Talk:List of towns and cities in Norway

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Svalbard[edit]

Should cities of Svalbard be here or there?

"There". It should include both Russian and Norwegian settlements and a place like Pyramiden (an abandoned Russian settlement) should not be on a list of Norwegian cities. The title "List of cities in Svalbard" should also be changed to something like "List of settlements on Svalbard" (if that makes sense to the English speaking readers). Also see my comment on Svalbard an Jan Mayen status on Talk:Norway. -- Gustavf Tue Jan 28 15:14:26 CET 2003

Bjørnøya is not a town, surely. Also, I don't think it is part of Svalbard, so it is even more misleading. Since this is a list of cities, none of the Svalbard places qualify anyway -- Egil

Bjørnøya is definetely a settlement, and in fact (even though it is far from Spitsbergen) it _is_ a part of Svalbard islands. About cities and settlements, I can agree with you, but they were in the list, I just refined the list according to a prior comment, and the facts that some settlements were missing. As was (I later recalled) Advent City (Adventsbyen) (abandoned). -- Chrmb

OK. Made a new list, list of settlements in Svalbard. None of the settlements would qualify as a "city", anyway. Egil 13:16 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Map[edit]

I would find it really useful if this page had a map with all the cities marked on them. Would this be possible? The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.111.8.103 (talk • contribs) .

  • I included a map where at least some of the cities are shown. Punkmorten 20:21, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Merge[edit]

See Cities of Norway - the content (cities ordered by population) should, I think, be merged into this article. Thanks/wangi 14:08, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Just be bold and do it. Remember to consult What links here and fix any issues. -- Egil 14:19, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
After 5 months without any action, I decided to be bold myself. I did not conduct the merge, but I did rewrite and move Cities of Norway. Reason: Cities of Norway did not deal with cities, but urban areas. Everything should be ok now. Punkmorten 16:46, 16 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Future towns?[edit]

This is original research, so it's not going in the article. But these are places that might seek town status in the future:

This is just my speculation. Punkmorten 11:38, 28 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cities without 0 as third digit[edit]

What on earth is that supposed to mean? -Oreo Priest 00:35, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It is described in the text body. Punkmorten 09:50, 31 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It is, and from what I can ascertain this today has no bearing on the city status of any given community. Therefore I propose we de-emphasize this item, particularly dissolve the partition into two different tables based on this archaic measure. Instead, I suggest we point out cities with less than 5,000 inhabitants. Perhaps we should call these towns and the rest cities? __meco (talk) 20:57, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For the category tree, anyway, they are now grouped as "cities and towns". Punkmorten (talk) 19:31, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It seems somebody is preempting a slow-moving, but in my view necessary, consensus-building discourse on this subject. Please see
__meco (talk) 09:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

City?[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was moved, as there seems to be no reason why not. I will caution editors to be careful about strictly applying Norwegian categories to the English language; just because a word is always translated in a certain way does not mean that it would sound natural to an average native speaker of English. -- Aervanath (talk) 05:02, 4 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]


A lot of places listed in this article don't really deserve being named "city", but should be listed as towns. There are few cities in Norway, in terms of the Norwegian word "storby" (lit. largetown), those being Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim and perhaps Tromsø (the latter not by size, but by culture and influence). Naming Hammerfest or Kongsvinger (my home town) a city is bizarre at the best if not utterly stupid. Since it's a rather large change, I have chosen not to change this article in to a list of towns before we have had a discussion about it, but it certainly should be done. Rkarlsba (talk) 12:54, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move[edit]

If this article List of cities in Norway is to be List of towns and cities in Norway, it should be moved there, not copied.   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 13:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I see - sorry about that. See the added population column - it's not, as I see it, really good to name this page a "list of cities", as most of the places are far too small to be named a city. Rkarlsba (talk) 13:43, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
What is your intent for List of cities/towns in Norway by population? Why is that named "cities/towns" instead of "towns and cities"? What about villages?   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 13:57, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Towns and cities is probably better, yes. I think there's a separate page for the villages Rkarlsba (talk) 14:00, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest a more-encompassing "inhabited places" or perhaps "municipalities".   — Jeff G. (talk|contribs) 14:02, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think list of municipalities is good, but perhaps also a list of villages, towns and cities would be good. What do you think? Rkarlsba (talk) 16:15, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The word "municipality" is used to translate "kommune". Sometimes the main town (kommunesenter) in a municipality (kommune) has the same name as the municipality, sometimes it does not. In a few cases, towns have grown into neighbouring municipalities. As to villages, what are the criteria for inclusion? They could easily drown out the more important places. The classifications used in Norway seems to be somewhat different from the city-town-village system used here. Places that are grouped together as villages here, are treated differently on the Norwegian wikipedia. Ters (talk) 21:07, 31 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Norwegian towns/cities are not just "big" settlements; they have an actual town status that sets them apart from smaller settlements (usually known as "tettsted" in Norwegian, which is a confusing term because it is also SSB's translation of "urban area"). Somehow merging this list with a list of "villages" would for this reason be wrong: they wouldn't be equivalent because this is not just a "list of big settlements". --Aqwis (talk) 09:46, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There is no difference between "towns" and "cities" in Norway and trying to decide which settlements are "cities" and which are "towns" is original research. Do note that many small places, for various reasons, are called "city" in the US and other countries, which shows that our "having to" call the smaller settlements "towns" is incorrect. --Aqwis (talk) 09:43, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In English, there's a distinct difference between town and city, and since this article is written in English, a town of 5000 inhabitants should not be listed as a city. Rkarlsba (talk) 11:35, 5 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
As I demonstrated with my example from the US, this is blatantly incorrect. The distinction between "town" and "city" varies from country to country and (US) state to state, and cannot be applied to Norway. Yes, "cities" are generally relatively large while "towns" are relatively small, although this rule has many exceptions, but then you have to set a limit somewhere between "big" and "small" settlements which, without a reliable source that defines such a limit, requires original research. --Aqwis (talk) 14:10, 5 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Improvement suggestions[edit]

  1. There are too many pictures for a list, and since the list contains unnecessary posts (like municipality in a list of cities and towns, where almost 100% have the same name) many users just can see a lot of pictures to the right and blank white space to the left. This could be solved by reducing the number of posts columns. (And make a gallery of most pictures, if all pictures really are necessary)
  2. The figures appear to show inhabitants of the (often very large) municipalities, rather than inhabitants of the town or city.
  3. Is the year 1996 "magical" within Norwegian demography ? I would prefer one list only.

Boeing720 (talk) 22:22, 4 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

By the earlier legislation, it was the municipalities that were towns/cities. This is reflected by the third digit in municipality number being zero for cities. In the 1990s (possibly 1996/1997), Norway formally stopped bothering with the concept of cities/towns. The formal term (as opposed to the even less precise use of the word(s) in everyday speech) is now purely a marketing gimmick, without any formal geographical definition (in most cases at least). As such, there are no sources to be found for number of inhabitants, except for the traditional "municipal cities". (The way I read the law, it is still so that only municipalities can be cities, by satisfying certain criteria, but no one seems to care. The fact that they didn't remove all mention of the city/town concept from the law altogether seems to be to not hurt the pride of existing cities/towns.) Ters (talk) 06:11, 5 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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