Looking for the Future of Small Cities

There’s more to Cleveland
than you might think. (Photo: BIG Slow via
Flickr)

One of our favorite blogs in the Streetsblog
Network is Rustwire.com,
a great source of news and opinion from the Rust Belt of the Midwest.
Today they’re featuring a guest editorial that asks some tough questions
about smaller cities in the region that are struggling to retain young,
ambitious citizens. Often, those youthful strivers want to go to where
the perceived regional action is — Chicago. Is this an inevitable
shift? What do smaller cities have to offer? Can they or should they try
harder to retain young professionals?

The Rustwire piece examines our misperceptions about places where
we don’t live, and wonders if we’re writing off places that might be
more viable than we realize:

I have recently returned to Cleveland after several years in the
“Capitol of the Midwest,” Chicago. Chicago is filled with
Midwesterners from all corners, and those who have committed to living
there have a mixture of disdain, pity, and guilty longing for the places
they left behind. The opinion they expressed was that
leaving Chicago for a smaller Midwestern city would stifle career
ambitions and deprive one of big city amenities. All they
saw outside Chicagoland was corn fields and closed factories. In
a discussion of urban development, one economist (originally from
upstate NY) asserted, “Detroit and Cleveland no longer have an economic
reason for being.” When I told people in Chicago that I
planned to return to Cleveland, most looked dejected and some said, “I’m
sorry.”

Having spent a year now in Cleveland, I realize that it is not a
small city with nothing going on. It is truly a major city
with sufficient scale for most things you find in major cities. We
have finance and legal industries. We have designers and
publishers. We have bicycle messengers. We
have at least a half dozen companies that do nothing but walk dogs for
busy professionals. We have a sand volleyball league, a
dozen ski clubs, and thirty-some yoga studios. We have
immigrants from all over the world in our universities and running
ethnic groceries. We have commuter trains, valets, and
loft condos with concierges. Life in Cleveland is much more
like life in Chicago than people there, here, or elsewhere recognize. Is our perception about smaller cities also wrong?

Just as Chicago collects people from Detroit, Minneapolis, and
Columbus, I have found that Cleveland has no small number of people who
grew up in Youngstown, Lima, and Wooster. From time to
time, I find myself in smaller cities or reading blogs about them —
Erie, Jamestown, Flint, etc. I start to wonder about these
places as the people in Chicago wonder about Cleveland. How
can they have an economic future? Who would move there? If I were a young, educated person, how could I justify staying
there? Would I have returned to Flint if that’s where I
grew up? If so, who would I work for? Who
would my spouse work for? What if I had to change jobs
mid-career but there’s only one local employer in my field?

These are vital questions for anyone who wants to see
revitalization of the urban landscape in this country — not just in the
obvious big cities on the coasts, not just in regional capitals like
Chicago. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

More from around the network: Imagine
No Cars comes to the end of a year-long car-free experiment in
Missoula, Montana. Biking
in Chattanooga struggles to find a good biking route. And Dottie at
Let’s
Go Ride a Bike shows us in some beautiful pictures why she never
gets tired of riding.