Jennifer Mapes Winner of the J.B. Jackson Prize
About the book
The New American Small Town is a book that started as my dissertation, an attempt to understand what the American small town means in the 21st century. It was inspired by Jennifer Robinson’s argument for the value of studying “ordinary cities” and in counter to far louder voices saying that small towns would be marginalized in a society increasingly focused on World Cities.
The book begins by explaining how small towns may be defined through population totals, population density, and separation from larger cities. I also look at the small town in the American imagination, a set up for understanding how small town influence our views of urban places more broadly, including the rise of New Urbanism. I argue for a more nuanced understanding of small towns and a recognition that we can learn from both those that are struggling and those that are succeeding — and by looking critically at our ideas about what means decline and what means success. I do this through years of interviews and examples from small towns across the country. I ask: How are small towns affected by global and national change? To what extent do they control their own destiny? Throughout the book, I examine how small towns can help us better understand what we can do to make our cities more sustainable places.
The New American Small Town was published by and with the editorial support of West Virginia University Press. It can be purchased at their website or through bookshop.org (to support local bookstores).
About the J.B. Jackson Prize
The J.B. Jackson Prize is awarded annually by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) to a book that “encourages Americans to look thoughtfully at the human geography of their own country; tries to understand how that geography came to be and what it signifies; and conveys that understanding to the public at large.” J.B. Jackson was a landscape geographer and an artist (among many other skills, hobbies, and jobs). In Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984) Jackson wrote, “No group sets out to create a landscape, of course. What it sets out to do is to create a community, and the landscape as its visible manifestation is simply the by-product of people working and living.” While my current research doesn’t focus on landscape geography per se, this approach continues to inform how I understand the world and I was brought into the discipline of geography through classes in cultural landscapes and by a love of everyday places that I share with Jackson and other previous winners of this award including Peirce Lewis, Wilbur Zelinsky, and John Fraser Hart.
Reviews
Journal of the American Planning Association
