I published this piece by @SamuelAbramsAEI and it makes some great points but I'd like to quibble with part of it (something lots of folks do writing about this stuff) and expand on it. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/listen-to-the-suburbanites/

We talk about "suburbia" "small towns" "rural" and "cities" as if they're different spheres, and in some ways they are. But the *form* of these places can overlap, and we often miss that. That's why I like to do what a lot of urbanists hate, and talk ask, e.g., what is suburbia?

Look at these three pictures. If you don't recognize where they're from, what would you think the populations are for the municipalities they're from? And what would you call these places based on these pictures?

When we talk about "cities" we tend to mean big cities vs. their surrounding suburbs; not traditional urban forms and land uses vs. suburban forms. In many cases we're talking about the wrong thing, and missing the fact that many rural and small town places are quite "urban."

So those pictures are Kentlands, a New Urbanist development in Gaithersburg, MD; Flemington, a small town of a few thousand people in rural-exurban central NJ; and a small main-street-style on Rhode Island Avenue at the edge of Washington, DC.

IOW, a small-town main street and a high-end New Urbanist suburban development look more urban than a lot of streets in DC. I drove through lots of very classically urban small towns in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Some of the folks there probably even "hate the city"!

That brick building on the left? You couldn't built that in most suburban localities today, but towns of a couple to a few thousand people, from the 19th century, are littered with them. Americans have a very long history of living in urban settlements, *outside of big cities.*

Of course, the cultural disrepute of cities in America has a lot to do with racism, as well as fear of crime, pollution, and general anti-urban sentiment which has its own long history. Be that all as it may, it shouldn't translate into disrepute for *traditional urban forms*.

And perhaps it doesn't! That's why it's important to dive deeper into what's mean by "city"/"urban" and "suburb"/"suburban." The almost total lack of recognition of small towns as an urban form seems to speak to the fact that we're not thinking this through enough. Fin.