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

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, OforiAmoah 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