Introduction: Thinking About Micropolitan America

The inspiration for this special edition came from at least three different sources. First I stumbled across a ‘Micropolitan Manifesto’ written by an entrepreneur and social media contributor named Katie McCaskey in August of 2012. Having relocated to Southwest Virginia after spending several years conducting research in downtown Toronto, my initial time in a small college town left my urban inklings somewhat disappointed. McCaskey’s manifesto not only helped me rethink my longing for a more grandiose version of cosmopolitanism but, borrowing her words, “discover purpose and prosperity in unexpected geography.”

A short time later I came across a small article on Staunton, VA in Virginia Living magazine which emphasized this small Shenandoah Valley city’s revitalization efforts. As fate would have it, McCaskey had moved to Staunton (from New York City) to start a small business and to argue for a different version of urban community. Part of the appeal of micropolitan communities is their scale and perhaps this helps encourage an underlying sentiment that people need to be (re)connected to place(s) so that they might endeavor to both create and protect on its behalf.

The third inspiration emerged from an article appearing in the journal Cities. Written by Gordon Mulligan to honor the work of the late Alexander Vias, this piece challenged geographers to rethink the ‘new geography’ that had been created by the Office of Management and Budget’s new micropolitan statistical category. Vias (2012) argues that micropolitan areas are uniquely positioned to reveal the dynamism of urbanization by exposing processes that extend up and down the urban hierarchy. As Vias (2012) eloquently summarized, micropolitan areas are sites of compromise, neither isolated rural areas nor congested metropolitan areas and as a result are key sites to investigate change.

Combined, these three inspirational sources forced me to think about the roughly 30 million Americans who call micropolitan areas home. This special issue seeks to offer a few thoughts on the significance of these areas. The authors have focused their efforts on the Southeast with the hope that many readers will either recognize or draw connections to their own communities.

In the first article, “Employment Change in Micropolitan America: 1980–2000,” Gordon Mulligan illustrates the demographic and economic changes unfolding across the urban landscape. In particular he highlights the “rich variety that is now evident across the nation’s micropolitan landscape” and illustrates the importance of non-earnings income in the Southeast’s regional economic performance.

The second piece, “Micropolitan Land Conversion to Development in Appalachia and the Black Belt,” by Robert Oliver and Valerie Thomas, is an exploratory effort that compares urban development in two regions that have historically lagged behind the rest of the nation in terms of social and economic well-being. This paper reveals that the total development in both rural and micropolitan areas in the Black Belt and Appalachia during the study period was higher than the national average and suggests that it is necessary to rethink broad assumptions about the spatial unevenness of urban settings in these regions.

In the third paper, “Examining the Geography of Newly Incorporated Municipalities (NIMs) in Micropolitan North Carolina, 1990–2010,” Russell Smith shifts the focus to North Carolina’s ongoing urban transformation by emphasizing the politics of municipal incorporation. Smith investigates the frequency and spatial distribution of newly incorporated municipalities while highlighting where micropolitan communities fit into this process. Moreover, he begins the challenging process of determining the motivation(s) guiding the desire to incorporate, illustrating that the desire to preserve a sense of ‘rural’ character is often promoted, even as communities become urban entities or receive the new micropolitan designation.

In the final paper, “Forest Change Dynamics across Levels of Urbanization in the Eastern United States,” authors Yi-Jei Wu, Valerie Thomas and Robert Oliver use remotely-sensed data, statistical sampling, and change detection methods to expose the spatial and temporal patterns of forest land conversion across megaregions and micropolitan areas. The high variability of forest cover in the Southeast requires that researchers consider how land cover change ‘signals’ may be masked. The growing accessibility of supercomputing platforms has made it possible to address...