Small Cities, Big Issues: Reconceiving Community in a Neoliberal Era ed. by Christopher Walmsley and Terrance Kading (review)

The social scientific study of small cities is woefully underdeveloped. It's a curious foible of social research that work on small cities tends to be more the domain of rural researchers who scale up from small rural communities to small cities, and less the domain of urban researchers who tend instead to train their vision on big issues facing big cities, leaving aside entirely the social dynamics of small cities. Consequently, studies of both small rural communities and of big cities abound, but little work focuses on the specificity of small cities. This tendency is most certainly a loss for urban researchers (and a mea culpa is in order here), as many of the processes at play in large metropolises are equally, if not more, tangible and visible in smaller cities. Moreover, as the contributors to this highly readable and thoughtfully edited volume show, all too often small cities are collateral damage when broad-scale structural transformations—rent primarily by neoliberal economic policies—are underway.

As the editors note in their introduction, "small is . . . a relative term," thus making a universally applicable definition near impossible. As the majority of the chapters in the collection are based on case studies from small Canadian cities, the editors pragmatically adopt a somewhat fluid definition treating small cities as those with a population between 10,000 and 100,000, with some wiggle room at each end.

Given the relative underdevelopment of what we might call the "small cities subfield," kudos are due to the editors of this fascinating collection for bringing together scholars and practitioners researching and working across a wide range of fields including sociology, social work, political science, and mental health. Each chapter shows that one barely needs to scratch the surface in small cities to very quickly reveal big issues at play. Across 12 well-written and thematically coherent chapters, I learned about homelessness, illicit drug use, sex work, queerness, deinstitutionalization, incarceration and parole, aboriginal peoples, planning and governance, immigrant settlement, poverty reduction, and community empowerment. Chapter by chapter it became clearer that small cities are sites of "serious inequities and social tensions," which as most authors demonstrate, quite clearly derive from state disinvestment and increasingly punitive social policy.

One minor gripe with this book: the absence of an index makes quick access to specific topics more difficult, though to be fair, in addition to the reasonably priced paper copy of the book, AU Press is to be commended for adopting a hybrid publishing model that also makes this book freely available as an open access digital download, so terms can be searched on the portable document format (PDF).

Overall, Small Cities, Big Issues advances a critical and timely analysis of the state of small Canadian cities in the neoliberal era. In contemporary social science, I sometimes feel like "neoliberalism" is a catchall buzzword or an inconsistently applied analytic term, but as the research on small cities reported in this book very clearly demonstrates, neoliberalism's everyday effects are consistently devastating to communities.