Town Sizes

[Tundra]

How big do towns/cities have to be before you don't know everyone's names/faces?

[Bloodcider]

My town is barely two square miles and I don't know anybody.

[MelancholyBliss]

Population density is also a factor.

My village is also pretty small. But we have a population of close to 3,000. And I wouldn't be able to recognize most of the people here by face. It takes less than 15 seconds just to drive down my street and I still wouldn't be able to recognize just those people.

[Bloodcider]

Yeah. We've got about 18,000 people in Winthrop. This is in about a mile and a half of suburban coastal town. It would be, literally, impossible to know all of these people.

Related: The Monkey Sphere
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

Fascinating read, it will tell you exactly why you wouldn't be able to know more than a few hundred people at most.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

Well, in high school, my band had 300+ people, and we all knew each other. I guess you could say band is like a town. We had 70+ clarinets and we used to joke that they had their own zip code. :)

I don't know what the limit on that would be, though.

[MichaelB]

I don't really know anybody here, and we're just a small outer-eastern suburb. I know a few people through Kung fu, but neighbors? forget it! There's a few people, mostly old men, who take their dogs for walks and I sometimes pass and recognise their faces, but I don't know their names, or who they are, or if they have any family or anything like that.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

I don't really know anybody here, and we're just a small outer-eastern suburb. I know a few people through Kung fu, but neighbors? forget it! There's a few people, mostly old men, who take their dogs for walks and I sometimes pass and recognise their faces, but I don't know their names, or who they are, or if they have any family or anything like that.

Hmm. That being said, it probably depends on the culture. Is it a friendly town that encourages interaction, or one that encourages keeping to yourself?

[AXJ]

This is a generalization, but it seems to me like towns of less than 10,000 people have that 'everyone knows everyone' feel. Although obviously not everyone literally knows everyone, but in a town that size, normally you can't go out to eat without seeing three or four people/families that you know. And then, IMO, as population increases that feeling ramps down, and is largely gone by the time you hit 40,000 people or so.

I'd guess that if you wanted to know EVERYONE's name/face, it probably couldn't be a town of much more than 500 or so.

[Tundra]

I want it to be small enough that having a town meeting is plausible and being able to walk most places is plausible, but not having slum areas, but big enough that my characters can show up and be like 'hey can I join the quest' and no one goes ' um... and who the hell are you??'

[AXJ]

I'd guess that's doable with towns of 2500 people or less, although assuming this is a pre-industrial setting, there are bound to be some people within the town's domain that probably couldn't easily walk to town- ie, farmers. 2500 people probably yields 600 or so families, 1200 adults. 1200 people would be a BIG meeting, but it's doable.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

...big enough that my characters can show up and be like 'hey can I join the quest' and no one goes ' um... and who the hell are you??'

But that would be such a great scene!:lol:

[butterfly]

We have 2000 people here, and I wouldn't say everyone know everyone. If I walked down the main street, I probably have a 50/50 shot of seeing someone I know (If we don't go in the post office etc where we know the people who own it etc).

[MelancholyBliss]

Hmm. That being said, it probably depends on the culture. Is it a friendly town that encourages interaction, or one that encourages keeping to yourself?

Yes, another consideration.

Despite my not knowing or easily recognizing most of the people in my village, I think most people who live here and have for some time recognize most others. I definitely recognize families who, like mine, have lived here forever, households that have been established for a couple decades. And like AXJ said, even though we can't reasonably know everyone, it still does have that feeling. In any public place here (church, supermarket, video store, etc.) I'll know quite a few people there beyond the person at the cash register.

Walking anywhere in this village is easy. I could probably walk 3 villages away in a decent amount of time with little to no fatigue.

Also, I'd imagine at town meetings new people would introduce themselves so they were known from that point on and if there were a family being represented there that had little to no involvement in town business and mingling, there'd still be a handful of people who know them. Remember that small towns breed nosey neighbors.

[Tundra]

A friendly town that encourages interaction, quite a long way away from other towns. (there are villages nearby)

[MelancholyBliss]

Time period and setting?

Also, how noticeable is it when there is someone new in town? With the nosey neighbor thing, that particular denizen - or group - will probably be poking around and finding shit out as soon as someone new comes in. And with friendliness and interaction, it wouldn't belong before everyone knew there was a new person and people would recognize that person or family simply as being the new people. I don't think you can have a small, interactive neighborhood without a few gossip fence ladies. After just 2 days, the town will know everything. So even if the numbers start getting high, it's wouldn't be a stretch at all to have more than a couple thousand people.

[Tundra]

Fantasy.
And yes, I'd like more than a couple of thousand people. I need to find a balance.

[KeinesV]

I live with ~20k townsfolks, and probably only recognize 20 to 50 tops, and of them, I don't know any really, beyond shit like "Blonde Coffee Boy", "Cute Vote Girl", " 'Science Friends' Guy", "Nightshift Guy"

[Tundra]

Old story is old but I'm still interested to know how big I should make this fictional town. I want to get back into writing it.

[Sandafluffoid]

Well, I live in a village of about 2000 people, and I don't know everyone, I barely know the people in my own street. It does of course depend on the lifestyle of the village. As it is, my village is mainly just a place where people sleep when they aren't commuting to London or another town in the region, if it had a more insular culture people would probably be more familiar.

[Tundra]

An insular community, yes, where people do travel to other towns but only by slower transport methods so don't do it all that often, and all their social life stuff is in that town.

[Eisen]

I live in a town of 930 people (at last count), and I still see unfamiliar faces almost every day. That's not saying much, seeing as it's a stop-over between two larger towns, but I would definitely say that a town would have to be pretty damn small for everybody to know everybody else.

Maybe your characters are part of the town "clique"? You know, the ones that are always nosing in on their neighbors' business, the "town drunkard" or "booster club" types (not that there's likely to be a booster club or anything, although that would make for a pretty original fantasy story, lol), or a family that's well known in the area for it's... um... 'issues'? They don't necessarily have to be recognizable to *everyone*--just the people that are front and center in your story.

[Tundra]

What's a booster club?

Oh I want it so that they're *not* recognised, but that no one thinks that's strange.

[Eisen]

Booster club? It's basically a group of people (usually parents or alumni) who get together and raise money for trips/buy new gear or equipment/other random stuff. I'm not exactly an expert on them, lol, but a lot of school sports teams around where I live have them.

In that case, you'd probably be safe with anything over a few hundred people. Less than that, maybe, if there are lots of villagers/farmers/whathaveyou who live a ways out of town and only make the trip in for important stuff.

[Locke]

To expand on it, a booster club is basically a huge fund-raising drive, since many school districts can't actually afford things such as athletic pads, marching band uniforms, or the ability to charter a bus for distant competitions. Hence, a single school could have a countless numbers of booster clubs, one for each extracurricular program. Feel free to ask questions *displays marching band member badge*

[Tundra]

Lol I totally want to include a booster club in a fantasy novel one day.

[KageJim]

My hometown has a population of 70k people.

But...even when I was in school and there were only a couple hundred students, I never could recognize everyone. Even in my astronomy club (maybe 100 members), I don't know everyone. I can probably recognize 90% of their faces, but only could put names to a third of them. I've never been good with either names or faces, however.

I guess my point is that it varies from person to person. Some people just aren't interested in knowing everybody, no matter how small the town/group is.

[Tundra]

I think there might be a difference in a historical or fantasy setting? Where there's no internet to entertain yourself with at night, and more community spirit? Or not.