"Small Towns, Mass Society, and the 21st Century" by James D. Wright, in Society (Nov.–Dec. 2000), Rutgers—The State Univ., 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, N.J. 08854.

Over the past half-century it’s become conventional wisdom, reaffirmed at 10-year intervals by the Census Bureau, that the United States is becoming an ever more urban nation. Wright, a sociologist at Tulane University, paints a different picture.

If America is becoming more "urban," he says, isn’t it strange that "most of the really big American cities have been losing population for decades"? Of the 10 largest cities in 1970, seven—New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washingon, and Cleveland—were noticeably smaller two decades later. Of the 100 largest cities, 54—predominantly in the Northeast and Midwest—had fewer people.

Of course, if "urban" simply means "not rural," then, yes, more than three-fourths of the American populace is "urban." (The Census Bureau classifies as rural any place with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants.) But should a tiny burg of 3,000 really be considered "urban"? It’s an archaic definition, Wright says.

"Urban" is also often casually equated with what the Census Bureau calls "metropolitan areas." These have a "large population nucleus" of at least 50,000 people, located in a county of at least 100,000, and include any adjacent counties that seem economically or socially "integrated" with the nucleus. In 1990, nearly four out of five Americans lived in such areas. Does that really make all of them "urban" folk? Many metropolitan areas, such as SpringfieldHolyoke-Chicopee in Massachusetts, in fact comprise "aggregations of numerous small cities and towns," Wright points out. And 50,000 people hardly make a metropolitan hub. Kokomo, Indiana, 30 miles from his hometown of Logansport, now falls just below that cutoff, but aside from its two large manufacturing facilities, says Wright, it "strikes me as wholly indistinguishable from the hundreds of other small towns that dot the Indiana landscape." Fort Wayne, Indiana (pop. 173,717), in contrast, seems like "a real city." Only about 22 percent of Hoosiers live in the five cities with populations greater than 100,000, but the Census Bureau has 72 percent living in metropolitan areas.

And what about suburbanites? Are they truly part of "urban" America? The term suburb implies "inferiority and dependence," Wright notes, but "the whole point of these communities is to be something other than the cities." People fled to the suburbs to escape the ills of the cities and "to reclaim for themselves and their children some of the stillaccessible virtues and insularity of small town American life."

When suburbanites (48 percent of the population in 1990) are added to the 20 percent of the population in non-metropolitan areas, Wright says, it becomes clear that most Americans live in small towns or in places that resemble or seek to emulate small towns.

The small town is much changed, of course. Most of the corner grocery stores have been replaced by supermarkets, and residents now watch cable TV, read national newspapers, and wear clothes made in Taiwan. But over the past half-century, Wright says, "there has been a strong resurgence of traditionalism, of religiosity, of small town ‘American’ and ‘family’ values, and an equally substantial repudiation" of big-city ills. Are these the characteristics, asks Wright, of an urban society?