Isegoria

It is difficult to exaggerate how different life is in a city of a million people or more and in a small city or town:

I don’t mean that people in big cities lack friends or even that they cannot have an important a sense of community in their neighborhood. I refer instead to differences in quotidian culture that bear on the nature of the role of government.

If you’re an urban dweller and you’ve got a problem with a water bill or getting your trash picked up, you must deal with an anonymous city bureaucracy. The policeman who arrives when your apartment is burgled is someone you’ve never seen before and will never see again. If you get into a dispute with a neglectful landlord or an incompetent contractor, there is probably no personal relationship that you can use to resolve the dispute; you have to take it to court.

By its nature, the big city itself is an unfathomably complicated machine. It has large numbers of people with serious needs of every kind, for which there are a profusion of government agencies that are supposed to provide assistance. The technological and administrative complexity of the infrastructure that provides police protection, firefighting, water, sewers, electricity, gas, and transportation in congested and densely populated places is staggering.

Now consider the other extreme: a small town or city. It might be 500 people, 3,000, or 15,000; it’s surprising how similarly communities function below a certain size. There’s no sharp cutoff point. For operational purposes, let’s say I’m talking about cities and towns of 25,000 people or fewer.

Daily life in such a place has a much different feel to it than life in the big city. For one thing, people of different ethnicities and socioeconomic classes are thrown together a lot more. There are only a few elementary schools at most, sometimes only one, and usually just a single high school. The students’ parents belong to the same PTAs and attend the same Little League games. The churches are centers of community activities, and while there are some socioeconomic distinctions among their congregations, the churches mix people up a lot.

Hardly anyone in a town or small city is anonymous. Policemen, sales clerks, plumbers, and landlords are often people you know personally. Even when you don’t, you’re likely to know of them — if the plumber’s last name is Overholtz, your parents might have known his parents, or your friend’s daughter married an Overholtz a few years ago, or in a dozen other ways you are able to place that person in the matrix of the town.

The same thing is true of whatever interactions you have with government in a town or small city. In the big city, postal clerks are so often brusque and unhelpful that the stereotype has become notorious. In a town, the postal clerk is more likely to add the necessary postage when you’ve under-stamped and collect later. It’s not because the United States Postal Service assigns its friendliest postal clerks to small towns, but the result of age-old truths about human interactions: When you know that an encounter is going to be one-time, it’s easier to be brusque and unhelpful than when you expect the encounter to be repeated. Repeated encounters tend to generate personal sympathies, understandings, and affiliations.

The mayor and city-council members of a small town are people you can phone if you have a problem. If you live in a small city, solving your problem might involve as little as a phone call to the right person in a municipal bureaucracy that numbers a few dozen people at most. Not every problem will get solved that easily, but, as a rule, the representatives of government in a town or small city are more reluctant to play the role of an “I’m just following the rules” official than is someone working in the bureaucracy of a city of a million. They are more willing and able to cut their fellow citizens some slack. It’s a variation on the reason a village postal clerk is likely to be helpful. Bureaucrats in towns and small cities aren’t faceless. They have to get along with the citizens they govern every day. In fact, they can’t even get away with thinking of their role as “governing” their fellow citizens. They have no choice but to be aware that they are, in fact, public servants.

As for social capital — the potpourri of formal and informal activities that bind a community together — the range and frequency of things that still go on in towns and small cities is astonishing. Such places have not been immune from the overall reduction in social capital that sociologist Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone. But in towns and small cities that still have a stable core of middle-class and blue-collar citizens, the traditional image of the American community survives in practice. These are still places where people don’t bother to lock the doors when they leave the house and the disadvantaged are not nameless “people on welfare,” but individuals whose problems, failings, and potentials are known at a personal level.

As cities get larger, the characteristics I have discussed shift toward the big-city end of the scale, but it happens slowly. The earliest change, and an important one, is that socioeconomic segregation becomes more significant. When a city is large enough to support two high schools, you can be sure that the students who attend each will show substantial mean differences in parental income and education. The larger the population, the more that churches will be segregated by socioeconomic class.

But many of the activities that go under the rubric of social capital continue. The churches remain important sources of such social capital, and so do the clubs such as Rotary, Kiwanis, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and others that are still active in cities of up to a few hundred thousand people (and sometimes beyond). Midsize cities often have strongly felt identities, with solidarity and pride that carry over into concrete projects to make the community better. Even in cities of 300,000 or 400,000, the local movers and shakers are a small enough group that they can be brought together in a variety of ways, as members of a local civic organization or more informally, and they are often able to deal with local problems without a lot of red tape.

I could discuss these characteristics of life for still another kind of community, the suburbs of the great metropolises, but by now the point should be made: The simple size of the places where people live creates enormous diversity in the daily life, in the relationship of citizens to the local government, in the necessity for complex rules, and in the ability of communities to deal with their own problems.

We aren’t talking about a small, quaint fraction of American communities that can deal with their own problems. Conservatives are often chastised for confusing today’s highly urbanized America with an America of a simpler time. I think the opposite mistake is a bigger problem: assuming that most of America is like New York or Chicago. As of the 2010 census, 28 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas or in cities of fewer than 25,000 people. Another 30 percent lived in stand-alone cities (i.e., not satellites to a nearby bigger city) of 25,000–499,999. Fourteen percent lived in satellites to cities with at least 500,000 people. Twenty-eight percent lived in cities with contiguous urbanized areas of more than 500,000 people — the same proportion that lived in places of fewer than 25,000 people.

Posted in Policy | 8 Comments »