[ This article is an excerpt -- read the whole article here. - Ed. ]

by Catherine Tumber

Smaller American cities, places like Syracuse—and Decatur, New Bedford, Kalamazoo, Buffalo, Trenton, Erie, and Youngstown—were once bustling centers of industry and downtown commerce, with wealthy local patrons committed to civic improvements and the arts. In the '70s they began a decline from which they have not recovered. Today, most are scanted as doleful sites of low–paying service jobs, with shrinking tax bases and little appeal to young professionals or to what urban theorist Richard Florida calls the "creative class." ...

Smaller cities have idiosyncratic charms of their own-–worthy of sustained attention and renewal. And, fortuitously, they have a distinctive and vital role to play in the work of the new century: smaller cities will be critical in the move to local agriculture and the development of renewable energy industries. These tasks will almost certainly require a dramatic rethinking of land–use policy, and smaller cities have assets that large cities lack. Their underused or vacant industrial space and surrounding tracts of farmland make them ideal sites for sustainable land-use policies, or "smart growth."...

The Portland, Oregon–based Post Carbon Cities project offers one bold way to start thinking about national policy, with its call for the "relocalization" of cities, a form of decentralization grounded in local food systems and energy resources. An alternative to the traditional idea of "balancing" economic and environmental needs, relocalization aims to maximize both by dramatically reducing reliance on costly and environmentally damaging supply chains—long transportation routes geared to truck or air transportation—while increasing sustainable agriculture and energy security and creating local jobs that cannot be outsourced.

Taking energy security first, the smaller cities of the United States, with their large parcels of vacant, relatively low–value property and proximate surrounding land, could serve the alternative energy industry well. Smaller cities are not only more likely to be located near sources of clean energy—such as waterways, forests, and fields—but they can also generate more energy proportionate to their size...