CityReads | Small Cities, Big Issues

Ocejo,R.E. et al 城读 2022-07-13

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Small Cities, Big Issues

Thinking big about small cities.

Ocejo, R.E., Kosta, E.B. and Mann, A. (2020), Centering Small Cities for Urban Sociology in the 21st Century. City & Community, 19: 3-15.

Source:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cico.12484

Urban sociology in the United States has a distinct big-city orientation since its inception. Chicago, the city that gave birth to the world's first sociology department, immediately became a natural laboratory for urban sociological research, and under the leadership of Robert Parker, a large number of urban ethnographic studies on different communities and ethnic groups in Chicago emerged. Since then, the study of urban sociology in the United States has been dominated by three major cities: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, and the Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles schools of urban sociology have been formed, with the Chicago school being the most influential. The urbanism represented by large cities has received overwhelming academic attention, while small cities are relatively absent in both empirical analysis and theoretical exploration.

In light of this, the academic journal Cities & Communities released a special issue in 2020, "Centering Small Cities", calling for the 21st century urban sociology to give more attention to small cities to help understand the complexity of the urban experience.

Classic small city studies in urban sociology

Small cities have rarely been serious sites for sociological inquiry, which likely stems from the discipline's origins in the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of sociology as a discipline, scholars mostly focused on large, industrializing cities, like Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Boston, to generate generalizable knowledge about urbanism and urban phenomena. Because these new urban cities were expanding and changing rapidly at the turn of the previous century, creating new ways of life.

While most scholars observed and analyzed social transformations within large cities, some focused on how the processes of urbanization shaped smaller places, with the most famous being the studies of Middletown and Yankee City. In the 1920s, husband-and-wife sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd examined Muncie, Indiana (population 35,000), which they called "Middletown" for its average size. This couple brought together a variety of data to form a "total-situation picture" of American community life. The Middletown studies were a landmark in community research and an early example of immersive fieldwork in sociology, aided in part by the city's scale. Similarly, in the 1930s, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner led his team to "Yankee City" (population 17,000), or Newburyport, MA, to examine community life. Warner's field research was eventually published in five volumes that touched on such topics as social class and status systems and the symbolic order in the realms of social, ethnic, religious, and business relations. Yankee City's size gave Warner the chance to explore these issues by studying a community and his methodological choice has been praised as influential.

What is a "small city"?

First, small cities are defined in terms of statistical criteria.

The standard for defining a small city in the United States: a city with a population of less than 100,000. In the U.S., small cities far outnumber large ones and hold a certain percentage of the urban population.

From a total of nearly 20,000 incorporated places (i.e., local governmental entities) in the entire United States, there are only 311 with over 100,000 residents. Small cities clearly far outnumber large ones. While it is true that 80% of the U.S. population lives in an urban area (i.e., a metropolitan statistical area)—with 62.7% living within a city—52% of the people who live in a city in the United States do so in one with fewer than 250,000 people (Ofori-Amoah 2007). Census reports show that small cities with fewer than 50,000 people hold about 16.8% of the population (Cohen 2015), and are about 96% of the almost 20,000 incorporated places (Gibb and Johnson 2015).

The population range for cities in many states varies considerably. New York State, for instance, has 62 incorporated cities, but only 5 have populations of more than 100,000. The largest, New York City, with 8.5 million residents, is also the largest city in the country by double, while the smallest, Sherrill, has only 3,000 (and a nearby town provides many of its municipal services). California has 74 cities with more than 100,000 residents, but 11 states only have 1 and 5 have none.

However, context variation complicates definitions, and renders the establishment of absolute cutoffs unproductive. In China, a small city may have a large population, and the scale of urban population needs to consider the urban hierarchy and its administrative implications.

In 2014, China's State Council issued a notice on adjusting the criteria for dividing the size of cities, which reads, "Taking the de facto population in urban areas as the statistical criteria, cities will be divided into five categories and seven classes. Cities with a de facto population of less than 500,000 in urban areas are small cities, of which those with a de facto population of more than 200,000 and less than 500,000 are Type I small cities, and those with a de facto population of less than 200,000 are Type II small cities."

Thus different countries and regions have huge differences, and the definition of small cities is complex, making it impossible to establish absolute standards. We thus leave open the question of smallness as one that requires conceptual calibration, instead of standard measures.

Second, small cities are defined conceptually.

Louis Wirth published a paper "Urbanism as a Way of Life" in 1938, which first defined cities from a sociological perspective. Wirth pointed out that population size, density and heterogeneity are the three dimensions that distinguish between urban and rural areas, large cities and small cities.

Scholars have typically interpreted these ecological dimensions in absolute terms by focusing on places with the largest populations and highest levels of density and heterogeneity (i.e., typical "cities"). But We posit that Wirth's theory of urbanism should not be seen in the binary terms of "urban" and "nonurban", but rather that the scale of urbanism is relative, thus subsuming smaller cities within the framework of urbanism. Most small cities are probably not nearly as diverse as larger cities, but will be more so than their surrounding areas. The point is, both multiple and a continuum of urbanisms provide subtle but different ways of life for inhabitants, depending on different combinations of city size, density, and diversity.

In a related critique, Jennifer Robinson shows that the field of urban studies has been divided between the "world/global city" literature and development studies. Robinson argues that these frameworks offer too narrow a theoretical lens to scholars of urbanism and potentially harmful policy imperatives to urban policymakers. She calls for a more cosmopolitan urban theory that focuses on "ordinary cities", or on the localized social processes, everyday practices in urban spaces, and distinctive urban forms. Under this view, cities of all sizes are influenced by both global forces and everyday activities, in varying types and proportions.

Finally, building from observation on large cities, Deirdre Oakley pushes for a deepening of the discourse on "regional cities". This agenda highlights regional variation, or the unique regional contexts. Oakley points out how issues like conceptualizations of neighborhood, spatial dynamics of public housing, and patterns of urban processes like residential segregation, among many others, play out in markedly different ways once regional variation is taken into account more fully. Building from this call for a focus on regionalism, we argue for expanding it by including small cities and considering the influence and role of their own positionality and context.

Therefore, we can question what we gain by perpetuating the categorization of cities as "big" or "small" on the basis of ecological conditions like population size and density levels. Urban scholars, then, ought to consider ecological realities as they refract structural processes, rather than as they reflect prescribed conditions within categorization schemes.

Setting a research agenda of small cities: Inequality, gentrification, and growth

Growth. Sociological inquiry into the drivers and implications of urban growth and development has long remained a central area of interest. Urban research has expanded from the internal order and natural order of cities to the influence of local, national and global forces on urban space. A growing body of literature examines how global markets impact small cities, unpack the opportunities, limitations, and implications of urban development and growth in smaller cities by frameworks like the "global city", and focus on other growth-related topics in small- and mid-sized cities.

We call for a deepening and more critical sociological engagement with "urban development" and "growth" in the small city context. How to define, measure, and conceptualize growth and development in smaller urban contexts? What are the benefits, costs, and compromises of growth in small cities? What role does growth play in undermining or reinforcing their forms and levels of economic, social, and cultural equity? To what extent does the "growth machine" model apply to small cities, and what forms does it take? To address these and other key sociological questions on small city growth, we encourage a variety of methodological approaches in a wide array of contexts.

Gentrification. Gentrification originally described the process that middle classes returned into formerly working-class neighborhoods of the central city. Recently, this process itself has become more widespread, complex, and ongoing, with promising new directions that include "planetary gentrification", commercial/retail gentrification, advanced or "super-gentrification", and rural gentrification.

However, we know precious little about how it unfolds in smaller cities.Small cities differ from big cities in community structure, city/suburb division, population movement, public housing, etc. Therefore, the urban experience of small cities will help expand the theoretical toolbox of gentrification theory.

Inequality. The topic of "urban inequality", or unequal conditions that are produced and sustained by the confluence of factors in cities, touches a broad swath of urban research, including health disparities, housing segregation, street crime and gang activity, the type and quality of local infrastructure and the response of underprivileged and marginalized populations.

A research agenda for small cities should include systematic examination of these and other forms of inequality. How does variation in scale influence how inequality manifests in urban contexts? How do their residents react to the unequal conditions they face? What resources do people and organizations in small cities have or lack to adequately address inequality? How do communities of color, women, sexual minorities, and recent immigrants respond to circumstances of discrimination, segregation, scarcity, and political opposition? We argue that the conditions behind inequality, its lived experience, and the tools and resources available to combat it in small cities will differ from those in large ones.

In conclusion: Centering small cities

Centering small cities promises to both expand and adjust existing theories of the city to consider urbanism as a continuum across which similarities and differences can be fruitfully explored at varying scales. We hope that scholars will consider their modes of "being urban" as complementary, call for more engagement at the small city level, thus both deepening and expanding our understanding of the complexity of urban experience.

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