The classic form is a template where only the city name changes, replicated across two hundred towns where the business has no presence. These pages used to work; today they mostly fail to be indexed at all, and at scale they attract manual actions. A provider proposing a city-page programme without first asking where you actually operate is proposing risk.
The legitimate version is a location page a customer would be glad to land on: a real address, real opening hours, named staff, the services genuinely offered there, and information only someone working at that site could provide. The test is simple — if the page would be useless to a human standing outside the building, it is a doorway page.