Independent cities of Germany

A kreisfreie Stadt (in Baden-Württemberg called Stadtkreis; in Bavaria formerly also called kreisunmittelbare Stadt) is a local authority. In addition to the own and transferred sphere of action of a municipality and a county, it also performs the tasks of the lower state administrative authority on behalf of the state in its own competence. Simply put, an independent city does not belong to a county, but fulfils its tasks itself. The opposite is the municipality belonging to a county.

In the area of general and internal administration, the urban area of a district-free city in Germany is thus free of the state (full municipalisation). The mayor of an independent city is at least on the same hierarchical level as a district administrator. Cities with comparable status also exist in many other countries.

As a rule, these are large cities - i.e. cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants - or larger medium-sized cities. However, in Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia there are also large cities that are not district-free, and in contrast in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia there are district-free cities that have fewer than 60,000 inhabitants. Occasionally, one also encounters the special case that municipalities belonging to a district "only" take over a part of the tasks of a district (for example, the large district cities). The smallest independent city in Germany is Zweibrücken in Rhineland-Palatinate with about 34,000 inhabitants (end of 2017), the largest is the Bavarian capital Munich with more than 1.45 million inhabitants (end of 2017). Berlin and Hamburg are larger, but are special cases of independent cities, so-called city states. The state of Bremen, on the other hand, consists of two independent cities, namely the municipality of Bremen and the municipality of Bremerhaven, which is located about 60 km to the north.

District-free cities and immediat cities have a comparable legal status. In Prussia, cities that did not have a council based on a council constitution but were directly subordinate to the sovereign, who was also the city lord in this respect, were called immediat cities until the city ordinance of 1808.

There are 107 independent cities in Germany. Together with the 294 administrative districts, they form the total of 401 regional authorities at district level.

Poland

Poland is also one of the countries in which a distinction is made between administrative districts and urban districts. Some cities became urban districts already during the German Empire (Bydgoszcz in 1875, Graudenz and Toruń in 1900) or were elevated to the status of statutory cities during their membership in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (e.g. Bielsko). Other cities were only declared city districts after 1918 by the newly founded Polish Republic, such as Gniezno (1925), Inowrocław (1925) and Kalisz (1929).

United States

In the United States, the concept of an independent city also exists. Since 1871, all major cities in Virginia have been county-free by law, but there are also independent cities in other states, such as Baltimore in Maryland or St. Louis in Missouri.

A similar situation exists in the somewhat more common construct of the consolidated city-county in the United States, where the spatial boundaries are the same, but the city and county exist as legally separate institutions. As a result, additional cities may occasionally exist within the "consolidated" county, such as in Duval County (Florida).