I got downvoted a bunch a while back for pointing this out. The UN and a bunch of other international organizations got together to define what a “city” was. The general consensus was at least 50k people. Burlington doesn’t even qualify.

>The degree of urbanization is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)".[19] This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March [2021] by the United Nations... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison".[20]

https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/how-do-we-define-cities-towns-and-rural-areas