بلدة versus مدينة
While writing a basic text in Arabic today, I wanted to talk about my town/city. At first, I picked مدينة; then I thought it might be clearer to say مدينة صغيرة; and then, based on dictionary definitions, I realised a مدينة صغيرة might actually be synonymous to بلدة. And then I started wondering – where exactly do I draw a line? Is it subjective, or is it up to variations depending on where the Arabic speaker hails from (similarly to how the definitions of ‘town’ and ‘city’ may vary across English-speaking countries)?

Incidentally, in case it helps at all, the population is 29,884, and the municipality has a total area of 595.811 km² (230.044 mi²).

Question

بلدة versus مدينة
While writing a basic text in Arabic today, I wanted to talk about my town/city. At first, I picked مدينة; then I thought it might be clearer to say مدينة صغيرة; and then, based on dictionary definitions, I realised a مدينة صغيرة might actually be synonymous to بلدة. And then I started wondering – where exactly do I draw a line? Is it subjective, or is it up to variations depending on where the Arabic speaker hails from (similarly to how the definitions of ‘town’ and ‘city’ may vary across English-speaking countries)?

Incidentally, in case it helps at all, the population is 29,884, and the municipality has a total area of 595.811 km² (230.044 mi²).

Answer

we say city  " مدينه "  kind of on big city like Capital of city and you also can use it when you want to say a small city , it's correct . 
بلده   it's a little bit smaller you can use it to describe a small town like a village, something like that 
in your case the best choose is  مدينة صغيرة

Answer

بلدة  it is mean village, مدينة  mean city

لا تفوّت فرصة تعلّم لغة جديدة وأنت مرتاح في منزلك. تصفّح مجموعتنا المختارة من مدرّسي اللغات ذوي الخبرة وسجّل في درسك الأول الآن!