Municipality

A municipality is usually an urban administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction. The term municipality is also used to mean the governing, ruling body of a municipality. A municipality is a general-purpose administrative subdivision, as opposed to a special-purpose district. The term is derived from French "municipalité" and Latin "municipalis".

The English word "Municipality" derives from the Latin social contract "municipium", meaning duty holders, referring to the Latin communities that supplied Rome with troops in exchange for their own incorporation into the Roman state (granting Roman citizenship to the inhabitants) while permitting the communities to retain their own local governments (a limited autonomy).

A municipality can be any political jurisdiction from a sovereign state, such as the Principality of Monaco, or a small village, such as West Hampton Dunes, New York.

The territory over which a municipality has jurisdiction may encompass

Direct-controlled municipalities of China

A municipality (simplified Chinese: 直辖市; traditional Chinese: 直轄市; pinyin: zhíxiáshì), also translated as direct-controlled municipality (formally), municipality directly under the central government, or province-level municipality is the highest level classification for cities used by the People's Republic of China. These cities have the same rank as provinces, and form part of the first tier of administrative divisions of China.

A municipality is a "city" (Chinese: 市; pinyin: shì) with "provincial" (Chinese: 省级; pinyin: shěngjí) power under an unified jurisdiction. As such it is simultaneously a city and a province of it own right.

A municipality is often not a "city" in the usual sense of the term (i.e., a large continuous urban settlement), but instead an administrative unit comprising, typically, a main central urban area (a city in the usual sense, usually with the same name as the municipality), and its much larger surrounding rural area containing many smaller cities (districts & subdistricts), towns and villages. The larger municipality span over 100 kilometres (62 mi). To distinguish a "municipality" from its actual urban area (the traditional meaning of the word "city"), the term Chinese: 市区, or "urban area", is used.

Municipalities of Puerto Rico

The municipalities of Puerto Rico number seventy-eight and they make up the smallest electoral division in Puerto Rico. Each municipality is led by a mayor and divided into barrios, though the latter are not vested with political authority. Geographically, a municipality has an urban core that consists of either a town or a city. Urban cores with a population of 50,000 or above are considered cities, while those under 50,000 inhabitants are termed towns.

Overview

Because Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony until 1898, its system of local government bears more resemblance to that of the Hispanophone nations of the Americas than to local government in the United States and some other Anglophone countries. Thus, there are no first-order administrative divisions akin to counties, as defined by the United States Government; instead, Puerto Rico has 78 municipalities or "municipios" as the secondary unit of administration. For U.S. Census purposes, the municipalities are considered "county-equivalents." The municipalities are grouped into eight electoral districts, but these do not possess administrative functions. In 1991, the Autonomous Municipalities of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Act was passed, which slightly modified the rights and responsibilities of Puerto Rican municipalities, with the aim of decentralizing control and improving government services.