City Types

Every city record carries an optional type field describing what kind of place it is. The value is inherited from the upstream GeoNames feature classification.

The type field mixes two ideas — what a place is (city, town, village) and what administrative role it fills (adm2, county, parish). The same place can be tagged either way. For example, Dallas is adm2 because it is the seat of Dallas County, and major Australian cities are adm1 because they are seats of state-level governments.

All Type Values

There are 35 distinct values across 153,765 city rows.

`type`	Count	Settlement?	Meaning
`city`	96,098	✅	Actual city
`adm2`	20,796	✅	2nd-order admin division — usually a real city that is also a county/district seat
`adm3`	15,774	✅	Mostly real municipalities/communes tagged with their admin role
`section`	5,346	✅	Suburbs and districts of larger cities
`county`	4,409	❌	County-level admin unit — not a settlement
`adm4`	3,909	✅	Similar mix to `adm3`
`adm1`	3,505	✅	1st-order admin division — usually a state/region seat (e.g. major Australian cities)
`district`	2,381	✅	District-level populated place
(null)	1,900	⚠️	No type assigned — see below
`regency`	390	❌	Indonesian kabupaten — admin division
`prefecture`	369	❌	Prefecture-level admin division
`locality`	319	✅	Named populated place
`capital`	281	✅	National or regional capital
`municipality`	209	✅	Municipality
`parish`	80	❌	Louisiana-style parish (= county)
`banner`	52	❌	Inner Mongolia banner — admin division
`town`	48	✅	Town
`province`	36	❌	Province-level admin division
`adm5`	16	✅	5th-order admin division (populated)
`abandoned`	15	❌	Abandoned place
`cities`	13	✅	Data artifact of `city`
`area`	12	❌	Generic administrative area
`village`	10	✅	Village
`historical`	9	❌	Historical place — not a live settlement
`settlement`	9	✅	Settlement
`oblast`	8	❌	Oblast — admin division
`gov_seat`	6	✅	Government seat (populated)
`special municipality`	6	✅	Special municipality
`administrative zone`	5	❌	Administrative zone
`region`	4	❌	Region-level admin division
`destroyed`	3	❌	Destroyed place
`township`	3	✅	Township
`religious`	2	❌	Religious site — not a settlement
`subdistrict`	1	✅	Subdistrict (populated)
`historical_capital`	1	❌	Former capital — not a live settlement

Filtering to Genuine Settlements

For use cases like “find the nearest city to a location” or “populate a dropdown”, you want to exclude admin-only and non-place types. Use an exclusion list rather than an inclusion list — any new settlement-style value added in the future is kept by default. Exclude these types:

county, regency, prefecture, parish, banner, province, area, oblast,
administrative zone, region, abandoned, historical, destroyed, religious,
historical_capital

SQL

SELECT *
FROM cities
WHERE (
  type IS NULL
  OR type NOT IN (
    'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
    'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
    'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital'
  )
)
AND latitude IS NOT NULL
AND longitude IS NOT NULL;

type NOT IN (...) evaluates to UNKNOWN for rows where type is NULL, silently dropping them. The explicit type IS NULL OR ... keeps null-type rows. Remove the type IS NULL clause only if you want to exclude them.

JavaScript

const EXCLUDED_TYPES = new Set([
  'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
  'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
  'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital',
]);

const settlements = cities.filter(
  (c) => !EXCLUDED_TYPES.has(c.type) && c.latitude != null && c.longitude != null
);

Python

EXCLUDED_TYPES = {
  'county', 'regency', 'prefecture', 'parish', 'banner', 'province',
  'area', 'oblast', 'administrative zone', 'region',
  'abandoned', 'historical', 'destroyed', 'religious', 'historical_capital',
}

settlements = [
  c for c in cities
  if c.get('type') not in EXCLUDED_TYPES
  and c.get('latitude') is not None
  and c.get('longitude') is not None
]

Records with No Type

About 1,900 rows have a null type. They are a mix of legitimate places and unclassified entries. For strict settlement queries, the safest signal is the presence of valid coordinates (latitude/longitude not null), and — where available — a non-null population.

Database Schema

Full cities table definition including the type field.

Multi-Level Territories

How overseas territories and dual-modeled entities affect city queries.

Database Documentation

Installation Guides

Support

All Type Values

Filtering to Genuine Settlements

SQL

JavaScript

Python

Records with No Type

Database Schema

Multi-Level Territories

​All Type Values

​Filtering to Genuine Settlements

​SQL

​JavaScript

​Python

​Records with No Type

​Related

Database Schema

Multi-Level Territories

All Type Values

Filtering to Genuine Settlements

SQL

JavaScript

Python

Records with No Type

Related