Small but special places

Three things make the world go around: money, power, and love, and the greatest of these is love. This special section on cities focuses on two small ones—Greenwood, Miss., and Owosso, Mich.—that are staying alive through the efforts of people who love them and are willing to invest time and money in them, even when they could probably grab a larger return elsewhere.

This emphasis on the small is a departure from our cities issues of the past two years, which featured cover stories about big Detroit and big Houston. We pay special attention to cities because they represent our future—more than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas—and because we want to look at them differently than other publications do. For example, our Houston coverage emphasized not traffic jams but the city’s diverse, ambitious population, with the headline: “Houston: America’s next great global city?”

Similarly, typical stories about Detroit show the decaying buildings and broken windows that constitute “ruin porn.” We recognize the raw but also look for redemptive aspects, so our cover headline for that issue read, “The new urban frontier: Scratching out a life without city services.” (The cover photo was of a young woman, bundled up against Michigan cold, holding a rooster.) In this issue we look at homelessness in a small cross-section, Hollywood, of a larger city, Los Angeles; but we also show the streaks of light that emerge when a cross-section includes the cross.

For many Americans in their 20s and 30s, small is not beautiful. Many cities with populations between 10,000 and 25,000 are barely hanging on, as younger people with skills that allow mobility head to big cities. But as social entrepreneur Gordon Pennington asks about his beloved Owosso, “What happens if our small communities lack vitality, and the talented have no choice but to become anonymous nomads in megacities?”