IMPLICIT IN ALMOST EVERYTHING that small-town residents say about their communities is a comparison with big cities. According to people who live in small towns, their communities are friendlier, safer, more familiar, more neighborly, more caring, and better places to raise families than a large metropolitan area. Residents of cities and suburbs are naturally less inclined to agree with negative assessments of their own communities. Although the primary point of reference for residents of big cities seems to be other large metropolitan areas, part of what they say resembles the comments of people in small towns. It is the friendly, neighborly atmosphere they especially appreciate. A resident of a medium-size city, for example, talks warmly about the “little neighborhood get-togethers” on her street. “We take cookies and little gifts to each other at Christmas time,” she explains. “We choose to get together sometimes for dinner.” She says this is what happens on the “self-contained” cul-de-sac of eight houses where she lives. A woman in her seventies who has lived all her live in suburban Minneapolis comments that the best thing about her community is its “small-town atmosphere.” Similarly, a resident of Chicago says she likes the fact that it is quiet on her street and there is a “nice neighborhood feeling” on her block. From comments like these, one might conclude that urban planners and landscape architects who have tried to promote a small-town atmosphere in larger places have been successful. One might suggest doing more to build outdoor malls that resemble old-fashioned town squares as well as constructing townhouse developments to include wide verandas, porch swings, and potted geraniums.
But being able truly to replicate all the characteristics that people find desirable about a small town in large cities is, frankly, a losing proposition. Everything that I have explored in the foregoing chapters indicates that scale matters. It isn’t just that people in small towns are inherently friendlier, easier to get along with, or more civically oriented. The difference is that smallness shapes social networks, behavior, and civic commitments. Some of these influences can be duplicated in cities. The fact that the Chicago woman, for instance, mentions her block is not surprising. It is on that scale that she feels a sense of quiet neighborliness. Most everything else about her life is fundamentally different than if she were living in a small town. She speaks of walking with her boyfriend through Millennium Park during a free concert. It was enjoyable for them, but they didn’t know anyone else in the park. Asked if she liked Chicago well enough to stay, she said the city was “great,” but she figured she might move in a year or two to San Francisco, or maybe to Spain. People in suburbs give similar responses. They like their immediate neighborhood because it is quiet and friendly. Some have yards and gardens that connect them with nature. They enjoy being outdoors. For example, the woman in suburban Minneapolis says that the cornfields disappeared decades ago, but “we’re still close to the wide-open spaces.” These suburban residents, however, seldom work or shop in their neighborhoods, go to church there, or actually see many of their neighbors on a regular basis. The Minneapolis woman says her suburb “is a good location to come and go from.”
Closer inspection of the language that residents use to describe their communities suggests further differences in orientation and outlook. Inhabitants of suburbs emphasize that their communities are family friendly, just as small-town residents do. But that means something different in suburbs than in small towns. Family friendly more often connotes diversity, which suburban residents say is a good thing because children need to mingle with people from racial and ethnic backgrounds different from their own. Whether suburbs are actually as diverse as residents claim is, of course, debatable. But suburban residents know that diversity is something they should value. More often a family-friendly suburb implies amenities—schools that are not only high in quality but also large enough to offer a wide range of academic, athletic, and artistic programs, plus access to organizations providing entertainment and recreation. As a parent who lives in a rapidly growing suburb of eighty thousand observes of his community, “It was planned really well in terms of residential development and recreation parks and trails.”
A family-friendly suburb also means a convenient place in which to live. Convenience is a value stressed by residents of small towns as well, so once again it is important to understand the differences in what counts as convenience. In small towns, it means being within a few blocks of the bank and living close to school, but it also connotes knowing the banker and teachers well enough to cut through the bureaucratic formalities required in a larger place, and implies a circumscribed array of opportunities that simplify the kinds of decisions a person has to make on a daily basis. The suburban definition of convenience differs because of the larger scale in which social relationships occur. Convenience means being able to drive to “workplace destinations,” as one suburban resident puts it. It is living sufficiently close to an interstate to get to where one wants to go in twenty or thirty minutes.
The sense of place implied by these different nuances of meaning can be described metaphorically as a circle in small towns and an arrow in larger metropolitan areas. Although people in small towns spend plenty of time elsewhere, especially if they have to drive to another town to buy groceries or see the doctor, the community strikes them as a bounded space, like a circle that coincides roughly with the town’s municipal limits. The community is a space in which social relationships occur, whether at work, the school, the farm supply store, or the American Legion post. An arrow serves as a better description of suburban space because residents’ homes are places to which they come and go. A person literally drives in one direction to work, another to the shopping mall, and yet another to church or school. Social relationships are scattered in those different directions.
Despite the fact that residents of small communities regard themselves and their neighbors as somehow more authentic as well as truer to such traditional values as personal integrity and altruism, there is no reason to believe that small towns are morally superior to large cities, or the reverse. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The one promotes neighborliness that sometimes becomes stifling, while the other provides opportunities that sometimes become overwhelming. The issue is rather one of recognizing the extent to which small towns actually are different from metropolitan places. Small communities do have some advantages. However much they may be changing, and becoming more fully influenced by national advertising, business patterns, and politics, they are and will remain different from cities as long as their populations remain small and social interaction within them is relatively self-contained.
People who move from large metropolitan areas to small rural communities in the hope of having the best of both worlds quickly discover that they can enjoy some of the benefits of small towns, but that many of the other potential advantages can be attained only at a cost they are unwilling to pay. A good example is John Meyers, a fifty-year-old business executive who moved with his wife and three sons a decade ago to a hamlet of a hundred people twenty-five miles from a large city. Mr. Meyers is an executive vice president of an international insurance company that was recently purchased by a firm in Switzerland. From his home study, he spends an hour early every morning communicating via a secure email link to the firm’s employees in India who have been processing accounts during the night. He checks in with his boss who lives in a suburb of New York City and stays in contact via email from his bedroom office. To this extent, Mr. Meyers is part of the new electronically linked global workforce that can also enjoy the benefits of living in the country. He and his wife own several acres. They take pleasure in being able to plant a garden, wander into the nearby woods where wildlife can still be found, and take in fresh air and beautiful sunsets. None of the other traditional attributes of small-town life are within their grasp, though. They know none of their neighbors because the neighbors, as near as Mr. Meyers can tell, are seldom at home. His home office is good for the first hour of the day, but then he has to commute twenty-five miles into the city because his boss insists he be there to interact personally with other employees. In fact, his boss monitors exactly where he is at all times through the GPS locators on his cell phone and computer. Mr. Meyers is a sociable person, so he makes a point of visiting with friends twice a week, yet to do this he has to meet them at a bar somewhere in the city. At least four times a month, he drives to the airport forty-five minutes away and then flies to another city to give workshops. He and his wife are part of a church fellowship group that they have to drive fifteen miles to attend.
This example returns us to the question I posed at the outset of whether small towns are somehow characteristic of what the United States is really like, even though only a minority of the public lives in them. The answer is no. Small towns are instead what many people think the United States should be like, and indeed, what they would like it to be. Small towns are neighborly and impose high expectations on residents to be involved in the community. There is a homey, secure connection with the past along with a rewarding sense of camaraderie for those who want it. For those who do not want it, small towns are stifling. Those who live in larger places have to find comforting social relationships in different ways. It is no accident that writers look to Tocqueville, who was impressed with the small communities he visited in the 1830s, for insights into the continuing success of US democracy. It is understandable that populists sometimes call on citizens to reject big government and fend for themselves the way people do in small towns. Those are dreams that work to some extent in small communities, but miss the complex realities of social life on a larger scale.
As much as small towns are changing, they do have a viable future. It is unlikely that refugees from cities and suburbs will heavily repopulate them. But the depopulation that happened as a result of large-scale farming has slowed. Easier transportation and better communication, the aging of the US population, and a continuing desire to live closer to the land and among friendly neighbors are among the factors keeping small towns alive. They are places in which the slower pace and smaller scale of the past is preserved. They are also communities in which leadership and innovative ideas are poised expectantly toward the future.