The “key to the city” has become known as a symbol to reward good will and recognize outstanding achievement. When someone is given a key to the city, it is a claim to a portal where the grantor symbolically places the city at the recipient’s disposal. Entry and access to spaces beyond the heavy gates go back to the days of fortified townships—evoking the memory of medieval walled cities whose embattlements were guarded during the day and locked at night. Entering the very bastions of a citadel was indeed a big deal. This special privilege was bestowed upon individuals whom the town viewed as patrons. Why was access to the city important?

Why not a key to a castle and its vaulted cellars where there are treasure stores as in the Tower of London, which served as both dreaded dungeon as well as royal palace and treasury—the key to this castle translated into power, fear.

The connection to our current cities and smaller, vibrant towns

Final part of Pachecano’s three-part series on small—and sometime lost—towns

When we think of successful small towns, it is hard to place their names at a moment’s notice. In contrast, with cities that attain their highest levels of civic pride, some places quickly come to mind: Paris, London, Rome. But these places, too, started out small. The transformation of Paris from a city of stinking streets and ugly black houses at the beginning of the 18th century is proof alone that small towns can become great places. Yet, even Baron Haussmann’s replanning efforts for Paris were tempered with significant social and political obstacles that were necessary in order to overcome the hurdles and make reforms succeed.

Charles Dickens, if he were alive to see how far the American city had developed since his American tour of 1842, would likely be shocked, but not by the cul-de-sacs and big-box retailing. Rather, the prisons and correctional facilities we now build more of than our schools. Dickens relished his visits to prisons and went to see Philadelphia’s panoptic small town outside the city. To him, this was an American triumph of control and a way of perceiving the American city.

We have ceded this control to outdated modes of planning that exclude the principal players: citizens themselves. Modern city planning tends to commodify and produce indifference and social isolation and strips away the older layers of our places. We ruin our small towns in a Nietzschean “will to grow at no matter what or whose expense.” This is our small town(s) becoming lost to dogmatic views on planning: that the new is intrinsically better than the old.

We’ve forgotten that small town planning efforts still work. Linked to the workings of American democracy and democratic institutions, small towns still play a vital role in our makeup, as they are spearheaded by local citizens who are genuinely passionate about their towns. This is revealed in a short illustration found in one of Bob Dotson’s essays on the (American) sense of place: “A friend of mine played football for a school so small that the players changed uniforms at half time and came back as the band. There were so few girls that they borrowed cheerleaders from another town.

It made for some close relationships. My pal married a cheerleader. She also played the flute in the band. She also moved the yard markers. That’s the way it is with small-town football—a family affair.”

With small towns in America, two themes have emerged. They are close to what we could call an ideal community and they are to a large degree isolated—which makes them difficult to tolerate but worth the while.

We often conjure up the town from the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life before other, real towns come to mind, perhaps because it is a place that has been burnished in our cultural history despite its being fictitious. In a small town, American values spring to life: quietness, the feeling of being closer to nature, and small towns are, at their core, a place where decency prevails; crimes are often solved within hours. We must give credit where credit is due: If it was the small town that sent generations of talented Americans off to the big cities like New York or Chicago to become successes, we must be reminded that it was also the small town that produced them.

Our rural areas offer insight into the development of a new ecological intelligence for a 21st-century civilization. Working together, cities and rural communities jointly hold the promise for the best strategy of our long-term survival and well-being. The feasibility of a total-urban environment is not an option either—we need our rural areas to support, among other things, a strong foundation in natural habitats as well as agri-business to support a new biofuel economy. The idea of “rural urbanism” may be a new form of development that could provide a solution to the problem of saving our lost towns.

While population is still increasing, the demand on our resources will be growing faster than the population. Add to this our deteriorating climate, atmosphere and oceans, and you begin to realize that our ecosystems are perilously close to collapse. The challenge: While we grow we must consume less of our natural resources. Our cities have to be reconfigured along with that of our attitudes toward our rural towns. A successfully sustainable environment is a place that interacts with its region and resources in a symbiotic way so as to increase the quality of both environments.