I don't think its just a question of city size - more a question of building style and technology.
5 stories up means you need very secure footings and a lot of tensile strength for your walls etc.... Not to mention 4 floors people can walk on.
Did you have a model for this sort of thing from history?
Sigurd
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I live in a historic town where the downtown region has roughly a couple thousand people. We have 2 buildings that are in the 4 story region, the rest lining mainstreet are 2-3 stories. I would guestimate that a town/city of around 10,000 or so would have a small number of taller buildings (4-5 stories), like maybe 6-12, on the main drag of town. I would think that for every 5,000 people in the vicinity you add again that number in the main regions of that town with, of course the shorter buildings radiating outward from the main area. A city of 30,000 would have roughly 30-60 of the 5 story building in the thriving area of town with the buildings getting shorter the further they are from the main area until you hit suburbs. May even want to toss in a few taller buildings for fun and flavor (an 8 story wizard's tower or the 7 story justice center).
All of this is based on my opinion and is only being stated as observations I've had and how I might equate that into a game world ideal.
roman insulae could have up to 8 or 9 stories, with 4 or 5 being usual. The really big cities should have some - Absalom for sure. Cities like Korvosa or Magnimar are several magnitudes smaller, but if you want to portray a real urban feeling, I would not let me be stopped by that.
Stefan
It's important to understand and think about why tall buildings are built in the first place.
As long as a city has room to spread horizontally across the landscape, there is no reason to build vertically, and lots of reasons not to. Thus, building taller is only a solution to overcrowding; until then, the city spreads out to fill whatever ladscape is available.
But even that isn't entirely true. While a city may have room to expand horizontally, there are always "good" and "bad" places to live in the city, and likewise with places to work. For example, a wealthy noble might have an estate in the center of town, near the businesses that he owns and near the government that he lobbies. He might want a bigger home, but be unwilling to relocate far out to the edge of the expanding city, so instead, he builds a taller home on the estate he owns.
So the bigger a city gets, the more motivated people might become to build taller, even if they aren't at the point where building taller is required.
There are other considerations. Plumbing? No way. Even today with all our modern techology, building taller than 4 or 5 stories need special pumps and their own water reservoirs on the roofs. So tall buildings full of residents who have to carry water up to their homes and have to pour sewage out onto the streets are extremely inconvenient and unsanitary.
Another consideration is logistics. How many farms, merchants, etc., does it take to support a city's population? As the population grows, more support is needed. A big city like ancient Rome was constantly at risk of famine and starvation because the tens of thousands of farms around rome were pushed to the limit to provide enough food to feed the masses. Simply building taller living structures to increase the pupulation further would have only resulted in more starvation. So there are limits to the population of a city, and such limits come from external problems as well as internal.
A previous poster pointed out the Roman insulae, but it's worth pointing out that th clever Romans, who built aqueducts and roads and colloseums and architecture that is still standing 2,500 years later, couldn't figure out how to build insulae more than 5 stories tall that didn't regularly collapse under their own weight. Roman emperors eventually limited the height to 5 stories for safety reasons - but that's still 5 stories, which should satisfy the OP's needs.
Then again, we're talking Rome, the largest city in the western world at the tiem these buildings were being built. Other Roman cities, even just a few dozen miles from Rome, didn't build anything nearly so tall.
Which takes us back to the "how big?" question.
The answer seems to be:
1. so big that it's probably the biggest city in the world
2. it also needs to be overcrowded to the point that it cannot expand laterally
3. it also needs sufficient logistics to support the population growing vertically without everyone starving to death, or dying from insufficient water availability
4. it also needs suffient sanitation to remove the amount of garbage and sewage that the tenants are dumping out their windows, without which, these tall buildings are festering centers of disease and plague
So, that's a simplified glimpse into ancient history of the real world. However, Golarion has magic, and that can change everything. A Decanter of Endless Water solves all the plumbing/sanitation needs, and a handy local druid to control favorable weather and bolster crop output can solve all of the logistics problems too. And with dwarven engineers and gnomish ingenuity, I imagine Golarion architects can solve the collapsing problems that the Romans faced.
Which means none of that historical stuff matters, so build your 5-story buildings anywhere you like.
Logic is not the only reason in a magic filled game world. Some people might build tall buildings just for prestige. The wizard who wants to be away from the plebs or the merchants that want to display their wealth might form a tall core of buildings for sheer bravado.
A region of town might be holy or reprehensible. Who wouldn't want to overlook the shrine of Wackywacky? Or perhaps there is an avian population that only wants to be up high.
I wasn't implying it wasn't done but if you are close to a historical model you can sometimes make useful observations on how they were used.
Sigurd
Let's also look at the up vs out question from another perspective- Material strength. Sure, castle and fortification walls were routinely 50+ feel high, but they were also 20-30 feet or more thick. The Romans had concrete, but they hadn't figured out how to make it steel reinforced, like most large buildings of today. Super tall skinny towers can be made of stone and mortar, but they're small in circumference for a reason. If one were to look at even late medieval/early renaissance towns, you'd find 2-3 stories were fairly common, because you can build that high with wood. higher, and they'd likely be near the city walls, or be part of a monumental structure (eg a cathedral or palace) that was designed to showcase the owners wealth and power, and the builders art. But again, how thick are the walls of Notre Dame at the base?
You also have to remember that some sections of Golarion have up to late 18th century technology and fashion, and so one would assume that the architecture would follow suit. It's kind of odd to have people with tricorne hats without at least a few "modern" 18th century buildings to go with them. And that's not even getting into what's possible with magic.
If you want to get into really wacky architecture possibilities, get the Wildwood Crafter by Monte Cook that was put out as a 3.0 freebie for Materia Magica (site long dead, but the pdf is still fluttering around) and use the class's ability to make all wood and stone double its normal hardness, then consider the architectural possibilities of that and give one a Lyre of Building or Fabricate and an Eberron Sky Forge.