Rebuilding the American Town

In the scholarship of urbanism, small towns are overlooked and understudied. Rebuilding the American Town highlights how smaller municipalities are transforming to serve their communities and meet the future. The book uncovers creative planning and design strategies of nine U.S. towns as they rebuild to remain vibrant, equitable and viable in the face of metropolitan sprawl, population shifts, political division, economic shortfalls and climate change. Rebuilding includes interviews and insights from those directly involved, to reveal the challenges and advantages of being a smaller city while highlighting the power of design at local levels.

The book provides a new lens for contemporary urbanism more broadly as it shifts thinking away from large-metro concerns, towards novel, tactical strategies that advance the quality of life for residents through design and policies that are scaled to the populations and places they serve. The projects in this book show how the small town in the U.S. is unexpectedly progressive, experimental, urban and global.