For decades, the most talked-about challenges in planning in the United States have centered on thriving metropolitan areas: affordable housing in Los Angeles, transit equity in New York, zoning reform in Seattle, or climate resiliency in Miami. Yet beyond these high-profile cities exists another America—thousands of smaller places suffering quiet erosion. With the decertification and consolidation of public schools, the elimination of primary markets, the fracture of public services and demographics, and the loss of health care resources, young people have been forced to agglomerate and leave, creating depopulation in many rural communities and altering them into zombie communities.
We can’t have a sustainable America without a sustainable rural America.” — Tony Hiss
In addition to
what we said above, decline is not a complete story. Rather, small towns across
the nation are quietly testing ways to buck the prediction of urban demise.
Substantial amounts of concrete examples of how these towns are demonstrating
resilience, from cooperative housing to creative use of abandoned buildings to
local entrepreneurship to digital skill hubs. This lesson is not only
transformative for rural America, but it is also empirically coordinated and
inspiring for urban planners who are looking for innovative, scalable solutions
with a human touch.
“Broadband is the new main street. Without it, rural towns are cut off from opportunity.” — Local planner, Kentucky
The Decline of
Rural America
The statistics are
stark. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 1,100 rural
counties in America, half of which lost population between 2010 and 2020.
"People go to the cities for jobs, so there are elderly populations left
behind." Main Streets once alive with family-owned businesses now display
dead storefronts. Public schools consolidate, hospitals close and broadband is
spotty.
This has huge
implications for planners. And with tax bases shrinking, there is less spending
on infrastructure. Outmigration destroys social cohesiveness. And yet, the
failure to discuss rural decline threatens to further alienate rural areas,
thus exacerbating the urban-rural divide, which already defines American
culture and politics.
As researcher and
planner Tony Hiss writes, "There cannot possibly be a sustainable America
without a sustainable rural America. The two are very interdependent.
Ambitious Pilot
Trials for Rural Resilience
In spite of these
challenges, however, some rural communities are pushing back against the
certainty of decline. Their efforts might never make national headlines, but
they are innovations in unlikely places.
1. Cooperative
Housing Models
At the other end
of the spectrum, in the 5,000-person Montevideo, Minnesota, planners and
residents formed a community land trust for affordable housing development.
Outrage over increasing home values—with retirees moving away and the low level
of new house construction—made the place unaffordable for local workers: the
housing supply was fixed. Trusts group lots of land and control it together, so
the homes will forever be affordable.
This collaborative
process resembles models frequently discussed in urban contexts, but it applies
just as much in rural ones as well: in conditions where demographic changes
threaten the stability and affordability of certain regions.
2. Digital
Skill Hubs
In Hazard,
Kentucky, a struggling mining town economically hit by the recession its
economy used to be on, the local leaders digitally converted a former enclosed
mall into a digital workforce house. The center, working with local community
colleges and nonprofits across the country, can teach residents to code, become
cybersecure, and work remotely.
In this
experiment, rural identity is redefined—not as a place "left behind"
by society but as a place that is able to tap into the digital economy. For
planners, it begs a fundamental question: are we now at the point where the
structural role of broadband access should be taken as a given, something
essential like roads and water lines?
3. Reinventing
disused buildings
In Oswego, Kansas,
an unused high school building was adapted into a multipurpose civic space
containing a daycare, coworking offices and even a mini maker lab. As well as
saving a historic building, the project was able to breathe new life into the
town's social and economic fabric.
Creative reuse
projects are an excellent demonstration of how underutilized assets can be
decayed in a manner that would generate hope and prospects for the community.
Lessons That
Urban Planners Can Take from
Why do
metropolitan planners need to care about rural experiments? Because both issues
of declining populations, limited resources, and lack of infrastructure that
plague small towns prefigure those that might eventually affect large cities.
Community-Centered
Planning
Rural projects
usually succeed because they are hyper-local. In other words, they are not
one-size-fits-all solutions but build upon existing assets and community trust.
Planners have much to learn from how it values bottom-up participation.
Lean Innovation
Rural towns are
doing creative things by necessity because they have minimal resources. The
result: low-cost, highly impactful solutions that urban planners potentially
can drop into areas in the city where budgets are tight.
Resilience
Thinking
Small towns are
reminding us that resilience is not simply a matter of climate adaptation but
also social resilience: the development of networks of trust, capabilities and
communality to carry communities through the shocks.
Challenges That
Remain
Of course, endemic
rural revival is not successful everywhere. Some communities do not have the
leadership or money to continue the effort. Others involve structural problems
that cannot be addressed with small-scale interventions such as hospital closure
or falling school rolls.
Moreover, it is
clear that many small towns are split over change. New forms of housing can
face simple opposition, fear of outsiders, or a distrust of those
government-led efforts. Planners have to walk a fine line between innovation
and sensitivity to local values.
A Need for
Broader Planning Frameworks
That is not to say
that isolated experiments should be the only policy solutions for rural America
to thrive. Federal and state government investment is needed, including in
broadband, health care, transportation and education. But equally important is
changing the mindset of the profession of planning.
But planning
education and the media disproportionately privilege megacities and suburbs.
Small towns are effaced as an edge. Yet as recent revitalization projects
demonstrate, they may be the key to answering some of America's most
intractable planning challenges: affordability, equity and sustainability.
As urban planning
scholar Mindy Fullilove has noted, "We cannot afford to forget the
periphery." Recovery in America can come only at the small corners, the
small forgotten places where new strength and renewal are already community
life.
Conclusion—the
hidden potential of small places
And while it is
true that rural decline is real, so is rural resilience. America's small towns
are both experimenting with and providing us with models of community
ownership, digital inclusion, and creative reuse that are worthy of national
notice. While these communities may not resemble the glittering "smart
cities" that get shown off at planning conferences, they do represent
something just as important: the tenacious desire to keep community alive.
The message to
planners is obvious. Revitalization is not occurring only in a top-down way, or
from the urban center out. It also originates from the edges, from unpaved main
streets and miniature civic squares, and from the creativity of social groups that
refuse to die.
Perhaps the future
of American planning lies not only in megacities but also in what his ghostly
choreographies can teach us from their cast-off provincial towns.
“Healing America requires attending to the small places, the forgotten places, where resilience and renewal are already taking root.” — Mindy Fullilove
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