Small Cities

While cities have existed for millennia, it wasn’t until the advent of industrialization in the late eighteenth century that the world entered a process of mass urbanization. Sociology has been preoccupied with understanding the nature of urban life since then. Yet since the turn of the twenty-first century, sociologists, geographers, and urban studies scholars have begun noting that the voluminous literature on cities and urban life produced over a century of research and theorizing is almost exclusively based on the metropolitan experience of big cities in the Global North. Emerging literature on small cities has identified several trends that have rendered them nearly invisible to urban sociology. In their search for generalizable knowledge, sociologists have prioritized big cities as the best indicators of urbanity, creating seemingly universal categories of urban analysis that often hide, instead of illuminate, the urban dynamics of small cities. This focus has also created a false sense that most urban dwellers live in the metropolis. In the United States, the majority of the urban population lives in cities with less than 250,000 inhabitants, making them the modal form of urban life, while big cities like NYC, LA, and Chicago are the exception. That said, while drawing attention to small cities as a distinct category of urban research, sociologists have nonetheless struggled to define what constitutes a “small city.” One difficulty stems from sizeism, or the inability to draw clear boundaries based on population size. While “incorporated areas with less than 100,000 residents” is often used as a shorthand, urban characteristics do not suddenly change once such an arbitrary population number is surpassed. Another difficulty is the relativeness of “small” in global context: a Chinese city of 700,000 could be considered small in that context, but not elsewhere. Despite these definitional challenges, this scholarship maintains that renewed attention to small cities should bring tangible benefits to urban sociology at large. Small cities do not represent a lack of, deviant, or antagonistic forms of urbanity; they constitute an important node within the diverse modes of urbanity. Their urban problems may be recognizable to big cities, but often operate through a different set of variables within the small city context. This encyclopedia entry summarizes this corrective turn to the big city bias, outlines existing research on small(er) cities, and underscores growing calls for giving small cities their due attention.