Q&A: Does Urban Planning Work in Small Towns?

By Olivia Weeks

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Mahbub Rashid is the Dean of the Architecture school at the University of Kansas. His recent book, Built Environment and Population Health in Small-Town America: Learning from Small Cities of Kansas, tests whether the most basic principles of urban planning really apply to small towns and rural areas. Shocker: many of them don’t.

Enjoy our conversation about what we miss when we bring an urban sensibility to rural problems.

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: So how’d you come to write this book about architecture in small town Kansas? What was the idea for it or what was the beginning of the project? 

Mahbub Rashid: Well, this has been on my mind for quite some time now. I’ve studied the relationship between the built environment and health in hospital settings, in office settings, and also in urban contexts. And since I moved to Kansas, you know, small towns are really not urban areas, but we seem to be very satisfied with the idea that if we study something in urban areas we can just apply those findings to small towns as well. But that’s often not the case. So I wanted to verify some of the things that we found in urban studies for these small towns. When I had enough data, I thought I had to start writing the book. And it fell right at that time of Covid which really impacted our small town. So that then gave me additional impetus to finish the book.

DY: What were the questions you were trying to answer in your research?

MR: Well, the first question I wanted to solve is, is there any proper definition for small town or small cities as we understand them? The second question I was asking is, we know that public health is an issue in a small town, but what about population health? These are two very different concepts. And the third question I was asking is, can I take existing definitions for rural areas and see if some of those factors impact the relationship between population health and built environment in these small cities?

DY: So what were some of your top-line findings from those questions? What did you learn?

MR: One top line finding would be that some of the things that we take for granted in urban areas, of course, seem not to work for small towns and small cities. I’ll give you an example: In urban studies, we have consistently seen that having parks in cities is a big deal for public health and population health because you can go and do some exercise there. You can release your stress. Green spaces are very helpful for any number of reasons. But in small cities, it doesn’t seem to be impacting as much as we would expect. There is simply no correlation between having public parks and population health indicators in these cities.

DY: To me, it seems like the most obvious reason that public parks wouldn’t have as much of an impact in rural areas or in small towns is that basically every small town has a park, but you don’t walk to it, you drive to it.

MR: Exactly. But we tend to take it for granted that having more open space, green areas in cities probably are good for public health. But this is one of the indicators that we didn’t find to be working in small towns. And of course, what we do in science is validate our intuition.

DY: So did you find any sources of increased public health in these small cities that were different from urban areas? 

Counterintuitively, it seems that having more industrial areas in a small town had a positive effect on the relationship between built environment and population health, unlike in urban areas. In urban areas, we’ll always say that industrialized areas have a negative impact because they are the polluters. They are the areas where a lot of things happen that are not conducive to public health and population health. But in small towns, having industrial areas seems to have a positive impact. The reason, I gather, is that having industrial areas in small towns means the population has employment and they can go to work. And as a result, their status of living improves, which is very counterintuitive when you think about having more industrial areas in cities.

DY: Yeah, I think it’s not so counterintuitive if you’re coming from a small town. 

MR: But most often in the literature, that’s what we hear people talking about. Having mixed use development, more density, having parks that are better for population health. When I find that not working for small cities, then our intuition kicks in. Oh, that makes sense. But somebody needed to show that. And that’s what I was trying to do in this book.

DY: And what are the implications of that, that we have these paradigms from studying the built environment in urban places and we often apply them directly to small towns? What effect does that have on these small towns? 

MR: On the policy level, of course, most often our policies are dictated by what we find in urban areas. Because in rural areas, we don’t have as many studies. So we need to be very careful about that. And at the planning level, of course, urban planning is not really small town planning. There are a lot of people working on city planning in big cities. They have an infrastructure available. In a small town, most often there is no planner.

If a town is big enough, there may be one planner working in the office. But for that planner to think about health and planning relationships seems to be a tall order. So either you seek help from outside or you need to engage the public in the process of improving population health through a built environment. And that’s why I suggest that traditional planning, as we understand it, land use planning, policy planning that we do in relation to urban planning, does not work in a small town setting. We need to be focusing as much as we can on physical planning, but also what I call community planning. You need to embolden and empower communities to make their own decisions. If they are not participating, probably nothing will happen in those small towns.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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