I enjoyed reading this article, but was perplexed at the statement "Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions." City names and boundaries are just as, if nor more, socially constructed as those of countries.
This is true of names and borders, but the cities themselves remain where they are even when names and borders change, so they're more persistent than countries.
That might seem logical on the surface, but dig just a little deeper and the flaws become readily apparent.
For example if you're looking for the population of New York between 1850 and 1950, you would see a potentially dramatic shift of the population around the turn of the century, which would be misleading if you didn't already know the caveat about the consolidation of the city in 1898.
However that shouldn't discourage the tagging of data by city. It just means that a city, as metadata, is no more or less functional than country, as the grandparent comment suggests.
Well, yes, few things are entirely immutable. Cities do grow and (rarely) shrink or disappear. But this is rare enough that it's useful to hang other data off of their names.
For example, take the locations used in time zone databases, where an official way to name a location is something like America/Los_Angeles. The assumption is that major cities don't get split across time zones and users know which cities they are nearby that they share a time zone with. Country names aren't used.
A lat/long pair would be more precise, but sometimes precision isn't needed.
