Rise of the Small Town: By Adam Bonosky, AIA, APA, CNU-a, Senior Planner, SWBR

Everything is a reaction to what came before.

This lesson was one of my major takeaways from an architectural history course. To understand where an ideology/movement/etc. came from – why its tenants are what they are and why certain things are emphasized over another – you need to understand the historical context. Over the past year, there has been an increase in the discussion and anecdotes of people looking outside of our major cities for places to live. It is unlikely that we are seeing the end of cities, but what we may be seeing is a reaction between the station of life of people in our cities, and the way cities have been revitalized today. Exacerbated by the recent pandemic and new opportunities of remote working, people are looking for places that offer a bit more space, affordability, and amenities. Rather than presenting the typical choice of urban or sprawl, this reaction presents an opportunity for us to embrace and highlight our villages and towns and provide true options of places and ways to live. In this essay, we will look at history to shed light on why our cities are the way they are today, consider new factors that are influencing recent reactions, and highlight how our villages and towns present solutions to current forces.

Before we examine the history of cities through the lens of where people live, let’s return to the thought first expressed at the start of this essay. A swinging pendulum is often used as a metaphor for the idea of reactions; forces nudge in one direction with the result being that the pendulum swings back in the other direction with brief moments of equilibrium. Picturing a pendulum swinging between two points can work well for specific topics. However, a Foucault’s Pendulum is a better way to think about the ebb and flow of the places we live. If you have ever been to a museum where you see a weight swinging back and forth in what appears to be a circle, knocking down markers to show the passage of time, then you have seen a Foucault’s Pendulum.

Foucault’s Pendulum

The pendulum metaphor raises a question – what is the equilibrium? What is the point around which the forces of a city swing and sway and drives success or decline? Many have written that it is around its inhabitants...its people. In fact, our cities, towns, and villages can be seen as sophisticated tools (not machines) that we use to address our individual and societal needs. An equilibrium is achieved when the tool is calibrated and used properly to meet the needs of the people. Meeting these needs is an act of managing the sometimes competing needs of people and the society that live within a city, town, or village. A Foucault’s Pendulum makes a better visual. The variety of priorities work together to pull the pendulum in ever-shifting directions as conditions change over time.

It is important to note here that while basic needs remain the same, secondary and tertiary needs change as the station of people changes – being born, going to school, growing up, having an adult life, having families, kids moving out, retiring – and a city needs to be flexible enough to address these needs. The closer the pendulum is to the needs of the common person, the more in equilibrium a city is. The farther away the pendulum swings, people begin to feel abused, unwanted, and overlooked. It is at this point that they react to their situation because their needs are habitually not being met. Their reaction is typically to look elsewhere to live. With this perspective in mind, let’s consider our other subjects.

Cities Through the Lens of its People

To start off with, why do we have cities, towns, and villages? Why do people settle in places together? On a basic level, settlements have been essential to our survival as a species. With greater numbers we could protect ourselves from outside dangers. They also serve other important aspects of being human. Our cities, towns, and villages are places of learning and encourage the exchange of cultures, house historic moments, and foster the spark of scientific ideas and creative pursuits. The Agora of Athens is where philosophers met, debated, and taught; the silk road enabled humanity to learn about each other; meetings at taverns led to the American Revolution; coffee houses helped develop the theory of gravity; and impressionists met in Paris to advance their art. At their highest, cities can even inspire us to be even better than we are. Inspiring speeches given in our cities have roused us to pursue egalitarian goals of equality toward our friends and neighbors. On top of these layers, they are places where we work, relax, are entertained, learn, and live.

Our lives in our cities and towns today are a result of the series of reactions that people had over time. So how did we arrive where we are now? Let’s start in with the second industrial revolution. This is when some of the grievances with cities and towns started really becoming exacerbated and triggered a deeper pendulum swing. The impact of the second industrial revolution on cities is as an example of what happens when the eye is taken off of the reason for the city. Beginning in the late 1800’s, industrialized cities were becoming more and more inhumane. London in the late 1800’s was booming. Industry was growing, more was being produced than at any time in our history and even more advancements were being made. At the same time, smog was being pumped into the air and the living conditions for the working class were deteriorating. While it was exciting, the city was recognized as an undesirable place to live unless you could afford to take yourself and your family to the countryside which provided cleaner air, green spaces for relaxing, and some reprieve from the noise and overcrowding downtown.

The pendulum had swung too far from equilibrium. The city was not meeting the needs of its citizens and this fact was recognized by several groups. Among the members of these groups was Ebenezer Howard who introduced the concept of the Garden City as a reaction to the existing conditions. It was an attempt to address the needs of a city’s inhabitants. This idea was largely successful in having influence and gained popularity. From this came the Garden City Suburb and the concept of the suburb as a place for people of the city to stretch out and relax. Even Robert Moses and his contemporaries began their careers on assembling park spaces for the residents of cities to escape the overcrowding. As the car grew in influence, a car-oriented system of planning and building fed off the mentality that had grown around the Garden City Suburb and the reaction that people were forced into after the second Industrial Revolution. Anything that was seen as urban was associated with the conditions of the industrial city was viewed negatively.

Eventually, the emphasis was placed not on the quality of the design of public space such as Forrest Hills in Queens, Chestnut Hill in Pittsburgh, and Highland Park in Illinois, but on the quantity. More space – any space – became viewed as inherently good and desirable. With this mentality, everything had to be far apart and uses had to be separated to avoid any sort of physical connotation of the city. This led to pushing everything even farther apart, creating unwalkable distances and increasing dependence on the car. The concern then morphed into providing vast spaces of pavement to house the induced amount of necessary parking. Streets became about how many cars the road could accommodate so that people could drive to the parking lots. Strip malls and sprawl became the status quo and the quality of life suffered.

Because of this pattern of development, developers have become very sophisticated in how they build to target a specific market. They know that they are building to suit a specific age range with a specific income and a specific number of children and so on. We have been silo-ed into neat categories. It’s no wonder we have developed a society that fears or attacks those outside the group – we have built a place that encourages this very kind of thinking. With everything so separated out, it is necessary to drive and sidewalks tend to be little more than lip service to the squishy pink things we call human beings. Now we have epidemics of social isolation, chronic disease caused by sedentary lifestyles, pollution of our green spaces, and strategies to avoid being a victim of road rage. Not only do these unwalkable places not contribute much to our physical and mental health, they likely even contribute to a shortened life span – a far cry from the better life this approach promised.

The pendulum had now swung too far in the direction of separation. The reaction to an overcrowded, polluted urban area that only emphasized the utility of a person ultimately led to the destruction of green space to accommodate the fleets of cars necessary for people to live, additional carbon pollution, and a decrease in the health of the citizenry. Again, the eye was taken off the primary concern of inhabited areas. We forgot that people are more than just economic engines, or automobile pilots. Accommodating automobile traffic took on a disproportionate effect on how people would experience the world around them (and still does in many places today), not to mention the insidious practice of redlining that came along with it. Cities were emptied and density was viewed as synonymous with crime, dirtiness, and “those” people.

Since the 1980’s, the pendulum has been swinging toward the revitalization of major urban areas. The degrading quality of life, poor health, and financial strain on people and municipalities created by the suburban sprawl is now recognized and people have been moving back toward walkable, car-optional places to live. City streets are seen as places of economic opportunity as more and more people move back downtown. New funky neighborhoods have emerged, and people are migrating into these places while, at the same time, new greenfield main streets are being established. As these places become more popular, values went up – good news for cities, bad news for folks living below a certain pay scale.

We should take note that many people in this group have been hit on several sides of the pendulum swing. As we disinvested in our cities, people with enough resources to leave fled while others who were less affluent or considered desirable (redlining again) did not have the option. This group of people have had to grapple with rising unaffordability in their neighborhoods as they have been displaced or deal with disinvestment while other neighborhoods with increasing property values have received more attention. In short, those who could least afford it have taken the brunt of the effects our disinvestment and reinvestment have brought – an all-too typical outcome.

There is a common thread to the trends that were outlined above – pursuit of profit and a lack of true options. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to people making money; if you’ve worked hard, you should be fairly compensated for your effort (which is an issue in-and-of itself). However, when the scales are tipped so far that the idea that profitable development is the way only to be a successful city, this becomes a problem. It becomes further compounded when the rules make it the only way to build. Having options – diversifying the market so to speak – creates a more sustainable system. A duality is better, but marginally. Stresses on one side will cause the other to become overloaded. A variety of densities, amenities, prices, dwelling types, modes of transportation, etc. within and outside of the city brings true choice to people. It is this diversity of choices that will better address and serve us moving forward.

Some New Factors

Enter another factor – the millennial generation and a retiring boomer generation. Much of the new development in the past decade has been sized for and priced to young professionals with rising incomes or retirees with savings to spend. This has been a boon to revitalization but has forgotten that a city must address the needs of people in all stations of life. This type of development has outpaced public amenities – evidenced by pop-up parks, pop-up drive-in movie theaters, pop-up parties, pop-up pop-ups etc. While these are great ways to keep a city lively and incubate young businesses, this is foreshadowing – the pendulum is shifting.

As development has exploded, fewer and fewer people can afford to live downtown. There is no shortage of articles, seminars, focus groups, planning initiatives, etc. to address this very topic. Between the Great Recession, the pandemic, and other economic factors, strategies for housing have lagged the issue of affordability. Often the solutions presented seem to suggest smaller living spaces with shared areas as a way to keep costs down. This can carry us only so far. Now that the millennial generation is pushing their mid-thirties, some have started families or are thinking about it. They are now looking around at the amenities and services available to them through the lens of their children. How safe is the neighborhood? Where can we go to play? Can we afford a place with kids? How are the schools? Some, like myself, are already in this position. The big three in Detroit have recognized this. In 2019, both Ford and Chevrolet announced that they would be nearly eliminating cars from their lineup in favor of large SUVs and Mini Vans in anticipation of the new boom of millennial families. Car companies are already banking on the idea that people will be leaving the city to places where they will be driving their kids around to their various clubs, sports, and other extra curriculars.

The current pandemic has heightened the urgency of this question that many new families are facing now and brought it to the forefront. The number of articles and stories about people leaving cities because of coronavirus continues to grow. To combat this, articles have been written to argue that studies show that cities are less vulnerable to the pandemic than we think. Regardless of the studies and articles written about how safe cities are (and there are flaws in the conclusions drawn from the statistical reports in these articles), if people believe a certain thing, that is what they will use to make their decision. We have seen this in our brief review of history.

In addition to affordability, parks, plazas, and other open public spaces have become secondary thoughts as major cities are experiencing booms. As an example, the Brickell neighborhood of Miami has three and a half park spaces. One is surrounded by a wall and few know how to get in or even know that they can. I lived there for a whole year and didn’t realize I could go inside until after I moved out. One does have basketball courts and a playground (the only publicly available ones in the neighborhood), but it also has spotty grass, is fenced off, and accessible from one point. A third is a green space that leads to the water. This one is nice, however it could use shelters, or more infrastructure that encourages gathering. The half is a preservation site, tucked off in a corner with almost no other infrastructure features, or notable landscaping. All the other outdoor spaces are privately owned or housed within a tower. The last great public space location in this neighborhood is being developed. With increasing density and only one publicly available playground, where are families to play outside – especially families that can’t afford to live in the higher-end towers? The land values are now too great for the city to hope to buy a parcel, all they can do now is hope to work with a developer to create a small space. Again, the eye has been taken off the people of a city and their needs.

There had become a gathering desert with fewer places for people to relax, families to run around, and pets to go outdoors. The recent pandemic has highlighted how much these are missing and how important they are to the long-term sustainability of a city or town. Considering these topics, it should be no surprise that people are reacting to this situation in one form or another – moving out of town or driving to farther away places to access green and potentially spending their money there.

The Promise of Small Towns and Villages

This is where thinking about the region as a whole is so important. Small towns and villages have a lot of potential. These places are smaller than cities, are typically compact and consist of a handful of walkable neighborhoods. They typically have a variety of dwellings, a main street, parks, places for entertainment, schools, and other daily needs within a walking or biking distance. Towns and villages can work together with the cities that they surround to act as a region of options of places to live, work, grow up, and be happy. Interestingly, the increased ability to work from home in the recent pandemic may diminish and remove some barriers. My wife stays at home and works remotely. This enables her to walk into the village that we live near for a coffee, run a quick errand, or just to take a break. The towns and villages that have not exploded themselves using auto-oriented development can offer a walkable environment with dining and entertainment options that  new parents may be looking for, park spaces for the kids, and a more affordable price.

But what about the schools? A 2018 review of home buyers by Realtor.com has shown that nearly a quarter of people purchasing homes said that a good school district was an important factor in deciding where to buy a home. Of those, nearly three quarters were willing to give up on certain features. The most typical were garages, large back yards, updated kitchens, updated bathrooms. This shows how influential a school district is and how important it is to invest wisely in them. Reconsidering how we plan our school districts and design our schools also has an opportunity to create flexible towns and address the systemic inequality that has been enacted through planning for decades. This subject is very important and deserves greater discussion.

Currently, the number of places that are walkable, with good schools, and are affordable is small or difficult to find. It should be much easier – managing a job, kids, a relationship with a partner, and having personal time is hard enough as it is. This is where our towns and villages can both provide an option for places to live, and blossom through their own revitalization. We should be finding more ways to get resources to our towns and villages to enable them to rapidly address this growing need of options and make the lives of people easier. As we do this, we need to keep in mind that the pendulum pivots around the needs of people.

Is this the end of cities? No. As we know them? Probably, but when are things not changing? This is coming about because people with families are going to be forced to make a difficult decision – do we give up the things we like about city life for affordability, a bit more space, and good schools? The pendulum is swinging in a different direction than we have seen over the past two decades, but that does not mean the decline of cities, nor does it mean and a rush back to suburbia. This mindset is a one-or-the-other fallacy. We should be thinking about this differently. This is not a loss for cities, but an opportunity to take the same success that we have found in revitalizing our cities and put it to use in our towns and villages. An opportunity to truly provide options for people to live and make life just a bit easier. This pendulum is swinging in a different direction, or at least it wants to, we just have to make it possible.