Right... we call these little suburbs "cities". City of Palo Alto. City of Berkeley. But we also pretty much consider the Bay Area as one big city, or maybe 3 if we're old school. If you say "Bay Area" anywhere, everyone knows you mean that giant beard that runs all over the bay.
For example the New Jersey has 52 cities - in a state with a population of just 8.8 million, so each 'city' only has on average 170k people - and that's if they all lived in a city! Many have populations in the low four-figures.
I'm not an expert on New Jersey, but there are signs everywhere for "Twps" which I guess are "townships". I'm guessing probably a lot of people live in them.
In New York State, a "town" seems to be not exactly a town, like a stereotypical "small town".
I've lived here most of my life and never really realized, but according to Wikipedia, a "town" in NY is more or less the equivalent to a "township" and within it are "villages".
"every piece of land in the State is part of a city or town, which, with the exception of the city of Geneva, is part of one and only one county. Not every piece is in a village or city. A village is part of a town; cities are not part of towns, but have the powers of towns. A village can be a part of more than one town. A village cannot be part of a city."
So more like a division of a county that's not part of a city than an actual town.
And where this is going, is that I think this is where a lot of people live, rather than cities per se.
An administrative division, where a lot of people live, that's neither a city nor a village, but has water and sewer and so on, sounds to me like almost a definition of suburbs.