City with No Name

"Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, [...]"

— The opening lines of Don Quixote

A location in a work of fiction that is never named onscreen, instead being addressed with a nickname, a generic term, or nothing at all.

Not the same as a location that is never named (or is given a pseudonym), but is recognizable as a real place in disguise — that's No Communities Were Harmed. When this trope is applied to character names, it's No Name Given. When it's applied to work titles, it's No Title.

No relation to the Code Lyoko novel of the same name. Maybe. (See below for irony.)

For a very specific subtype, see Canada Does Not Exist. See also Where the Hell Is Springfield?, in which a place is named, but its actual location is never specified. Contrast Informed Location.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• More like "Country with No Name" for Assassination Classroom. Koro-Sensei was born in a poor and corrupt country that was very hard to live in. The name of said country was left ambiguous.
• While the setting of Boy's Abyss is based on a real small town, the actual Town of the story is never said in-series.
• The setting of Bradherley's Coach is deliberately kept ambiguous, although it has a vaguely West European aesthetic.
• The city in Ghost in the Shell (1995) is namedropped as the fictional city of Niihama (Newport City), but only in radio chatter and so briefly that it is easy to miss (it seems to be visually based in Hong Kong). The original manga and TV series take place in Niihama and Fukuoka.
• In GTO: The Early Years, antagonists from other towns in the Shonan region are often named after their hometown (Kamakura Mad Dogs, Yokohama Cavalry), but the town the Oni-Baku are from is never named. A fan figured out it's most likely Fujisawa, and guessed the reason it was never revealed is because Tohru Fujisawa didn't want people to think he picked the city with his name.
• In Innocents Shounen Juujigun, the village in the beginning of the story is never named, just referred to as somewhere in "Northern France".
• The half-timbered town Is the Order a Rabbit? takes place in is only ever referred to as "the half-timbered town".
• Naruto:
  • In Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow, there is a city in the Land of Fire where the movie studio is.
  • In canon, very few of the non-shinobi cities visited are ever given a name. Simple referring to the country where the events take place is far more common.
• The setting of Queen's Blade, the land has no name and is only refereed to as the continent, and doesn't it have any specific features, that way the creators can make new features in the setting anytime they want.
• Likewise the planet colonized after several generations in Trigun isn't named. It may be obliquely referred to in promotional materials as 'Gunsmoke'.

Comic Books

• In the 1995 Black Lightning series, Jefferson moves to a new city. The city itself was never named, although the neighborhood he worked in was called Brick City. (Strange considering the sheer amount of fictional cities the DCU has, it would've been easy to establish Brick City as being part of one of them.)
• Dynamite Comics' Legenderry (Steampunk plus Elseworld plus Massive Multiplayer Crossover) is set in The Big City, which writer Bill Willingham says isn't exactly London and isn't exactly New York. The world of Legenderry also contians The Jungle, The Island, The Sea etc.
• Faith Erin Hicks' graphic novel series The Nameless City is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: it's set in a city in a very strategically important position (controlling multiple trade routes), which means that every powerful empire in the region has taken turns conquering, losing, and re-conquering the city. Every time it's conquered, the conquerors rename the city, which means it's had dozens of names over the centuries, and is thus better known as just "the city".
• The Mega City in Transmetropolitan though it's implied to be placed on the east coast (having absorbed New York and most of what's now the Northeast Megalopolis), since one panel depicts the statue of Liberty. It's referred to as "The City".
• The Goon is set in "the town on the edge of Horse-Eater's Wood". It's implied to be located somewhere in a mountainous region of the southern United States, given the Hillbilly Horrors that lurk outside of town, and it's clearly also reasonably far west, with a municipal history involving lost pioneers in covered wagons, who gave the Wood, at least, its name. Let's just say that horse wasn't all they ate.
• Rat-Man is set in a city simply called "The City with No Name" (La Città Senza Nome). Another city in the same universe is called "The Very Large City".
• In Asterix, the Gaulish village where all the main characters live is never named.

Comic Strips

• The city in which Dick Tracy is set. It started off being an unnamed Chicago, but the fact it wasn't named as such meant the creators could contradict Chicago geography for the sake of a storyline. The closest it gets to a name is "Tracy's city".
• The community in which Peanuts is set is never really named, although Hennepin County (the Minnesota county that is seated by Minneapolis) is referred to at one point. The Twin Cities area is often alluded to, as is California.
  • A comic from 1963 said the zip code was 95472, which belongs to the town of Sebastopol, California.

Fan Works

• Ghost Rider: The Audio Drama is set in a city that is never referred to by name - and the writer seems to go out of his way to avoid actually calling it anything, or even referring to it directly.
• Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: Since canon never named the city that the show takes place in, here it's only referred to as "the City".
• The Pokémon Squad subverts and parodies the trope. The town is referred to as an unnamed town in the first episode; subsequent episodes would establish that the town's name is indeed "Unnamed Town".

Films — Animated

• The Cat Piano: The city which the poet sings its praises to in the beginning has no name.
• In Shaun the Sheep: The Movie, the bus display just says "Big City". The roadsign for the City Centre says it's twinned with Großstadt, La Grande Ville, and La Gran Ciudad ("The Big City" in German, French and Spanish).
• Parodied in Wreck-It Ralph. According to its opening narration, Hero's Duty takes place "on a planet with no name".

Films — Live-Action

• 21 Grams never names its location, although a traffic report on a car radio names the major intersections of Memphis, Tennessee.
• The city in The Asphalt Jungle remains anonymous. Apparently, the exterior scenes were shot in Cincinnati. One version of the script even mentioned the city by name but it was taken out because ironically, Cincinnati was facing police corruption at the time.
• The filmmakers of The Banishment (2007) wanted the movie to be "out of time and place" and did their best so the audience would not guess where and when the film took place. Even car plates and signboards were designed specially for the film. The props were bought in Germany, the "town" part of the film was shot in Belgium and northern France, and the "country" part was shot in Moldova.
• The name of the city in The Best Offer is never revealed. Apparently, the director wanted to give the idea of a generic, nameless Central European city.
• The city that Blindness takes place in is never named, nor is its country.
• Casino Royale (2006) has an unidentified city in Montenegro as the setting for most of its second half, and the location of the casino itself. The cars license plates are an odd mixture of old, Yugoslavian-era design and fictional city codes.
• The City of Lost Children. The city itself is never named.
• The city in Dark City, mainly because it's a pastiche built from the mixed-and-matched memories of people abducted from numerous time periods throughout the Twentieth Century.
• Unlike most Hitchcock films which feature an iconic city or landmark, Family Plot was filmed in San Francisco, but all references to the city's name were removed from the script.
• Fight Club mentions several other cities, but never specifies where the narrator lives. Clues in the novel and movie imply that the city is actually Wilmington, Delaware.
• The city featured in The Matrix is just "the city", because there's actually only one. Extreme wide shots in the sequels show that much of the plugged-in human population is concentrated in a single, vast megalopolis - though there are Big Fancy Houses for rich people five hundred miles away. For those who don't want to screw around with a map, that's a third of the width of the US.
• Memento deliberately doesn't say where it takes place. According to the filmmakers, this was deliberate, it references how many Film Noir movies took place in a generic anytown USA location. However, given that Lenny mentions several times that he used to live in San Francisco and that the outskirts of Los Angeles were the primary filming locations, it's implied that the movie takes place in some nondescript small town in southern California.
• The location of No Escape (2015), a war-torn country in Southeast Asia, is never named.
• No Name City in Paint Your Wagon, but it was a Boom Town after all.
• The city in the Police Academy films is never given a name (the first four films were shot in Toronto, so this may have been to avoid cluing people in about California Doubling).
• The homeland of Princess Ann in Roman Holiday is never named or seen, though it seems to be of a Ruritania type.
• The city where Se7en takes place. It appears to be a composite of New York and Los Angeles noir cities. However, the constant overcast skies more resembles the Pacific Northwest.
• Shallow Grave is set in an unnamed Scottish city. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow were used for exterior shots.
• The plot of The Stoning of Soraya M. plays out in a Town with a Dark Secret but despite the fact that it's based on a real-life account the village's name is never mentioned.
• Star Wars: Despite how iconic and well-known it is, Tatooine is not named at any point in A New Hope.
• Streets of Fire: The individual neighborhoods featured in the movie are named, but the greater metropolis they're part of is never named. The movie was filmed entirely on a backlot, but its sets featured elevated train tracks and highways based on those in Chicago.
• The desert city in 3 Women is never mentioned by name. Shooting locations were Desert Hot Springs and Palm Springs, California.
• The main character's hometown and high school in Zero Day remain unnamed throughout the story, possibly to give the impression that such things can happen anywhere.

Literature

• The setting for the 87th Precinct novels is referred to in the narration simply as "this city". Some reviewers - including Stephen King, oddly enough - have mistakenly given the city's name as Isola, but that's actually just one district of the city, analogous to Manhattan in New York.
• The city in Aimee. Justified in that the protagonist didn't want to mention it, because it was her journal and she didn't want her psychiatrist to find out where she was from.
• Animorphs plays with this one - the characters deliberately conceal the name and location of their hometown from the reader, ostensibly to protect the characters identity. The last book confirms many hints throughout the series that the city is in Southern California, somewhere down the coast from Santa Barbara but not in the LA metropolitan area, reducing the possibilities to the cities of Ventura and Oxnard.
• The city in Barnaby Grimes is a very ambiguous setting, which extends to it never being named.
• The city in The Cats of Seroster is never named, it's just somewhere in France.
• The titular city in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Nameless City" (namedropped in many other Cthulhu Mythos stories) is an odd case; its "real" name, if it ever had one, is unknown, but characters and fans pretty much turn the phrase "The Nameless City" into its Nonindicative Name.
  • A more downplayed example from Lovecraft in The Music of Erich Zann, which is set in an unspecified, very hilly city where French seems to be the most widely-spoken language.
• It's unstated what city Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. operates out of, although it's clearly located in the United States and obliquely implied not to be in the South.
• The continent of Discworld on which most novels' events take place, and where such familiar locales as Ankh-Morpork, Lancre, and the Chalk can be found, has yet to be named. This is a bit of an odd lapse, considering we know the names of both Klatch and Fourecks, and a title (the Counterweight Continent) for another; all three are smaller than the still-nameless home continent of most Discworld characters. It also seems that all cities are city states, if there is a country where are city/town is based is not named-apart from Lancre Town (Lancre). And the countries that are named don't tend to have named towns. (That last bit gets fixed to an extent with The Compleat Discworld Atlas, which establishes that, for example, the capital of Llamados is Pant-y-Girdl. However, it also suggests that the Main Continent is its official name.)
• The city in An Elegy for the Still-living is left deliberately unnamed, adding to the overall dreamlike feel of the work.
• Faction Paradox: The titular town of This Town Will Never Let Us Go remains nameless.
• Fahrenheit 451's setting is only ever referred to as "the city", presumably so that people would be able to think of it as their hometown no matter where they lived.
  • Which is somewhat unnerving, since at the end it gets nuked.
  • St. Louis is mentioned, as well as Chicago. Ray Bradbury was also from Illinois.
• Played with in Haruhi Suzumiya; although the series definitely takes place in the half-million city of Nishinomiya, the name is never mentioned, and the settings are generic enough to be located anywhere in Japan. Later in the series, Kyon briefly visits Osaka, but only mentions it as "an average Japanese metropolis".
• While the city where The Hate U Give takes place is unnamed, Starr's neighborhood is called Garden Heights.
• Jack Reacher: The unnamed city in Blue Moon divided in half between the Albanian and Ukrainian mob.
• John Dies at the End starts out with this trope, censoring the name of the town with [undisclosed]. Later, it seems the name of the town just becomes Undisclosed.
• The city Wilson Lander is living in at the beginning of Robert Girardi's The Pirate's Daughter is described extensively but never named.
• The city in Saving Zoë by Alyson Noel. All that is said is that it is a small suburban town.
• A flashback in The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel concerns the exploration of an ancient, ruined Earthlord city known only as "The City" or "The Nameless City", a fact which is commented on by the characters.
• Septimus Heap: The major settings of the Castle and the Port seem to actually be called just by those names.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the city where the series begins is only ever called "the city". Some hints, and the movie reveal it to be Boston, Massachusetts, but evidently an Alternate Universe Boston.
• The city in Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint/Riverside books — Riverside is a district within the city, but the city is never named.
• Tasakeru takes place in an island country with no name, referred to only as "the world". Since the island is a Closed Circle, the inhabitants have no concepts that there's anything else beyond the sea.
• The Tiger's Wife is set in an unspecified/fictional Balkan country, and the narrator, Natalia, names small villages but calls the capital, where she grew up, the City.
• The city in the German kids' book series TKKG.
• Tunnels has a variation with "The Colony".
• Tally's city in the Uglies series is never given a name. All other mentioned cities have names though. (Diego, etc.)
  • However in the Bogus To Bubbly universe-guide, the map of the continent (North America) shows that the Rusty Ruins near Tally's city are the ruins of San Fransisco.
  • Actually, the Rusty Ruins depicted in Bogus to Bubbly is the ruins of Seattle, as seen (and mentioned in the books themselves) by the giant ruined tower (the Space Needle).

Live-Action TV

In General:

• Many of Aaron Spelling's cop shows — The Rookies, Starsky & Hutch, S.W.A.T. (1975), T.J. Hooker — are set in police agencies that resemble the Los Angeles Police Department, but are in unnamed cities.

Series:

• 21 Jump Street was filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, but set in an unnamed city in Washington State. The police uniforms simply say "Metropolitan Police".
• The City in Almost Human.
• A BBC children's drama, Bootleg was set in "The New Commonwealth". It was filmed in Australia, had a map of London present and used the Australian electoral system.
  • This could be a shoutout to Nineteen Eighty-Four — Bootleg (and the eponymous book on which the drama was based) is a book about censorship and fascism, made accessible to children through the banning of chocolate and hypocritical endorsement of healthy activities.
• Doctor Who: Lampshaded in "State of Decay", when queries about other communities in the world of the giant hibernating king vampire are answered: "There is only the Village. And the Tower."
• Flashpoint's location is never named nor its location given, though the series is filmed in Toronto, Canada and the regular police wear clearly Canadian-style uniforms.
• The city in which Hill Street Blues takes place is never named, although a lot of establishing shots depict Chicago locations.
• High&Low takes place in a nameless town, and the only way it's referred to in-series is by the acronym of the 5 gangs that run the town, S.W.O.R.D.
• Kung Fu: The Legend Continues: The city is never named. Fans called it Sloansville after the writer Micheal Sloan.
• Malcolm in the Middle: It is never quite revealed where they live. The house where it is filmed is located in Los Angeles and there are California license plates, yet it is somehow 300 miles from Francis' boarding school in Alabama.
  • One could assume, based on police cars and uniforms, that it was Los Angeles.
  • Some later episodes had Oklahoma license plates, and implied the town was named "Millbrook".
• The city where Max Headroom is set is never named. American accents are just as common as English accents among the populace. One episode does show an outline of the American continent on a computer monitor in connection with The City.
• My Name Is Earl occasionally ventures to a city nearby Camden County, but said city is never given a name (since Camden County itself is a question in itself).
• Newhart: It's never actually revealed what Vermont town the Stratford Inn is located in, only that it's 59 miles from Montpelier and close enough to commute to Dartmouth College. According to The Other Wiki, some sources indicate it may be Norwich, while the building used for establishing shots of the inn is in Middlebury.
• Pushing Daisies is odd in that we don't know the name of the city where the main action takes place, though we do know it's in the fictitious "Papen County". (Hints tying Papen County to a US state or region occasionally appear, but are internally inconsistent.)
  • The nearby town where the characters grew up, and where Lily and Vivian still live, is known, though: Coeur D'Coeurs
• The setting for The Prisoner (1967) is never explicitly named; it is only referred to as "The Village". The series was, famously, filmed in Portmeirion in Wales.
• In Radio Enfer, it's never specified in which city the school the main characters go to is located.
• The city in which Scrubs is set in is never named although Word of God confirms that it's in Southern California. Cast and crew on the show refer to the location as San DiFrangeles.
• The Regime is set in a fictional Central European country that's never named. References to the country's history, culture, economy, and even local folklore are frequently made, but its exact location is never given other than that it's somewhere in Ruritania.
• Shoestring was filmed in Bristol, but the city is never mentioned by name.
• Star Trek: The Original Series. In "Spock's Brain", Captain Kirk indicates the Underground City they are in and asks Luma, "What is this place?" She answers in confusion, "This place is...here" having no concept of any other place than the one she lives in.
• The Tribe takes place in an unnamed city in an unnamed country, intended to be as generic as possible to reinforce the plausibility of the series' post-apocalyptic setting. Most characters spoke with Kiwi accents, though, and the one time money was shown, it was New Zealand currency. The show was filmed in Wellington, New Zealand, but there were enough details tweaked to suggest it could be any city. Zoot's police car in particular looked like an American police car.
• Lampshaded in the pilot of Warehouse 13. As Pete and Mika are driving to their rooms at Leena's, they pass through a 'town' which a sign refers to as 'unnamed unincorporated settlement'. Although subsequent episodes call the town "Univille".

Music

In General:

• Honestly, an awful lot of references to "The City" in rock music are pretty much an example of this. "Summer in the City" (Loving Spoonful) or "Heart of the City" (Nick Lowe) or "City With No Children" (Arcade Fire) may well be referring to specific cities in the authors' minds, but the listener isn't privy to the details!

Artists:

• The city in The Protomen's works is never named, and the lyrics and the liner notes only call it "The City".

Podcasts

• The setting of Black Jack Justice. It's not even certain if the city is in the US or in Canada.
• In The Hidden Almanac, many of the historical events occurred in "the city", the name of which Reverend Mord apparently expects his listeners to know without being told. The country in which it is set likewise remains unnamed.

Radio

• The city and state of The Shadow's adventures are never named.

Tabletop Games

• City of Mist takes place in The City, and it is strongly implied that it is actually an archetypic representation of the idea of cities. Just like it's inhabitants. It also includes classic locations in a city, like The Docks.
• Dead Inside: The City at the heart of the Spirit World is known simply as, well, the City. It's the only form of civilization anywhere in the Spirit World, and is implied to be the collective unconscious archetype of the very concept of the city. It's extremely malleable as a result, so instead of having a firm geography you can only reach one neighborhood from another when on foot because they're conceptually related.
• Spirit of '77 has The City, a place perfect for all of the action to take place as it's catered to the genres and tropes of The '70s.
• Warhammer: The world that the game takes place in has no name. It's usually referred as "the world" or "the Warhammer world" in the army books. The Europe analogue most of the stories focus is on is similarly just the Old World, even though every other major landmass has an actual name. The continent's dominant political entity is the Empire.

Theatre

• Anyone Can Whistle is set in a town that is never named. Even the nearby town that draws away its population with a competing miracle is referred to only as "the town beyond the valley."
• The Consul is set in an unnamed city in an unnamed European country.
• She Loves Me is set in an unnamed European city with no landmarks mentioned, which may have to do why the characters seem more interested in reading books than going places. However, considering that most of the characters have Hungarian names, Budapest would be a reasonable guess.
• Urinetown takes place in a city that remains unnamed until the epilogue, when things get so bad that the chorus sings: "This is Urinetown! Always it's been Urinetown! This place, it's called Urinetown!"

Theme Parks

• In Transformers: The Ride at Universal Studios, the city shown throughout the attraction is never named. Appearance-wise, it looks like a mixture of New York City and Los Angeles.

Video Games

• The setting of the Ace Attorney games is never straight out named; however, it's heavily implied that it takes place in Los Angeles. For starters, it's outright stated that many characters live in LA and at times the police force is sometimes referred to as the LA Police.
• The Bendy in Nightmare Run episode "Bendy in Death and Taxis" occurs in one of these.
• The city in Ghost Trick is never named. Not even the country it belongs to. What we know, though, is that it has a harbor.
• Grand Theft Auto 2: Or rather, the generic name "Anywhere City". The game takes place in America, but unlike the cities in the first game (or any future GTA games in particular), Anywhere City doesn't resemble any real town in particular.
• Heavy Rain's city. Some of the police appear to have the Liberty Bell on their patches, which would suggest Philadelphia, but its never stated.
  • In the scene at the subway, Philadelphia natives can clearly spot a map of SEPTA: Philadelphia's public transit system.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the city surrounding Hyrule Castle and the Temple of Time is never named, being called only "Market". The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild identify it as Hyrule Castle Town.
• The city in Mega Man (Classic) is never identified. The box and manuals for the first game refer to it as "Monsteropolis", but that's only in the English localization. In the comic book adaptation, the city's name is never brought up until later on, in which it was renamed "Mega City" in Mega Man's honor.
• The City in Mirror's Edge. It's never referred to by name, even the Police Department is only referred to as the CPF (City Protection Force).
  • Averted in the Continuity Reboot Mirror's Edge Catalyst, where the City's name is Glass, or "the City of Glass".
• Satellite Reign is set in a futuristic city only referred as "the City".
• Heather's hometown in Silent Hill 3.
• While western adaptations of Sonic the Hedgehog, including Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), call the anthropomorphic animal-populated world "Mobius", the mainstream games, Sonic X, and the IDW Comics only refer to it as "Sonic's World".
  • In a more traditional example, the city besieged by Eggman in Sonic Forces is just "City". While its stages have names (Ghost Town, Park Avenue, Sunset Heights), and the bridge where Metal Sonic is fought has a name (Red Gate Bridge), the city itself is never named.
• The City found in the Thief video games. Though it seems quite possible that may actually be its name - it's even referred to as that, capital letter and all, in official in-universe documents.
• In Touhou Project, the Human Village and the Nameless Hill sound like they should both be examples; but, both actually are intentionally named. The former is actually the name of the city (there appears to be only the one human village in Gensokyo), and the latter is named for its sad past.
• That game called The Town with No Name.
• This was originally the case in Warcraft, which was set within the kingdom of Azeroth on a world with no given name. Some confused grammar in the sequels lead to "Azeroth" eventually becoming the name of the planet, with the kingdom being retconned into "Stormwind".
  • Similarly, the reason why the Orcish homeworld has an Eredun name (Draenor) is because the Orcs used to refer to Draenor simply as "world". The name Draenor was eventually adopted by Orcs after the arrival of the Draenei.
  • Lordaeron's capital is literally referred to as Capital City. Brann even hangs a lampshade on it. That said, some have referred to it as Lordaeron City.

Webcomics

• Building 42 that named the Buildingverse stands in one of these. It's even nicknamed by the fans as Unnamed University Town.
• College Roomies from Hell!!! is similarly ambiguous. All we know is that it's in the United States, north enough to see the snow but south enough that the Butt-Monkey can get himself shipped to Mexico while passed out for a few hours.
• In The Letters Of The Devil, the city is never named. The only clue is the initials "SGPD" on the back of Cedric's police windbreaker.
• Sleepless Domain: The domed city in which the story takes place is referred to only as "the City," even in contexts where a proper name would be expected; for example, a prominent government agency is called the City Defense Department. It's implied that "the City" is the closest thing the City has to an actual name — after all, distinguishing the City becomes considerably less important when no one knows what, if anything, exists outside of it.
• The setting in Sluggy Freelance was (almost) totally ambiguous before a "No Content Saturdays" strip mentioned it was located somewhere in New Jersey (though a few particularly obsessive fans had already figured it out from a map shown in one comic). The city itself is still unnamed, even though above-mentioned obsessive fans claim to have narrowed it down to a town called "Denville." There is actually a New Jersey town named Denville, in Morris County, part of the NYC suburbs that make up North Jersey.

Web Original

• The setting of City of Lost Characters is referred to simply as "The City". (Confusingly, at least two player characters — Garrett and The Tick — come from places also called simply The City.)
• The Debbie and Carrie Show is set mostly in a small Town in east Texas that is never named.
• Todd in the Shadows listed the city where he lives as "Bumfuck Nowhere, Virginia".
• The city from X-Ray & Vav is only ever refereed to as "the city". But with the comedy of that show, it might be the actual name!

Western Animation

• The Fire Nation capital in Avatar: The Last Airbender is not named in-show. The website called it the Royal Caldera City.
• The Belchers in Bob's Burgers appear to live in New Jersey, according to a map gag when they were traveling in "It Snakes a Village", but their city was never referred to by name for the first eight seasons. It's unofficially known to the cast and crew as "Seymour's Bay", after the show's editor Mark Seymour, and the name seems to have become canon as of "Just One of the Boyz 4 Now".
• The city in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers has never been called by name. To add to the confusion, it bears some resemblance to at least two or three real cities in the USA.
• Code Lyoko, at least the English version, bends over backwards to avoid identifying itself as located in France, then blows it by using real places — The Factory is a former Renault factory that was on an island in the Seine outside Paris, for example, and one shot showing XANA hijacking a Kill Sat explicitly shows France as a target.
• Codename: Kids Next Door never revealed the name of the town Sector V lives in, mostly being simply referred to as "the Neighborhood".
• The setting of Detentionaire is meant to be a fictionalized Toronto, though it wasn't mentioned on screen. When the show's run in Australia implied it took place in the US, co-creator Charles Johnston considered naming the city Ottington.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, though Fanon says it may take place in Townsville.
• Frisky Dingo never mentions the name of the city the series takes place in, only referring to it as "the town". The page quote lampshades this.
  • The show does, however, feature maps of the town that resemble the interstate roadways of Atlanta, Georgia. The company that produced the show was located in Atlanta as is the headquarters of the channel it airs on.
• Hey Arnold! takes place in an city which seemed to be a combination of Seattle and New York City. Although the name is never spoken, different signs all about town indicate it's either Hillwood or Hillwood City.
• Invader Zim never discloses this. Then again, it is in an alternate reality where they might not even live in the actual US. Nicktoons: Globs of Doom simply calls it "Zim's Town", since it doesn't have an actual name.
• Almost every location that any KaBlam! shorts take place in are never named. A season four episode hints that the Henry and June shorts take place in New York City (with the Empire State Building appearing in the background through a window), which is where the short was recorded.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The Town with a Dark Secret in "The Cutie Map" is never named. Later dialogue implies it has no name, and even after the secret is revealed and Starlight Glimmer is driven from the town (and later redeemed), it is only referred to as, e.g., 'Starlight Glimmer's old village'. Fanon has given it the name "Our Town".
• Recess. While nearby locales are mentioned in the movie, the town itself is never named.
• The city of Regular Show doesn't seem to have a name other than just "City", and Geographic Flexibility means the closest it could be narrowed down to is somewhere in the Sunbelt region (as they're close to water and the border with what is implied to be Mexico, they're also near deserts and forests, radio callsigns start with "K", several aerial shots show a location near Texas, they're hit by a tornado at one point), yet a Revolutionary War battle took place at the park, and other hints seem to imply they might be in California or even South Carolina. An easter egg in its Spiritual Sequel Close Enough may imply that the city is Los Angeles.
• In the entire Rugrats franchise (including All Grown Up!), the series has a very vague setting. It is also unclear what type of community the characters live in. This ambiguity in the setting was probably done intentionally to help give the impression of seeing the world through the naive eyes of toddlers. Even as the eight children grew 9 to 10 years older, this fact is still ignored, due to the plot focus on their pre-teen social lives.
  • Actually, in the AGU special "RV Having Fun Yet?" when the RV enters the freeway, an exit sign for Western Avenue (a street in Los Angeles) can be very plainly seen. This still doesn't explain how they can get heavy snowfall in the wintertime...
  • Rugrats seems to suggest it could take place anywhere in the US that can receive snowfall in the winter, whereas the Christmas episode of All Grown Up! has a snowless Christmas, which suggests that they live in a warmer part of the world. The fact that their school seems to be more or less designed for warmer weather also suggests they may be in California or some warm part of the US.
• On Sonic Boom, it's often lampshaded that the village the characters live in has no name. In the episode, "Unnamed Episode", it is revealed that the village used to be named "Badgerville", by Jebediah Badger, Sticks' great-great-grandfather. At the end of the episode, Sticks is passed down the naming rights to the village, and names it "Hedgehog Village".
• Teen Titans (2003): Fans use the name "Jump City" from the comic book Spin-Off Teen Titans Go!.
• Lampshaded in The Tick. In the first episode, where superheroes are charged with protecting various cities, the others are assigned to real-life, specific places (such as New Rochelle, New York), but the titular blue crime-fighter is simply sent to The City.
• The setting of Widget the World Watcher could be anywhere from the USA to the Philippines (which is where the show was made).

Real Life

• A semi-example: people living in or near a major city will often simply refer to that city as "the city." Taking it a step further, during the height of The Roman Empire, the city of Rome was simply "The City" to many across all of Europe. Even the calendar counted years ab urbe condita, or "from the founding of the city" with everyone understanding which city. Not really No Name Given, more like No Need To Give Name.
  • The capital city of Luxembourg is always called "The City" across the country, because calling it "Luxembourg" would just be plain confusing.
  • The second biggest city in Wales is Swansea, or more formally The County and City of Swansea. If you live near the city centre, you'll undoubtedly call it 'Town'. As in 'I was planning to go into Town in the afternoon.' This is left over from when it was called Swansea Town.
  • The name of Greek city Megalopoli (known as Megalopolis during the Ancient Greece era) is Greek for "large city".
• The name 'Istanbul' originally comes from a Greek phrase 'eis tên polin' meaning 'to/into the city.' People from the surrounding countryside would simply talk about going 'eis tên polin' (rather than saying 'going to Constantinople') and over time this ended up superseding Constantinople as the city's proper name. It was simply 'The City.' So Istanbul isn't simply the Turkish version of Constantinople, and was actually in use before the Ottomans took over.
• Inverted with Nashville, Tennessee. Everybody calls it Nashville, but it seems to have no official municipal government. Police, courts, schools, and fire departments are run by "Davidson County", located in Nashville's downtown.
• Nameless, Tennessee is a sleepy little rural community which acquired its name when a representative from the US Postal Service informed them that, if they wanted to receive mail, they would have to give the place a name that you could properly address a letter to. The residents met and discussed various names, but ultimately decided that it was just a nameless sort of place, and so it officially became.
• No Name, Colorado got its name through clerical miscommunication. When the town was being founded the state required it to fill out a questionnaire with the required information. Since a name hadn't been decided on the answer for Name of Town was "No Name", and the state took them at their word.

---