It probably has more to do with different administrative areas. Cities used to have different rights. Cities could just not simply expand to external land. The reason was quite simple: the land belonged to someone else. Meanwhile, the city was independent, even if it was the capital of a kingdom (such as Paris, for example).

In Vienna, for example, the city ended behind the belt. As a citizen, you could travel back and forth between the surrounding area and the city, but different laws applied (taxes, marriage, property).

The Viennese enjoyed traveling to the surrounding countryside for leisure (winegrowers had to pay significantly less tax for serving their own products than innkeepers in the city), but the citizens did not want to live there, or there were strict regulations on moving in.