This essay introduces the articles collected in the special issue devoted to “decentering urban history” and considers some of their implications. For the most part, urban historians have concentrated on major cities or have at least failed to distinguish between the metropolis and smaller, more peripheral cities in meaningful ways. This essay reviews the articles in the special issue, which were first presented at the 2007 Small Cities Conference sponsored by the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University. They range across the last two centuries and consider urbanization in China, Japan, South Asia, Chile, Germany, and the United States. The essay then argues that prevailing ideas about the impact of globalization, the definition of a city, and the development of urban identities require further consideration from the perspective of peripheral cities. It concludes by offering an approach to distinguishing the experiences of these communities relative to major urban centers.
Louis Wirth , "Urbanism as a Way of Life," American Journal of Sociology44 (July 1938): 1.
2.
For a sampling of new urban history, see Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennet, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). Marxist analysis made similar assumptions. It envisioned the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the formation of a working class as inevitable parts of a social evolution common to all communities. Variation from city to city mattered less than these broad transformations, leading Marxist-inspired social historians examining individual cities to concentrate on class formation and related issues. For discussions of these issues, see John A. Agnew, "The Devaluation of Place in Social Science," in John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Boston and London: Unwin and Hyman, 1989), 9-29 and Anthony M. Orum, "The Urban Imagination of Sociologists: The Centrality of Place," Sociological Quarterly39 (Winter 1998): 1-11.
3.
Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany, trans. Carlisle W. Baksin ( Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966); Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Modern Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985); G. William Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1964); David A. Smith, Urbanization in the World-System: A Retrospective and Prospective," in Thomas D. Hall, ed., A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology ( Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge, 2002).
4.
Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Charkrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism , (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.) (The cities featured most prominently in this collection are Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Mumbai.) Studies that emphasize the potential of the city for the creation of cosmopolitan spaces and identities include David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 156-255; Kian Takjbakhsh, The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 162-84.
5.
Charles Tilly , "What Good Is Urban History," Journal of Urban History22 (1996 ): 702, 710.
6.
For one attempt to define U.S. small cities during the twentieth century, see John D. Buenker and Theodore Mesmer, "A Separate Universe? An Exploratory Effort at Defining the Small City," Indiana Magazine of History99:4 (December 2003): 331-352.
7.
Robert S. and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, 1929). On the reception of Middletown and the sources of its popularity, see Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 68-102.
8.
Timothy Mahoney , "The Small City in American History," Indiana Magazine of History99:4 (December 2003): 311-30; Francoise Gaspard, A Small City in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). For another discussion of these issues and a historical consideration of smaller cities in the premodern era, see Kenneth R. Hall, ed., Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400-1800 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming); Herrington J. Bryce, Small Cities in Transition: The Dynamics of Growth and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977); W. Garrett-Petts, ed., The Small Cities Book: On the Cultural Future of Small Cities ( Vancouver: New Star Books, 2005); David Bell and Mark Jayne , eds., Small Cities: Urban Experience beyond the Metropolis (New York: Routledge, 2006). The Center for the Small City at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point also held regular conferences (and published proceedings from them) dealing with the development and policy challenges facing these communities.
9.
United Nations Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects (New York: The United Nations, 1999), 79.
10.
Robert P. Wolensky and Edward J. Miller, "A New Era for Small Cities," The Wisconsin Sociologist20 (Winter 1983): 14-21; Yoichi Murase, "Determinants of Social Networks with Influential People: Social Stratification Structure of Political Influence Measured by Relational Resource," Japanese Sociological Review50:1 (June 1999): 21-40; Edward O. Laumann and Peter V. Marsden, "The Analysis of Oppositional Structures in Political Elites: Identifying Collective Actors ," American Sociological Review44 (October 1979): 713-32; Michael G. Shatzberg, "Islands of Privilege: Small Cities in Africa and the Dynamics of Class Formation," Urban Anthropology8 (Summer 1979 ): 173-90; Sheperd Zeldin, "Sense of Community and Positive Adult Beliefs toward Adolescents and Youth Policy in Urban Neighborhoods and Small Cities," Journal of Youth and Adolescence31 (October 2002): 331-42; Judy Maynard and Michael Timberlake , "Urbanism and Anomie: The Effect of Size of Place of Residence on Feelings of Anomie and Unhappiness," Southwestern Sociological Association Journal (1980); Beth Anne Shelton, "Variations in Divorce Rates by Community Size: A Test of the Social Integration Explanation," Journal of Marriage and the Family49 (November 1987): 827-32.
11.
Marc Baer, "Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul," Journal of World History18:2 (July 2007): 141-70. For another perspective on the importance of smaller cities for understanding minority experiences, see Jack Blocker, "Building Networks: Cooperation and Communication among African Americans in the Urban Midwest, 1860-1910," Indiana Magazine of History99:4 (December 2003): 370-86.
12.
David Bell and Mark Jaynes, "Conceptualizing Small Cities," in Bell and Jaynes, Small Cities, 14.
13.
This and the following two paragraphs are based on Stephen Morillo, "Autonomy and Subordination: The Cultural Dynamics of Small Cities," in Hall, ed., Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm. Morillo presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2007 Small Cities Conference. His approach refines the dual-model perspective advocated by Hohenberg and Lees, who note the value of combining central place and network theories of urbanization. Morillo's combination of the hierarchical elements reminiscent of the central place concept with the horizontal emphasis evident in network theory's concern for the core and periphery creates a flexible framework for viewing experiences within smaller cities. See Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Modern Europe, chap. 2.
