The Bureau of the Census keeps track of incorporated places by size. Incorporated places may be cities, towns, or villages. Some entities, although called a village, may not be incorporated. Thus knowing whether or not the following chart includes you will depend on whether that word, incorporated, applies to your place or not. The census provides eight divisions, from 1 million in population or greater down to under 10,000. Herewith a graphic showing the number of incorporated places and the total population that goes with each size category. The source is Table 28 at on this web page.
There are nine places with more than a million in population—and 16,580 in the under 10,000 category. The three largest sizes are too small to show up on the graph, but the number is shown at the bottom. The population associated with each size-group is shown in red (right axis) and the number, in millions, indicated above. In 2009 the U.S. population was 309 million. This chart shows 192.2 million indicating that 62 percent of the population lived in incorporated places in 2009.
Interesting to note that the population is roughly equally divided by size categories. The largest proportion live in cities between 100 and 250 thousand. The average population of the smallest places is 1,731 souls.
Filed under: Cities, Population Tagged: | Towns, Villages
That is a very nice graph.
Interesting how many of us live in unincorporated places, surprising really as I see those as quite small. I’ll have to check the definition of unincorporated places.
Say, what’s with the EcoPressed link now appearing at the bottom of your posts? I’ll have to pay attention and see if the articles linked to change each time I come back to one of your posts.