The small city in the urban system: complex pathways of growth and decline

KEYWORDS:

• Small cities
• Economic role
• Demography
• Urban System
• Governance

Editors’ introduction

To paraphrase an old saying attributed, probably erroneously, to Abraham Lincoln, God must love small cities, because he (or she) made so many of them. By whatever reasonable definition, they vastly outnumber large cities in almost every country and contain significant shares of each nation’s population. While Germany has three cities of over one million population, and 96 between 100,000 and 1 million, it has 1518 cities between 10,000 and 100,000, which contain 42 percent of the country’s population. In much smaller Hungary, only Budapest, the national capital, has a population over 1 million, while there are seven cities between 100,000 and 1 million, and 137 between 10,000 and 100,000, containing roughly one-third of that nation’s population. It seems clear that small cities are a significant part of the urban system.

Research on small cities, defined for our purposes here as those between 10,000 and 100,000 population, is not completely absent from the social scientific literature; moreover, there is some evidence that attention to them is growing, as witness this special issue as well as a recent symposium in City & Community (Ocejo, Kosta, and Mann 2020). That said, there is ample evidence that they have not received attention reflecting their scale in the urban system. Notably, Ofori-Amoah ironically entitled his book on the subject Beyond the Metropolis: Geography as if Small Cities Mattered (2007), while Atkinson has written more recently that ‘the vast majority of contemporary research and policy development has concentrated in large cities and metropolitan regions […] within the context of globalizing forces and international competition' (Atkinson 2019). Wagner and Growe flatly state that ‘Small and medium-sized cities, which are considered to be neither agglomerations nor metropolitan areas nor located in remote rural areas, have been largely ignored in research' (2021, 106).

We would suggest that much of this relative neglect arises from the perception by scholars that, while there may be a great many small cities, they are not particularly interesting; that is, that small cities fail to offer the sort of serious questions about urbanization and change that matter to scholars; as Ocejo et al. suggest

Since the time of the Chicago School […] small cities were thought to lack in – or even represent an antagonism to – the kinds of urbanity unfolding in the big cities that commanded and continue to command the overwhelming share of research attention. (2020, 3)

Since most research is probably conducted by scholars at large universities in major centres, place bias may enter into the picture as well.

This may reflect, in turn, the extent to which the scholarly perception of small cities tends to be dominated by stereotypical ideas and generalizations rather than by well-ground information and analysis. Those ideas include generalizations about traditionalism (or backwardness); pervasive economic decline and loss of historic central functions vis a vis regional centres or metropolises; brain drain, or loss of younger populations; ineffective and reflexive modes of governance; political obscurantism and regression; but perhaps also greater social capital and stronger social bonds. Moreover, these generalizations suggest in turn that small cities lack agency, being largely passive objects within the local urban system, poorly integrated if at all in the global networks in which large cities participate. While there may well be some truth to all these propositions, they tend to be generalized and widely accepted at face value. Few have been given the scrutiny they deserve.

Even casual observation suggests that there is great variation between the conditions and trajectories of small cities within the same countries and regions, and even more so between small cities in different countries, with respect to all these factors, as well as with respect to their larger trajectories of decline and regrowth. We suggest that it is not only interesting but important to examine the dynamics of economic, political, demographic, and cultural change in small cities, to attempt to understand the roots of those dynamics, and how they may differ from city to city or from nation to nation based on locational, political, economic, or institutional factors. In the remaining pages of this introduction, we look at some of the themes that are emerging both in the articles in this special issue as well as in other recent published and unpublished research into small cities.

Economic role and function

All cities of whatever size had at one time some economic role that sustained them; otherwise, they would not exist. While economic and political changes since World War II, and in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Communist system around 1990, have unsettled the economic functions of all cities, it is widely recognized that new economic functions, particularly those associated with the knowledge economy, have generally benefited larger cities, with smaller ones left behind (Mallach 2018; Heider 2019). In keeping with the neoliberal tendency of our times, a vocabulary of urban ‘winners' and ‘losers' has emerged, addressing factors such as agglomeration which favour large over small cities (Moretti 2012).

We do not dispute the existence of these larger trends but suggest that to focus exclusively on them is misplaced. Rather than think of small cities as a generic category of world-historic ‘losers', more research is needed that both reflects the considerable variation in outcomes among small cities as well as the strategies being pursued by small cities to find meaningful twenty-first century economic roles, and their relative success or failure. Mallach (2022) has shown how many small cities in the United States rustbelt state of Ohio have retained or developed strong manufacturing economies, while Meili and Mayer (2017) have analysed the economic heterogeneity of small cities in Switzerland. Van Heur (2012) challenges the widely held assumption that culture-led economic development – the ‘creative city’ beloved of Richard Florida and his disciples – is a prerogative reserved for larger cities.

Closely related to this is the role of location. Small cities are highly heterogeneous with respect to their location relative to major metropolitan centres, transportation linkages, and other positive and negative factors, all of which affect their economic development potentials. While not specific to small cities, Reese and Ye (2011) have explored the role of what they call ‘place luck' in the economic development fortunes of American cities, while the ESPON TOWN project of the European Union has developed a typology of the spatial context of small cities and their economic development implications (Atkinson 2019).

In contrast to the vast literature on the global roles and inter-connections of major cities, research has just scratched the surface of the rich, complex, economic heterogeneity of small cities. Spatial context matters but does not determine. What other factors, whether institutional, historic, or cultural, may influence economic outcomes? What role do governmental policies play? The role of the EU, both in terms of setting priorities and allocating resources, seems particularly relevant, especially in Eastern Europe (Atkinson 2019; Trubina 2020). In light of the recognized economic disadvantages of small cities vis a vis the metropolis, research that identifies pathways to greater economic success is needed not only from a scholarly perspective but as a means of informing public policy.

Demographic change

As with economic change, larger global demographic trends appear to be working against smaller towns and cities. The combined effects of overall declines in fertility rates and population growth, on the one hand, and both intra- and inter- national migration patterns, particularly in Europe and East Asia, work to render small cities particularly vulnerable to population loss and linked demographic changes, notably population aging. The tropes of the small towns that have lost all but a handful of residents and are now populated by old people (Stern and Dimitrov 2020; Wang 2019) or shrinking small cities with their empty buildings (Petrov 2020) are common journalistic fodder. Again, we do not question the validity of these themes and the underlying forces driving them. The selective attention given to decline, however, not only constructs a stereotypical picture of these places, but also overlooks growing small cities as regional centres, as places attracting in-migration, or located in the peripheries of growing metropolitan centres.

The picture, however, is more complex, and the significance lies in the variations on and departures from these themes. A cursory look at population trends in small cities shows considerable variation. In Ukraine, for example, while the median change in population between 1989 and 2020 for cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000 was −16%, the range was from −39% to +55%, suggesting great variation in individual cities’ demographic dynamism. Although the modal Eastern European small city may be shrinking, the level of variation is such that it should be clear that many different demographic and migratory processes, which may or may not be linked to patterns of economic growth or decline, are at work. They may include in-migration of distinct demographic subgroups such as elderly retirees (Steinführer and Grossmann 2021, in this volume), so-called Millennials (Farmer 2019), or more recently, refugees. Wolff, Haase, and Leibert (2021, in this volume) demonstrate in a quantitative analysis the variety of demographic pathways and the complexity factors influencing them. There is anecdotal evidence that reverse migration from large cities to smaller ones has increased, at least in the United States, under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these trends may be linked to the larger phenomenon known as amenity migration (Gurran 2008; Weidinger and Kordel 2015 among others), but other factors are likely to be at work as well.

In the final analysis, there are likely to be many demographic pathways that result in widely varying outcomes for small cities, even within the same country or sub-national region. Amenities and location relative to major metropolitan centres are likely to be significant factors, but systematic comparative research may well uncover other mechanisms and thereby add useful complexity to the often-oversimplified migration narrative (Steinführer and Grossmann 2021, in this volume).

Social cohesion, social organization, and governance

Much of what we think we know about small cities is based on stereotypes of social or cultural obscurantism, epitomized by the classical literary trope of the ambitious or sensitive young person who flees the cultural or social constraints of her small town for the freedom and opportunity of the big city. A recent reworking of that trope is found in the LGBTQ literature. As Muller Myrdahl (2013) writes,

the theoretical lenses employed to read and conceptualize queer lives implicitly reify an existing tendency to create a hierarchy between, on the one hand, places where LGBQ lives are assumed to thrive, and on the other hand, places that are assumed to inhibit queer place-making. (281)

She, as well as, others have challenged those assumptions. The salience of this trope needs to be more thoroughly examined, particularly in light of the evidence of multidirectional migration, and the pervasive presence of social media in contemporary life.

Whether stronger social bonds and social capital are present in small cities compared to the greater anonymity of the metropolis would seem to be fertile for examination, but the literature reveals little; the classical distinction in the literature has been and remains the contrast of urban and rural areas, as defined by pioneering sociologists like Georg Simmel (1903) or Louis Wirth (1938). Wirth wrote over 80 years ago ‘the city and the country may be regarded as two poles in reference to one or the other of which all human settlements tend to arrange themselves' (3). The difference in social bonds is one dimension by which the two poles are commonly defined, with anonymous and functional relations in cities associated with freedom and individuality; and strong social bonds linked to strict social controls in rural areas. Small cities are rarely addressed in this framework, or if addressed, treated as a less meaningful intermediate stage, rather than a distinct social form.

A closely related question is that of social organization and governance in small cities, and whether there are factors that work to further or hinder it generally, or whether it takes on distinctive features in small vs. large cities. Stereotypes associate small cities with strong community spirit, social networks, and local associations. Some studies tend to confirm the existence of strong social capital in small cities, even in shrinking ones, as Hannemann (2004) found for Germany. Safford (2009) studied two similar small shrinking cities in the United States and found significant variations in their social capital, with strong implications for their respective ability to recover from similar economic shocks.

Governance research finds local government in small cities to be weak, lacking resources, or otherwise inadequate, including overt state failure (Gunko et al. 2021, in this volume), downsizing and resource constraints (Kummel 2020), or incapacity to address community development needs (Theodos, González-Hermoso, and Hariharan 2021). In much of this literature, local initiatives by civil society are depicted as a way to compensate for weak government. Gunko and her colleagues (2018) have described the phenomenon of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) renewal in Russian cities, while Kummel and her colleagues (2020) have explored the emergence of civic networks delivering public services in small German towns. Other forms of civic engagement such as co-creation and informal planning appear to be emerging topics (Gunko et al. 2021, in this volume, also Meijer and Syssner 2017; Leetmaa et al. 2015). In contrast, Theodos and his colleagues (2021) cite the effects of the more limited ‘community development ecosystems' in smaller cities in the United States.

These studies are mostly local case studies. It remains open what larger systems of governance, including centralization or decentralization of competencies and the nature of the social safety net, are conducive to the stronger or weaker functioning of small cities. This, of course, leads directly to the final question addressed in this introduction, which is the role of small cities in the urban system, both as a general question for geographers and others, and their role in the specific urban systems of particular nations.

The small city in the urban system

All cities exist within some form of the urban system, which can be defined as the network of political and economic relationships between cities and metropolitan areas within a nation, or cluster of nation-states linked by shared political or economic relations. While urban systems are often defined in terms of economic relationships (Pred 2013), we consider the political dimension of the urban system to be as important as the economic one. In that respect, the evidence of political subordination of small cities is compelling. The fact that urban systems are often referred to as urban hierarchies is not a trivial consideration.

Although it is not the central focus of their research, Coppola, Di Giovanni, and Fontana (2021, in this volume), in their discussion of the rebuilding of L’Aquila after the 2009 earthquake, paint a powerful picture of the way in which decision-making authority was pre-empted by the metropolis, with little deference to local (and even regional) government as well as locally based expertize and preferences. Baudet-Michel et al. (2021, in this volume) cite the disparate impact on small cities of French public management reforms, while Andersen and Nørgaard (2018) cite the Danish administrative reform that eliminated two-thirds of small city local governments, not only uprooting traditional relationships in the interest of efficiency, but also eliminating community gathering places and symbolic centres. Similarly, the Canadian Province of Ontario decided to abolish five small cities and merge them with Toronto into a single, larger city of Toronto, a process called amalgamation. Although the merger was strongly opposed by all of the cities involved, including not only the small cities but Toronto as well (Chidley and Hawaleshka 1997), it nonetheless took place on 1 January 1998.

In all of these cases, it is hard to escape the sense that for decision-makers in the metropolis, small cities were seen solely through the lens of efficiency, a perspective that overrode any considerations that might have been significant to the small cities themselves, and that consultation with the political and civic leadership of those cities, if any, was most probably no more than perfunctory. As a former Ontario official characterized the province’s motivation in forcing the amalgamation some years later, ‘First, it saw amalgamation as helping achieve its most important policy goal: a reduction in public spending. Second, the government was concerned about Toronto’s competitiveness on the global stage' (quoted in Lesch 2018, 6). This, in turn, raises important questions of the role of small cities as more than geographic entities in an urban system that has become increasingly defined by neoliberal values of cost-effectiveness, efficiency maximization and global competitiveness, and which tends to conflate scale with efficiency. In practice, the research consensus on the outcome of amalgamation in Toronto appears to have been a decline in the quality of civic engagement and democratic participation with limited at best offsetting cost savings (Lesch 2018). What the effects of amalgamation may have been on global competitiveness are unknown but debatable.

The implicit problematizing of small cities by political decision-makers is paralleled in much of the research on small cities, as Bell and Jayne (2006) not unreasonably point out, ‘in studies of small cities in the global North, they are more often figured as always facing problems, even as being problems themselves' (7). We would suggest that the initial task is to move away from problematizing small cities, and, to quote Bell and Jayne again

[there are] ways in which small cities can and do ‘work’ in the urban hierarchy; they are much more than fillers, not (yet) cities or would-be cities – they are important nodes in the networks between places of different scales, and they are seen to mediate between the rural and the urban, as well as between the local and the global. (7)

Part of that process involves moving beyond size to begin to understand the diversity of small cities and the diversity of the roles they play in the urban system. In that respect, developing typologies of small cities may be useful. The regional typology developed by the TOWN project has been noted above. Erickcek and Mckinney (2006) identified eight distinct economic types of small city in the United States, based on a statistical analysis of economic, demographic, and other variables, including ‘company towns left behind' and ‘growing new economy places'.

Creating meaningful typologies of small cities is an important first step in moving away from what we see as the Scylla and Charybdis of small city research. First, problematizing small cities per se, and second, fetishizing size; that is, seeing population in itself as the determinant of small city conditions and outcomes. To be sure, small cities have problems, many of which reflect their role in the urban system, but it is necessary to understand how these problems evolve and why they reappear in different political and economic contexts, as well as the circumstances under which they take different forms, rather than problematize the cities. Similarly, size does matter, but it is not the only thing that matters. We hope that the papers in this special issue will contribute to this ongoing progress of reframing the scholarly discourse on small cities and help understand them better as valuable actors within the urban systems they inhabit.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).