When Building Iron mines, if the mine is completely separate from any city it will build by it's self in a few turns but if its adjacent to a city, it will be placed into the cities build queue and wont complete until everything else is done. Since in the early game I often have several other things needing to be built this can be massively detrimental. I haven't checked if other resources behave like this but I'd guess that they do.
Is this working as intended? Is there a way to manually separate a resource with a city?