Welcome to the 2025 Small Cities Co-Lab! We are so excited to have you join us in Bethlehem, our own small city, for two days of conversation, reflection, learning, and action.
The core mission of the Small Cities Lab is to help close the knowledge and resource gaps faced by smaller places across the country. Central to this is building networks of colleagues working across sectors, regions, and disciplines who live in or simply care deeply about small cities. This inaugural Co-Lab convening is the first step in establishing a new small cities network, and something we hope will help increase our collective knowledge and jump-start collaborative projects.
Since embarking on this work, we are often asked: "What is a small city, anyway?" While it's tempting to start with a population range (100,000? 250,000?), we know that those numbers fail to capture the huge variety of smaller places where the majority of Americans live. Over the next two days of facilitated discussions, presentations, and workshops, we can't wait to learn more about what small cities are and why they matter.
Onward!
Karen Beck Pooley and Wes Hiatt
Small Cities Lab Co-Directors
This series is an outcome of the Co-Lab that took place in September 2025, convening 70 cross-sector participants from the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and Midwest. The goal of the convening was to understand more about what small cities are and identify patterns about challenges and opportunities facing small cities.
Through facilitated exercises, participants surfaced recurring themes that are important attributes, conditions, and experiences in small cities, which gave rise to five booklets: an introduction, followed by four thematic volumes. The four themes include Housing, Waterfronts, Social and Cultural Resources, and Meds and Eds. Each volume distills key insights from the Co-Lab, elevates emerging questions, and features contributors whose work speaks directly to these themes. Every release is paired with a virtual Lunch and Lab, where featured contributors expand on their work and join a live conversation.
The Small Cities Lab Co-Lab booklet series features insights across four reoccurring themes: Housing, Waterfronts, Social and Cultural Resources, and “Meds & Eds” Cities. Distilled from our first convening, these resources showcase how small cities organize and understand themselves.
This booklet looks at how small cities move from regulatory reform to real housing production. Across the country, cities are adopting new zoning codes and policy strategies, yet many struggle to translate reform into new projects on the ground. It explores what's driving growing interest in middle housing and diverse housing types, and what stands in the way of building more of what communities need.
This booklet examines how small cities are reclaiming and reimagining their relationships to rivers, coastlines, and natural environments. Many small cities were founded around water, and waterfronts remain among the most valued and defining features of small-city life. Yet, they also carry legacies of industrial decline, pollution, and infrastructure that has cut residents off from the water. As climate change accelerates flooding, erosion, and rising water levels, the pressure to rethink these spaces has never been greater.
Small cities are often praised for close-knit communities, but participants described a persistent divide between those who are "from here" and those who "came here." Drawing on cities across Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and Northeast, this booklet traces how social and cultural resources, such as festivals, traditions, and civic institutions, shape belonging, and asks whether they can help dismantle long-standing insider-outsider divides.
This booklet examines the implications for local economies built around medical and educational institutions. As manufacturing declined, many small cities turned to "meds and eds," anchors seen as rooted and less likely to relocate, and boosted by decades of government investment. But their outsized land, capital, and political power often strain housing and community relationships. The booklet looks at how these institutions can become more effective, accountable partners in local governance.