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Unincorporated area

In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not a part of any municipality. To "incorporate" in this context means to form a municipal corporation, i.e., a city or town with its own government.
Thus, an unincorporated community is usually not subject to or taxed by a city government. Such regions are generally administered by default as a part of larger territorial divisions such as: township, borough, county, state, province, canton, parish, or country. It is uncommon, but not unknown, for small towns in fiscal crisis to disincorporate in order to have services provided by a higher administration.

Australia

In Australia there are large unincorporated areas in the Northern Territory with over 9000 km of roads in those areas. Most of South Australia is in the unincorporated Outback Areas Community Development Trust. The far west and north of New South Wales is called the Unincorporated Far West Region, which is sparsely populated and barely warrants an elected council. However a civil servant in the state capital manages such matters as are necessary. The only other state to have unincorporated areas is Victoria, which has two small unincorporated areas in Alpine Shire, and one in Shire of Mansfield (all of which are ski resorts), as well as some small off shore islands. The Australian unincorporated areas are mainly notable due to their vast size.

Canada

In Canada, depending on the province, an unincorporated settlement is one that has no town council. It is usually, but not always, part of a larger municipal government. This can range from small hamlets to larger urbanized areas. For example, Sherwood Park, a suburb of Edmonton would be the seventh largest city in Alberta if it were incorporated, but remains simply a part of the Specialized Municipality of Strathcona County. Likewise, the oil sands boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta is not a separate community but part of the massive Wood Buffalo Regional Municipality.

Unincorporated settlements with a population of between 100 and 1,000 residents may have the status of designated place in Canadian census data.

Some unincorporated settlements which are not part of a larger municipality — particularly those in very remote areas — may have some types of municipal services provided to them by a quasi-governmental agency such as a local service board.

Germany

As of January 1, 2004, Germany had 244 (of which 215 are located in Bavaria) uninhabited unincorporated areas, called gemeindefreie Gebiete or singular gemeindefreies Gebiet, not belonging to any municipality, consisting mostly of forested areas.
There are also three inhabited unincorporated areas (Osterheide and Lohheide in Lower Saxony, and Gutsbezirk Münsingen in Baden-Württemberg).

United States

In United States local government, an unincorporated community is one general term for a geographic area having a common social identity without benefit of municipal organization or official political designation (i.e. incorporation as a city or town). There are two main types of unincorporated communities:

a neighborhood or other community existing within one or across multiple existing incorporated areas (i.e. cities or towns). In this sense, a community is part of a municipal government, but not seperately incorporated from it. For example, Hyannis, Massachusetts is a unincorporated village with the town limits of the larger incorporated town of Barnstable.

a neighborhood or other community existing outside of an incorporated municipal government. In this sense, the community is outside of any municipal govenrment, and entirely unincorporated. Some, like Nutbush, Tennessee are small rural settlements of low population. Others, like Springfield, Virginia are densely populated, urbanized areas that have never been incorporated despite dense populations.

Due to differences in state laws regarding the incoproration of communities, there is a great variation in the distrubution and nature of of unincorporated areas. Unincorporated regions tend to be fairly rare in the densely populated New England states, where nearly all of the land is part of an incorporated town. Some states, like Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan set strict requirements on incorporation, and thus have large, urbanized areas which have no municipal government below the county or township level. Other states, such as New York and New Jersey, have complex systems of incorporation with multiple types of municipalities, such as City, Township, Town, Borough or Village. Some large cities have annexed all surrounding unincorporated areas, creating what are known as consolidated city-county forms of government. Jacksonville, Florida (which merged with Duval County in 1968) is typical of this sort of arrangement. In areas of sparse population, such as the western part of the U.S., the majority of the land in any given state may be unincorporated. The state of Hawaii represents a unique case; there are no municipal governments and thus no official incorporated places at all.

In the context of the United States insular areas, the word "unincorporated" means that the territory has not been formally and irrevocably incorporated into the United States. (See: incorporated territory.) Unincorporated insular areas are therefore potentially subject to being sold or otherwise transferred to another power, or, conversely, being granted independence. However, neither fate seems likely to occur in the foreseeable future to the five remaining major unincorporated U.S. insular areas, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or the Northern Mariana Islands.

Countries without unincorporated places

Many countries, especially those with many centuries of history using multiple tiers of local government, do not use the concept of an unincorporated place.

In the United Kingdom the whole of the country, rural and urban, has been covered by a two or three-tier system of local government for many centuries (although many of the larger conurbations now have single tier or unitary local governments). In South Africa the latest constitution gave every place in the country democratically elected third-tier government.

Likewise the whole of the territories of Austria, Denmark, Finland, France (except for some small overseas possessions), Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Norway (though a handful of exist within ordinary municipalities), Serbia, Sweden, and Switzerland are divided into communes.

References

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