�鶹����

The majority of Americans live in small cities with fewer than 250,000 residents, and more people continue to move to them each year. Yet we know relatively little about these places: architects, planners, and policymakers have limited research tools or frameworks for working in small cities, while the vast majority of scholarship, “best practices,” and state and federal programs are designed for large metropolitan areas. Academic work in architecture, urbanism, and planning has overwhelmingly centered on major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where patterns of urban change differ significantly from smaller contexts. Likewise, canonical Western cities such as Paris, London, and Rome continue to dominate urban history and theory. Despite their importance within the American urban system, small cities remain understudied and underserved. Existing literature tends to focus narrowly on post-industrial cities in the American Midwest, often grouping them into a single category defined by decline and economic hardship. This reductive framing leads to universalized solutions that fail to account for the diversity of conditions and trajectories across small cities. The mission of the Small Cities Lab at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is to challenge these monolithic narratives and address critical gaps in knowledge and resources. While small cities are often grouped by population thresholds, they differ significantly in form, development patterns, socio-economic conditions, and long-term trajectories. To better understand this diversity, the Small Cities Lab launched Small City Stories, an oral and material history project disseminated through a postcard series and a web-based archive. The project emerges from ongoing fieldwork and road-based research across Pennsylvania, where researchers document built environments and conduct interviews with planners, policymakers, and residents in small cities throughout the state. This approach raises key questions: How can narrative-based tools inform new policy frameworks and design interventions? More fundamentally, how can planning frameworks be adapted to the specific conditions of small cities rather than importing assumptions from larger urban contexts? This paper presents emerging research and outlines early steps toward building a more robust, context-sensitive knowledge base for design and policy in small cities.

Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez

ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4