A101 Team Make no mistake: Big cities have been essential to American progress. But small places are essential, too – and we can look to these small places for a taste of the kind of community we need to rebuild our nation.
Ryan Terry, a Texas real estate developer, ponders his family’s ancestral home in Hess, OK:
Today, if you were to drive through Hess, you might be tempted to call it nowhere—as if a place of so little global importance was not worthy of being called a place at all. But the value of a place, a home, a people, is not determined by its importance in world affairs or the global economy. …
If we are to renew our culture and our nation, if we are to—as the Charter of the New Urbanism suggests— “dedicate ourselves to reclaiming our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment,” then such reclamation must start with the small towns that still preserve the seed of local community within them. For as the poet and author Wendell Berry says, in this cause “the common denominator is the local community. Only the purpose of a coherent community, fully alive both in the world and in the minds of its members, can carry us beyond fragmentation, contradiction, and negativity, teaching us to preserve, not in opposition but in affirmation and affection, all things needful to make us glad to live.”
