Today
Most of the urban areas of Sweden which once were chartered towns are today still usually referred to as stad. The majority of them are also seats of their respective municipalities. The difference is that stad nowadays colloquially is more of a geographical term, rather than an administrative one. In some municipalities there can be more than one former town, e.g. Eskilstuna and Torshälla in the Eskilstuna Municipality, Kungälv and Marstrand in the Kungälv Municipality, or Jönköping, Huskvarna and Gränna, which all three now are part of the Jönköping Municipality. The town of Visby is the seat of the Gotland Municipality, but is no political entity of its own. Some former towns have also grown together, forming one urban area.
A few municipalities which used to be towns still prefer to style themselves as stad for marketing reasons. That applies to e.g. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. There are also municipalities with considerable rural areas that market themselves as stad, which can cause confusion to some people as the word in daily speech sometimes is used only about the urban area.
Statistics Sweden defines a stad as a locality with more than 10,000 inhabitants. There are slightly more than 100 such towns in the country.
Read more about this topic: Stad (Sweden)
Famous quotes containing the word today:
“If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colours would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)