Place (United States Census Bureau)

The United States Census Bureau defines a place as a concentration of population which has a name, is locally recognized, and is not part of any other place. A place typically has a residential nucleus and a closely spaced street pattern, and it frequently includes commercial property and other urban land uses. A place may be an incorporated place (a self-governing city, town, or village) or it may be a census-designated place (CDP). Incorporated places are defined by the laws of the states in which they are contained. The Census Bureau delineates CDPs. A small settlement in the open countryside or the densely settled fringe of a large city may not be a place as defined by the Census Bureau. As of the 1990 Census, only 26% of the people in the United States lived outside of places.

An incorporated place, under the Census Bureau's definition, is a type of governmental unit incorporated under state law as a city, town (except the New England states, New York, and Wisconsin), borough (except in Alaska and New York), or village and having legally prescribed limits, powers, and functions. Requirements for incorporation vary widely among the states; some states have few specific criteria, while others have established population thresholds and occasionally other conditions (for example, minimum land area, population density, and distance from other existing incorporated places) that must be met for incorporation.

The Census Bureau recognizes incorporated places in all States except Hawaii; for Hawaii, by agreement with the Office of the Governor, the Census Bureau recognizes all places as census-designated places (CDPs) rather than as incorporated places. Puerto Rico and several of the outlying areas under United States jurisdiction (such as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands) also have no incorporated places.

Different states use a variety of terms for their incorporated places. The designations "city", "town", "village", and "borough" are most frequent, but one or more places in Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, and Tennessee have place-type governments (usually consolidated ones) that do not have any of these designations. New Jersey is the only state that has all four kinds of incorporated places. Only two other states (Connecticut and Pennsylvania) include "boroughs" as incorporated places. Eleven states have only "cities", and the remainder of the States have various combinations of "cities", "towns", and "villages".

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