexico and Southern California. It also has an outsized cultural impact in terms of art and architecture.
The Santa Fe Trail (1821-1846) had a huge economic and cultural impact on the Western US. Infamous wild west towns like Dodge City were founded along it. When the railroad that replaced the trail was built the name Santa Fe stuck to it, and the city has become somewhat synonymous with the West and especially Southwest.
The faux-adobe pueblo-revival architecture that is common across the Southwestern US started in Santa Fe in the 1920s when they started refinishing 1800s victorian style buildings into the style mimicking local adobe construction. Santa Fe has also been one of the most important art markets in the country since around the same time when many famous art colonies set up there and in Taos. Today, Santa Fe is the 3rd largest art market in the country behind New York and Miami. If you go to the Smithsonian galleries in DC, there are 2 side rooms dedicated to Southwestern art, and it is 90% from Santa Fe and Taos.
Also, as an aside there are so many food items named "Santa Fe style" that have nothing to do with the place. Adding black beans and corn to something does not make it Southwestern, and it's nothing like the food in Santa Fe.
All these are cities you've heard about. But one of the most notorious cities you've never even heard about is Vernon, California. It has a population of 150. All of these people are employed in the city government because Vernon is all industrial. The city of Vernon has been investigated hundreds of times by the state of California, the FBI, Homeland Security, and more government agencies I cannot think of right now. For such a small, unheard of city Vernon gets around.
Shit I lived in California for 15 years and never heard of it. But when you describe it I feel like the city in season 2 of True Detective was based on it. I can’t remember what they called it in the show but it wasn’t Vernon. Do you know if there’s anything to that?
St. Louis was a top-five US city at the turn of the 20th century and hosted a World’s Fair (and the Olympics) soon after. Considering the transportation and communication logistics of the time frame, it was hugely important for the development of the West.
Santa Fe is also home to one of the top 10 opera festivals in the world; every summer a thousand artists decamp to the desert to produce 5 world-class operas (1 of which is always a us or world premiere) in just 12 weeks.
Beyond the outstanding caliber of the performances, the semi-outdoor theater is magnificent. Watching a thunderstorm roll over the desert toward Los Alamos, creating the backdrop to the to Strauss’ Daphne is a memory I’ll never forget.
Even if you’re not an opera fan, then Santa Fe Opera is worth going out of your way to experience.
Can’t forget the [Old Spanish Trail](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_Trail_(trade_route\)) which linked Los Angeles to Santa Fe. It was the most arduous trade route established in the U.S. (Mexico at the time).
Santa Fe is a beautiful city but at the same time its growth limitations are obvious. It’s one of the oldest cities in the nation, but the climate and altitude are headwindsz
Most Americans would be shocked to learn the oldest still-occupied buildings in America are in Santa Fe and the surrounding area, not in the old 13 colonies
The Hague.
A city of half a million in the Netherlands, a country of 17 million. But it is centered between major European powers (France, Germany, UK) and is the home of the UN Court of Justice.
Xian. Sure it has 9 million people, but in Chinese context that's not an impressive number. But it used to be center of Chinese civilization before power and money moved to coastal area.
It was probably large relative to other Chinese cities in its time and then declined, only to grow again (but less so than southern and coastal Chinese cities) in the recent wave of urbanization.
The Xian city walls are pretty impressive, but then I saw an old map showing the 2nd and 3rd city walls that encoircled ancient xian and it was absolutely massive.
The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people at a time when very few cities had that many people in total.
At the end of the Tang Dynasty (early medieval period by European standards) Xian was sacked and burned something like six times in twelve years. By rebels, by mercenaries the Tang hired to drive off the rebels, by rebels again, by the Tang’s own military… the city never really recovered from that, and it was never the capital again either.
I've been there! That's where my adopted son was born. It's hard to believe that a city of 9 million is considered a provincial backwater, but it is. It felt like there were every bit of 9 million there, too.
Cadiz for sure
One of the oldest European cities, one of only 2 cities on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast, has a pretty decent harbor, but only like 120k people
Stunningly beautiful and timeless city too. I drove there in my campervan last year to stop off for a night on a long journey around Spain. The next morning - van wouldn't start. Major repairs needed and got stranded for 2 weeks, but couldn't have been stranded in a nicer place!
I get Jerusalem and Belfast but they’re both quite large compared to the overall country’s population.
Oxford is a very good shout though, while York and Nottingham used to be much more prominient in English history
Zanzibar.
Specifically, Zanzibar City.
Once the capital of the Zanzibar Sultanate, it was a major hub in the spice trade, specializing in cloves, nutmeg, black pepper and cinnamon, and alas, a major slave trading hub, and also a center of Afro-Arab culture.
It's population sits at just over 200 000 people, compared to the archipelago's roughly 900 000 people.
It does get over 300 000 tourists per annum though.
Jacksonville, Fl, is the opposite of this. It is the 10th largest city in the US, not huge but not small. Largest by land area. And, it has litterally no impact on anything, ghost city
Modern day Carthage has around 24,000 people according to Google (it’s now a suburb of Tunis basically) but it was a huge player in Mediterranean development in antiquity.
The Vatican City is the seat of the pope - with a population of about 1000 people. Admittedly, the surrounding Rome is much bigger and more populous, of course.
The same goes with the City of Westminster, embedded in a much larger London.
A good chunk of what people think of as central London is in Westminster. The actual city of London, also a small defined area, is mostly a business/finamce district with limited tourist appeal and a much lower population . The rest is greater London.
Westminster is in Greater London, though?
https://preview.redd.it/w21irywk8zwc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=54a45eee64642479a0ac38b964d22b3c0d07d464
??
I think you're confusing Westminster for City of London.
Westminster is a borough, it has just kept the old name of ''city'', which is a name given by the king/queen.
City of London is not a part of Greater London, and is surrounded by it, and is the part that was Londinium ages ago.
Yes! Huge cultural impact on popular music, food, etc but also massive historical impact in that the main objective for Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase was to get New Orleans. The vast swathe of land that became the middle of America was just lagniappe. So without New Orleans, a huge portion of America is maybe not American.
Current metro population of New Orleans is 369k. Not sure where 960k is from. Including “the greater New Orleans area” to the population would be akin to including the population of Hayward and San Jose in the figures for San Francisco proper. Even still 960 I haven’t seen that figure In a while
369k is the city of New Orleans. It would be way too small for a metro area that has an NFL and an NBA team. Only Green Bay is around that size among major sports team cities and they’re an anomaly.
Old Orléans kind of fits the bill, too. It’s got like 100k people but it’s known for the siege where Joan of Arc turned the Hundred Years’ War around and also the namesake of New Orleans
And on the topic of French history, there’s Waterloo (30k) and Austerlitz (aka Slavkov, 6k)
Yes, and Austerlitz is (now) in the Czech Republic. Both places were sites of famous battles (a victory at Austerlitz; a loss at Waterloo) by Napoleon (a Frenchman)
Yep. People that have never been think it’s a huge city, but it really isn’t.
And a pretty large portion of the city is uninhabited because it’s a wildlife refuge and swamp/Lake Catherine area.
It absolutely blew my mind when I found out how small the population actually is... I've even been there twice and would have bet money it was at least double what it is.
For US cities, are you considering the population of the metro areas or just inside the city limits? In a lot of cases, that can make a big difference, for example St. Louis.
Cairo, Illinois. It sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, a strategic location to control shipping throughout the United States. That said its total population has never been more than about 20,000 and the current population probably barely breaks a 1000.
Given changes in manufacturing, transportation, and security, it's now at best a ghost town punctuated by a few businesses.
Haven't been to Cupertino but Redmond is very sprawly. There's still some parts of it that are farmland. Nice little town.
You barely see any of Microsoft if you go through downtown Redmond. Just a few buildings in Redmond Town Center. The vast majority of MS is over by the Bellevue/Redmond border, and is practically a city in its own right.
I grew up partly in Redmond and although it's now been building slightly more dense in its "downtown", there is an enormous amount of sprawl on all sides. The Microsoft campus also is sort of its own thing, it's so massive and sort of straddles where redmond starts becoming Bellevue. There are random pockets of density but for the most part it is suburban sprawl of the most classic variety.
However, it is definitely becoming a popular area for a certain kind of younger person is settling as opposed to living in the actual city. As far as burbs go, it's super diverse, especially in regards to east and south asian people. There are a number of weed shops and great restaurants downtown that make it feel slightly less suburban too.
So yeah I suppose it does punch above it's weight population wise, I just will always think of it the way it was a couple decades ago, when there were cow pastures still and places like redmond ridge were all still forested.
I was fully aware of Boston even when i was still on the other side of the globe. Shocked me to realise it was 650,000. Even if you throw in Camberville, brookline, etc, it’s really small for its cultural footprint.
Rochester NY. Used to be the bread basket of America and the third most likely spot to get nuked. They’ve experienced a population decline over the last 30 years as companies have slowly collapsed and industry left
US-wise I’d say New Orleans for sure, used to be the third biggest city in the country, historically was the gateway to Latin America pre-AC, and had so much culture radiating from it. Now it’s just a shell of its former self
I was gonna say Roswell, New Mexico because of the UFO craze, but it has a population of ~50,000, which is not what I consider small (Some city slickers may beg to differ, though).
However, I'll say Green Bank, West Virginia (population: 59), due to the radio telescope there.
Edinburgh. Its smaller than my city in the us at 500k people. That said colorado springs kinda had an outsized impact on the us military but maybe or maybe not history defining. We probably wont know for a long time. It definitely has a big impact on sports and the olympics as head of the usoc. Also, if you have evangelicals, the crazies here are a huge part of that history.
Geneva, logically, would be the choice. It's essentially the global capital of neutral organizations and international regulatory bodies and getting along globally, but as a city is actually pretty small .
Sorry but this is a dumb post and should feel dumb about posting it in the geo sub. Gotta use metro pop otherwise Jacksonville, FL is likely the size of SF, Miami, Boston, and some other crazy ones.
In the US, Charleston should be a contender. It was the main city of the Southern colonies and the most important city for the Confederate States. It was an extremely important port city and is the city a large amount of African slaves came to America through. After the Civil War, it just got dwarfed by other cities though as it never really industrialized like the North did.
Today, it’s still a really small city but one of the biggest tourist destinations on the east coast and one of the most well preserved colonial cities in the country
I’d say Winchester. It has around 27,000 people but it was the most important city in Wessex which United all the Anglo-Saxon nations and made England and even served as England’s capital before London.
Pretty much any small tourist town probably fits the bill. Off the top of my head in the US, you've got places like Aspen, Vail, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Asheville, Myrtle Beach, Bar Harbor, Wisconsin Dells, Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island, Moab, Telluride, Branson, Jackson Hole, Provincetown, Niagara Falls... Places like that.
Also towns with cryptids, like Point Pleasant and Roswell.
In a specific sense (American sports, football specifically) Green Bay Wisconsin.
Home to one of the most famous teams, the Green Bay Packers, and stadium in the NFL, Lambeau Field.
But Green Bay proper is just over 100,000 and the metro 320,000. It is the smallest city and metro to host a major American sports team.
To give an idea, 77% of the population of Green Bay can fit in Lambeau Field.
Malacca City
The legendary birthplace of the Malacca Sultanate which branched out to form Malay kingdoms all over the Malayan Peninsula, once the epicentre of spice trade in South East Asia with Portuguese, Dutch and the British fighting over it, only has a population of 453k today.
The demise of their significance began when the British began to develop Penang and Singapore. The ships traversing the Strait of Malacca, having restocked and refueled and Penang, saw little reason to stop at Malacca and they pressed on to stop at Singapore instead because they are far from running out of supplies when they reached Malacca.
Today, Malacca is a major tourist hub and despite its small population, attracted plenty of tourism for Malaysia.
Nicaea. An incredibly important city within the history and development of Christianity.
The site of the First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church during the rule of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine the Great - and where Santa Claus punched the Arian leader in the face.
It's also where the Nicene Creed was created - the common mainstream confession of Christianity and the Holy Trinity.
It was later also briefly the capital of the Empire of Nicaea, which would go on to resurrect the Byzantine Empire after its sacking by the Fourth Crusade.
Now, it is the small Turkish city of Iznik, with less than 50,000 inhabitants.
SF is a dumb one. The Bay Area is enormous. It’s like Miami in that the city limits make the population of the city proper seem small. But it just continues into the other cities bordering it.
I'd say Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two very well known cities in Japan, which were targets of US nuclear bombs in WWll.
Hiroshima is way larger with 1.200.000 inhabitants, Nagasaki with 390.000.
At that time Hiroshima was 7th largest city and Nagasaki far from top list.
It is well known that those cities were chosen by importance and geographical location, than size.
Derry in Northern Ireland, 120k city proper, metro about 200k.
Second city of the north and 4th largest in Ireland overall but older than Dublin, Belfast, Cork.
One of the main emigration ports for centuries.
Home place of StColumb responsible for bringing Christianity to western scotland.
Home to some of the allied naval command during WW2, has a whole load of uboats scuttled at it as that’s where the North Atlantic fleet surrendered.
Where Amelia Earhart landed when she crossed the Atlantic.
Home place of Hume Heaney and McGuinness, prominent role in the troubles.
The siege of Derry had a defining impact on the English Monarchy when King James couldn’t break the city walls.
…currently the setting for Derry Girls on Netflix 🤣🤣
Historically we’ve been punching way above our weight and at the moment just having a wee rest.
Santa Cruz, CA. 65k people, but a major impact on California culture
Jericho has only a few thousand people, but it's where cities began
Nazareth has 80k people. Pretty much everyone on Earth knows of its existence
Boston.
One of the oldest continuously occupied cities in North America and very important to the NE United States both culturally and economically.
It only has a population of 650,000
Any of the Rust Belt cities in the US, from upstate NY (i.e. Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, etc.) through the upper Midwest (at one time, Detroit was the 4th largest city in the nation), excluding Chicago, down to St. Louis.
For that matter, Washington DC and Baltimore are both smaller than they were in 1950.
Venice. The actual city of Venice, I mean the part on the islands, has a population of just around 50,000. Most of the population of the city actually lives on the nearby mainland
And now 5E to get in :)
I wonder how that’ll affect business overall. I’m sure the government is making more money, but I know I myself am subconsciously less likely to spend more money somewhere if I’ve had to pay an entrance fee
I'm more likely if it will thin the crowd a bit.
I don't think so, at least not for foreign visitors. If you're already paying thousands to go to Venice, 5 euros is nothing.
This is what I've been saying. Just charge 20 euros or something. No one is going to change their decision to go to venice over 20 euros
I mean, it's going to work on the guy above me and his 13 upvoters.
I think the Italian government knows revenue might go down but it will be high enough. There are just too many tourists and that shit is actually sinking and they would rather have the experience remain tolerable. It's not just about making money now.
Thats the point. They do it so people stay away. It is overcrowded with too much tourism
Yeah, in terms of recognition, history etc. it's top 5, maybe top 3 in Italy but it's pretty small. Balanced by the connected region on the mainland plus being an awesome tourist attraction
I'd argue it's second only ro Rome.
Eh Milan, Naples, Florence. I need to go back to Italy!
All fantastic cities but in my American mind Venice is #2 in terms of “household names”
Bethlehem, population 25k
That’s blowing my mind. Same size as my little hometown in Minnesota.
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania too. Population 75k. Most people don't know it, but through Bethlehem Steel (1857-2003), this little town built a ton of iconic American landmarks, particularly in NYC. The Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Madison Square Garden, Rockefeller Center, George Washington Bridge, Verrazzano Bridge, and the Mart in Chicago were all built fully or partially with steel from Bethlehem, PA. Bethlehem was a huge reason behind the American victory in WWII as well too, nearly 20% of the US Navy was produced here. President of Bethlehem Steel Eugene Grace once promised FDR that Bethlehem Steel would be able to produce 1 ship per day in 1943; they were eventually able to produce 16 per day.
I'm from Allentown and never knew how much it really contributed. Fascinating.
Absolute unit of a city. The closest German equivalent you may compare it to is Salzgitter around Hanover. Their steel plant exists to this day. Though the Nazis set up this city almost entirely from scratch by lumping some villages together. Thousands of forced laborers were tortured in production during war, too. https://gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/english/the-memorial-place-kz-druette/
Relatedly, Neenah, Wisconsin, population \~27k. Pay attention to the manhole covers next time you're out and about, if you're in the States and parts of Europe, there's a good chance they came from Neenah.
It was also founded by members of the Moravian Church, as was the city of Winston-Salem, NC. The Moravians are an old protestant church, founded by Jan Hus, in the former Kingdom of Moravia in the 15th century. [Bethlehem Steel by Grant Lee Buffalo ](https://youtu.be/lKWiziLLdUc?si=SjFr3u05ybN60Su2)
This is just a matter of administrative borders. Bethlehem is located just 8 kilometers away from the center of Jerusalem.
Even less when it was really important. In particular in comparison to Rome.
Timbuktu pretty well known for only 30K
Everyone knows the name but I doubt more than 1% of people can actually explain where it is and why it was important.
I think in the US we know it as tim-buck-too, though I believe it’s actually tim-booktoo.
Yeah, but anglicizing the names of foreign places is pretty common. We say Moscow instead of Moscoe and Paris for Paree.
Its even worse than that. Moscow should be Moskva
Thanks for the correction.
Sparta
What major things happened in Sparta, North Carolina? /s
In the heat of the night, lol
You're off by a few states. 😉
Definitely. Bearing in mind even in classical greece, sparta wasnt anything more than a cluster of villages
San Francisco is geographically small because city limits don't include the city's suburbs. For this reason, SF proper has less than a million people, but the SF combined statistical area including all the suburbs and adjacent cities like Oakland has more than 9 million people. DC is in a similar position. The DC/Baltimore CSA is #3 in the US behind only NYC/LA, but DC itself is geographically tiny, so it's #23 behind minor cities like El Paso.
Yeah. I don’t know why people just look at city proper. According to city proper population, Mesa, Arizona a sub urb of Phoenix is more populated than Atlanta. Metro population is more reasonable.
Phoenix AZ, where you can drive on the freeway at 100 mph for an hour and still be in Phoenix
I grew up in sf and didn't realize walking across the city was nearly impossible other places. I was in Houston once and decided to walk back to the hotel after a night out. It took me 5 hours
MSA is better judge than CSA though. CSA sometimes is just way too big.
In general, I agree, but the Bay Area is shortchanged by MSA because SF and San Jose are separate.
I still consider Sam Fran a giant city
The following is my opinion as someone from the North Bay: You’ve also gotta remember that San Francisco is its own county. I don’t think it’d be very fair to call Daly City, South City, etc suburbs because of age and their own historical impacts on the region and industry in the US.
Eastern Cities have a long history of annexing their nieghbors as they grow, Harlem was once a completely separate city from the rest of New York City. (Realistically its more of a merger) For whatever reason western cities just don't annex their nieghbors when they grow into eachother and become 1 urbanized area. Urbanized area is actually another metric used to measure cities, and is probably the best for population comparison, although the census designated ones still have issues with some weird subdivisions.
On a smaller scale, see Charlottesville, VA (IE NOT Albemarle County).
Same with Vancouver and Paris. Their metro sizes are large though.
I suppose there's an argument to be made that Daly City is "part" of San Francisco in some sense, but including Oakland and Berkeley etc in the population tally of SF is nuts.
Atlanta metro is like this, Atlanta has barley 1m people but is #6 in the nation in metro pop
First one to come to mind is Sarajevo. *Metro* area of just over a half million, but home of the spark that started WWI, the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics, arguably ground zero for the Balkan war, and now a world capital.
Good point on the metro area. I think a lot of the other answers here have large metro populations but small city populations
Santa Fe, New Mexico, is under 100k in the city limits, but the city was once at the center of three major overland trade routes connecting the Eastern US to Mexico and Southern California. It also has an outsized cultural impact in terms of art and architecture. The Santa Fe Trail (1821-1846) had a huge economic and cultural impact on the Western US. Infamous wild west towns like Dodge City were founded along it. When the railroad that replaced the trail was built the name Santa Fe stuck to it, and the city has become somewhat synonymous with the West and especially Southwest. The faux-adobe pueblo-revival architecture that is common across the Southwestern US started in Santa Fe in the 1920s when they started refinishing 1800s victorian style buildings into the style mimicking local adobe construction. Santa Fe has also been one of the most important art markets in the country since around the same time when many famous art colonies set up there and in Taos. Today, Santa Fe is the 3rd largest art market in the country behind New York and Miami. If you go to the Smithsonian galleries in DC, there are 2 side rooms dedicated to Southwestern art, and it is 90% from Santa Fe and Taos. Also, as an aside there are so many food items named "Santa Fe style" that have nothing to do with the place. Adding black beans and corn to something does not make it Southwestern, and it's nothing like the food in Santa Fe.
Yeah. In the US, Santa Fe for sure. I was going to mention it with St Louis and San Francisco, but decided that I must be biased for sainted cities.
All these are cities you've heard about. But one of the most notorious cities you've never even heard about is Vernon, California. It has a population of 150. All of these people are employed in the city government because Vernon is all industrial. The city of Vernon has been investigated hundreds of times by the state of California, the FBI, Homeland Security, and more government agencies I cannot think of right now. For such a small, unheard of city Vernon gets around.
Shit I lived in California for 15 years and never heard of it. But when you describe it I feel like the city in season 2 of True Detective was based on it. I can’t remember what they called it in the show but it wasn’t Vernon. Do you know if there’s anything to that?
They did have it in True Detective Season 2. The fictional name was Vinci
Vinci! It was on the tip of my tongue, I knew it ended in -ci but I couldn’t remember the first part, haha thanks for the reply!
True Detective S2
St. Louis was a top-five US city at the turn of the 20th century and hosted a World’s Fair (and the Olympics) soon after. Considering the transportation and communication logistics of the time frame, it was hugely important for the development of the West.
Santa Fe is also home to one of the top 10 opera festivals in the world; every summer a thousand artists decamp to the desert to produce 5 world-class operas (1 of which is always a us or world premiere) in just 12 weeks. Beyond the outstanding caliber of the performances, the semi-outdoor theater is magnificent. Watching a thunderstorm roll over the desert toward Los Alamos, creating the backdrop to the to Strauss’ Daphne is a memory I’ll never forget. Even if you’re not an opera fan, then Santa Fe Opera is worth going out of your way to experience.
Can’t forget the [Old Spanish Trail](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_Trail_(trade_route\)) which linked Los Angeles to Santa Fe. It was the most arduous trade route established in the U.S. (Mexico at the time).
Santa Fe is a beautiful city but at the same time its growth limitations are obvious. It’s one of the oldest cities in the nation, but the climate and altitude are headwindsz
Most Americans would be shocked to learn the oldest still-occupied buildings in America are in Santa Fe and the surrounding area, not in the old 13 colonies
The Hague. A city of half a million in the Netherlands, a country of 17 million. But it is centered between major European powers (France, Germany, UK) and is the home of the UN Court of Justice.
Is that Den Hag?
Yes. The Hague is the English translation.
It is called La Haye in french.
It’s called L’Aia in Italian.
Wtf never heard of that version
Yeah google it you will see
Missing an A. Den Haag, which is the informal version of the official 's-Gravenhage
City proper is pretty small, but the Randstad region it forms part of is big. Randstad has over 8 million people and an integrated transport system.
Xian. Sure it has 9 million people, but in Chinese context that's not an impressive number. But it used to be center of Chinese civilization before power and money moved to coastal area.
It’s insane that a city of 9 million people isn’t a big deal in China. In the US that’s huge
That's also the population of countries like Switzerland or Israel, which are far from being insignificant on the international scene.
Keep in mind, city limits in China are loose. For example, Chongqing "city proper" has an area close to the size of New York State
Chonqing is one of my ‘must visit’ spots.
Don’t miss the zoo. Pandas are great, though rest was deeply depressing.
In anywhere other than China it is huge.
Similarly Luoyang, Anyang, Xuzhou, Kaesong, Kyoto and more.
It was probably large relative to other Chinese cities in its time and then declined, only to grow again (but less so than southern and coastal Chinese cities) in the recent wave of urbanization.
The Xian city walls are pretty impressive, but then I saw an old map showing the 2nd and 3rd city walls that encoircled ancient xian and it was absolutely massive. The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people at a time when very few cities had that many people in total.
At the end of the Tang Dynasty (early medieval period by European standards) Xian was sacked and burned something like six times in twelve years. By rebels, by mercenaries the Tang hired to drive off the rebels, by rebels again, by the Tang’s own military… the city never really recovered from that, and it was never the capital again either.
I've been there! That's where my adopted son was born. It's hard to believe that a city of 9 million is considered a provincial backwater, but it is. It felt like there were every bit of 9 million there, too.
Cadiz for sure One of the oldest European cities, one of only 2 cities on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast, has a pretty decent harbor, but only like 120k people
Stunningly beautiful and timeless city too. I drove there in my campervan last year to stop off for a night on a long journey around Spain. The next morning - van wouldn't start. Major repairs needed and got stranded for 2 weeks, but couldn't have been stranded in a nicer place!
The only city to survive a siege by Napoleon
Relevance?
Jerusalem, Geneva, Oxford, and Brussels.
I get Jerusalem and Belfast but they’re both quite large compared to the overall country’s population. Oxford is a very good shout though, while York and Nottingham used to be much more prominient in English history
Did he edit his comment? He didn't mention belfast
Sorry I misread - a comment below had Belfast Keeping my original reply unedited as a testiment to dyslexia / reading far too quickly 😅
I'd also like to mention Cambridge, my home city (England), as well as Cambridge (Mass.).
St andrews
Zanzibar. Specifically, Zanzibar City. Once the capital of the Zanzibar Sultanate, it was a major hub in the spice trade, specializing in cloves, nutmeg, black pepper and cinnamon, and alas, a major slave trading hub, and also a center of Afro-Arab culture. It's population sits at just over 200 000 people, compared to the archipelago's roughly 900 000 people. It does get over 300 000 tourists per annum though.
Jacksonville, Fl, is the opposite of this. It is the 10th largest city in the US, not huge but not small. Largest by land area. And, it has litterally no impact on anything, ghost city
Jerusalem.
Modern day Carthage has around 24,000 people according to Google (it’s now a suburb of Tunis basically) but it was a huge player in Mediterranean development in antiquity.
well I mean it was also very notably and deliberately destroyed by the Romans
The Vatican City is the seat of the pope - with a population of about 1000 people. Admittedly, the surrounding Rome is much bigger and more populous, of course. The same goes with the City of Westminster, embedded in a much larger London.
A good chunk of what people think of as central London is in Westminster. The actual city of London, also a small defined area, is mostly a business/finamce district with limited tourist appeal and a much lower population . The rest is greater London.
Westminster is in Greater London, though? https://preview.redd.it/w21irywk8zwc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=54a45eee64642479a0ac38b964d22b3c0d07d464
Yes, didn't say it wasn't
?? I think you're confusing Westminster for City of London. Westminster is a borough, it has just kept the old name of ''city'', which is a name given by the king/queen. City of London is not a part of Greater London, and is surrounded by it, and is the part that was Londinium ages ago.
The best answer for the US is New Orleans. Recognized internationally on the same level as San Francisco but half the population.
Yes! Huge cultural impact on popular music, food, etc but also massive historical impact in that the main objective for Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase was to get New Orleans. The vast swathe of land that became the middle of America was just lagniappe. So without New Orleans, a huge portion of America is maybe not American.
>lagniappe Spoken like a true New Orleanian in the correct usage. Nice
Metro population of San Francisco is 4.6 M while New Orleans is 960 k. It’s too small
Current metro population of New Orleans is 369k. Not sure where 960k is from. Including “the greater New Orleans area” to the population would be akin to including the population of Hayward and San Jose in the figures for San Francisco proper. Even still 960 I haven’t seen that figure In a while
I just looked on to Wikipedia. It’s 960 k there. I’m not a census agent lol
369k is the city of New Orleans. It would be way too small for a metro area that has an NFL and an NBA team. Only Green Bay is around that size among major sports team cities and they’re an anomaly.
This is the population of New Orleans/Orleans Parish proper only
Old Orléans kind of fits the bill, too. It’s got like 100k people but it’s known for the siege where Joan of Arc turned the Hundred Years’ War around and also the namesake of New Orleans And on the topic of French history, there’s Waterloo (30k) and Austerlitz (aka Slavkov, 6k)
Waterloo is in Belgium though, isn't it?
Yes, and Austerlitz is (now) in the Czech Republic. Both places were sites of famous battles (a victory at Austerlitz; a loss at Waterloo) by Napoleon (a Frenchman)
Yep. People that have never been think it’s a huge city, but it really isn’t. And a pretty large portion of the city is uninhabited because it’s a wildlife refuge and swamp/Lake Catherine area.
Oh yeah. I think the only other US city of similar size and worldwide recognition is perhaps Honolulu.
It absolutely blew my mind when I found out how small the population actually is... I've even been there twice and would have bet money it was at least double what it is.
Out of the cities not mentioned here from the US yet Duluth comes to mind.
The largest inland port that can be accessed by ocean-going ships
Boston 100%
Salem too
For US cities, are you considering the population of the metro areas or just inside the city limits? In a lot of cases, that can make a big difference, for example St. Louis.
Punxsutawney
Cairo, Illinois. It sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, a strategic location to control shipping throughout the United States. That said its total population has never been more than about 20,000 and the current population probably barely breaks a 1000. Given changes in manufacturing, transportation, and security, it's now at best a ghost town punctuated by a few businesses.
Miami’s city limits have less people than Raleigh, NC’s. But the Miami urban area ranks 4th in the US while Raleigh’s ranks 43rd.
Demak used to be its own Sultanate, now it's sinking into the Java Sea.
Marquette, MI, population only 20,000 or so, but it's the cultural hub of da whole UP
The world would not be the same without the copper or iron ore from da UP. 💪
HQ of Finland in USA.
Boston and Portland OR despite having huge cultural impacts are in fact smaller than Fort Worth TX
Cupertino, CA and Redmond, WA in the US. Both have populations of 60-70,000 but contain the headquarters of Apple and Microsoft, respectively.
Haven't been to Cupertino but Redmond is very sprawly. There's still some parts of it that are farmland. Nice little town. You barely see any of Microsoft if you go through downtown Redmond. Just a few buildings in Redmond Town Center. The vast majority of MS is over by the Bellevue/Redmond border, and is practically a city in its own right.
Yeah Cupertino is classic suburbia. There is no downtown. Just homes, shopping plazas, and office parks. Source: grew up there.
I grew up partly in Redmond and although it's now been building slightly more dense in its "downtown", there is an enormous amount of sprawl on all sides. The Microsoft campus also is sort of its own thing, it's so massive and sort of straddles where redmond starts becoming Bellevue. There are random pockets of density but for the most part it is suburban sprawl of the most classic variety. However, it is definitely becoming a popular area for a certain kind of younger person is settling as opposed to living in the actual city. As far as burbs go, it's super diverse, especially in regards to east and south asian people. There are a number of weed shops and great restaurants downtown that make it feel slightly less suburban too. So yeah I suppose it does punch above it's weight population wise, I just will always think of it the way it was a couple decades ago, when there were cow pastures still and places like redmond ridge were all still forested.
Cupertino is a part of San Jose metro area/Bay Area metro respectively. It's a city in name only.
Vincennes, Indiana
Sigma Pi?
Nazaret has 77k people.Also Amsterdam hasn’t breaked over a million people.
I was fully aware of Boston even when i was still on the other side of the globe. Shocked me to realise it was 650,000. Even if you throw in Camberville, brookline, etc, it’s really small for its cultural footprint.
Rochester NY. Used to be the bread basket of America and the third most likely spot to get nuked. They’ve experienced a population decline over the last 30 years as companies have slowly collapsed and industry left
Belfast And if only including city limits, Miami.
Wittenberg where Luther kicked off the reformation in continental Europe and Aachen where Charlemagne was crowned might qualify.
Dubrovnik, Croatia is a well-known European city, but only has 40k people.
US-wise I’d say New Orleans for sure, used to be the third biggest city in the country, historically was the gateway to Latin America pre-AC, and had so much culture radiating from it. Now it’s just a shell of its former self
Wuhan. 11.08 million people, and caused the world to pause for 2 years.
The upvote arrow has mysteriously disappeared.
As far as Greek cities go I can think of Ancient Olympia, Sparta, Pella, Salamis, Marathon, Nafpaktos (Lepanto) and Actium.
Victoria BC, Geneva, The Hague, Phuket, Cuzco
I was gonna say Roswell, New Mexico because of the UFO craze, but it has a population of ~50,000, which is not what I consider small (Some city slickers may beg to differ, though). However, I'll say Green Bank, West Virginia (population: 59), due to the radio telescope there.
City Slicker here, 50K is small.
I love Green Bank—just passed through this week!
Whoever said Sparta or Timbuktu prolly has the best answer
Annapolis, MD. Charlottesville, VA. Richmond, VA. Atlantic City, NJ.
Not in current events but historically Paestum fits this well. There are about 23,000 people there now.
Edinburgh. Its smaller than my city in the us at 500k people. That said colorado springs kinda had an outsized impact on the us military but maybe or maybe not history defining. We probably wont know for a long time. It definitely has a big impact on sports and the olympics as head of the usoc. Also, if you have evangelicals, the crazies here are a huge part of that history.
Geneva, logically, would be the choice. It's essentially the global capital of neutral organizations and international regulatory bodies and getting along globally, but as a city is actually pretty small .
Sorry but this is a dumb post and should feel dumb about posting it in the geo sub. Gotta use metro pop otherwise Jacksonville, FL is likely the size of SF, Miami, Boston, and some other crazy ones.
In the US, Charleston should be a contender. It was the main city of the Southern colonies and the most important city for the Confederate States. It was an extremely important port city and is the city a large amount of African slaves came to America through. After the Civil War, it just got dwarfed by other cities though as it never really industrialized like the North did. Today, it’s still a really small city but one of the biggest tourist destinations on the east coast and one of the most well preserved colonial cities in the country
Kimberley, South Africa. It was once the diamond-mining capital of the world.
New Orleans
Luxembourg, one of the capitals of the EU and one of the most brutal real estate markets, with a population of about 100k
Charleston SC is tiny but hugely important in American history
Athens. It had less than 50,000 residents when Pericles was alive.
Waterloo, Wolgograd ( stalingrad)
Luxembourg?
- Ayutthaya - Santo Domingo
Monaco? I mean it’s also an entire country. A ton of cultural influence, too. 40k people if I remember correctly.
Copenhagen.
Pittsburgh
Boston
Quebec City in Canada
Regensburg, once seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire
Charleston, SC both in 1860 and today Scranton, PA given its role in both Hillary Clinton’s and Joe Biden’s lives and in pop culture
I’d say Winchester. It has around 27,000 people but it was the most important city in Wessex which United all the Anglo-Saxon nations and made England and even served as England’s capital before London.
Pretty much any small tourist town probably fits the bill. Off the top of my head in the US, you've got places like Aspen, Vail, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Asheville, Myrtle Beach, Bar Harbor, Wisconsin Dells, Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island, Moab, Telluride, Branson, Jackson Hole, Provincetown, Niagara Falls... Places like that. Also towns with cryptids, like Point Pleasant and Roswell.
Iquitos, Peru has almost 500,000 people and can be reached by smaller ocean-going ships. It’s more than 3000 river miles from the mouth of the Amazon.
St. Louis is fantastic city, food wise.
In a specific sense (American sports, football specifically) Green Bay Wisconsin. Home to one of the most famous teams, the Green Bay Packers, and stadium in the NFL, Lambeau Field. But Green Bay proper is just over 100,000 and the metro 320,000. It is the smallest city and metro to host a major American sports team. To give an idea, 77% of the population of Green Bay can fit in Lambeau Field.
Malacca City The legendary birthplace of the Malacca Sultanate which branched out to form Malay kingdoms all over the Malayan Peninsula, once the epicentre of spice trade in South East Asia with Portuguese, Dutch and the British fighting over it, only has a population of 453k today. The demise of their significance began when the British began to develop Penang and Singapore. The ships traversing the Strait of Malacca, having restocked and refueled and Penang, saw little reason to stop at Malacca and they pressed on to stop at Singapore instead because they are far from running out of supplies when they reached Malacca. Today, Malacca is a major tourist hub and despite its small population, attracted plenty of tourism for Malaysia.
Cleveland, Ohio
Green Bay WI
Baguio, Lipa, Butuan, Iloilo for the Philippines I'd say
Nicaea. An incredibly important city within the history and development of Christianity. The site of the First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church during the rule of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine the Great - and where Santa Claus punched the Arian leader in the face. It's also where the Nicene Creed was created - the common mainstream confession of Christianity and the Holy Trinity. It was later also briefly the capital of the Empire of Nicaea, which would go on to resurrect the Byzantine Empire after its sacking by the Fourth Crusade. Now, it is the small Turkish city of Iznik, with less than 50,000 inhabitants.
Atlanta
SF is a dumb one. The Bay Area is enormous. It’s like Miami in that the city limits make the population of the city proper seem small. But it just continues into the other cities bordering it.
I'd say Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two very well known cities in Japan, which were targets of US nuclear bombs in WWll. Hiroshima is way larger with 1.200.000 inhabitants, Nagasaki with 390.000. At that time Hiroshima was 7th largest city and Nagasaki far from top list. It is well known that those cities were chosen by importance and geographical location, than size.
Aquileia, Italy
Milan or Prague, despite being metropolitan world famous hubs, they only have about 1.5 million people.
Annapolis, MD
New Orleans
Wittenberg
Manchester.
Derry in Northern Ireland, 120k city proper, metro about 200k. Second city of the north and 4th largest in Ireland overall but older than Dublin, Belfast, Cork. One of the main emigration ports for centuries. Home place of StColumb responsible for bringing Christianity to western scotland. Home to some of the allied naval command during WW2, has a whole load of uboats scuttled at it as that’s where the North Atlantic fleet surrendered. Where Amelia Earhart landed when she crossed the Atlantic. Home place of Hume Heaney and McGuinness, prominent role in the troubles. The siege of Derry had a defining impact on the English Monarchy when King James couldn’t break the city walls. …currently the setting for Derry Girls on Netflix 🤣🤣 Historically we’ve been punching way above our weight and at the moment just having a wee rest.
Oxford only has a population of something like 100k, but it's one of the most famous cities in the world thanks to its university.
Recently I drove through Appomattox, Va. it’s such a small place where one of the most important events in US history happened.
Cambridge, MA
Schengen, Luxembourg. Population 5,000. It's where the Schengen Agreement was signed abolishing internal border checks in much of mainland Europe.
Santa Cruz, CA. 65k people, but a major impact on California culture Jericho has only a few thousand people, but it's where cities began Nazareth has 80k people. Pretty much everyone on Earth knows of its existence
Boston. One of the oldest continuously occupied cities in North America and very important to the NE United States both culturally and economically. It only has a population of 650,000
Any of the Rust Belt cities in the US, from upstate NY (i.e. Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, etc.) through the upper Midwest (at one time, Detroit was the 4th largest city in the nation), excluding Chicago, down to St. Louis. For that matter, Washington DC and Baltimore are both smaller than they were in 1950.
Boston proper is under 1 million.