City Limits
Every American city has a shape, drawn by a century of annexations, refusals and county lines. Here is one of them, with the number of square miles it covers. Name it.
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City limits
Plate 1
Land area
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square miles
Land only. Water inside the city limits is drawn but not counted, which is why the shape can look bigger than the figure.
The city was
Population
By area
Pool
This run
Nothing yet. The cities you name, and the ones you miss, are listed here.
The shapes. Legal municipal boundaries from the Census Bureau's 2024 cartographic boundary file, generalised to 1:500,000 and clipped to the coastline. They are the city limits, not the metro area and not the built-up area, which is why Atlanta is small and Jacksonville is enormous.
The projection. Each city is redrawn on a projection centred on itself, so its shape is true where it sits rather than stretched by its distance from the equator. Outlines are then scaled to fill the frame, which is why the square-mile figure is the only size information here.
The number. Land area from the same file. It excludes water inside the boundary, so it is the figure a city is normally quoted at: Los Angeles at 470 square miles rather than the 502 its limits enclose.
The pool. The 300 most populous incorporated places in the United States, by the Census Bureau's 2024 estimates, from New York down to Spokane Valley, Washington at 108,000 people.
The answers. Nicknames count. So do the unwieldy legal names, so Nashville-Davidson and Urban Honolulu are both accepted. Where two cities in the pool share a name, the state is needed: there are three Springfields here.
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