You Don’t Have to be Huge to Succeed

Recently, DOT Secretary Foxx announced the finalists in his “Smart City Challenge” initiative. These cities aren’t in the top 10 cities, population-wise, but they’re all pretty big.  Did I say “top ten>” Yes, there currently are exactly 10 incorporated cities in the U.S. with populations over 1 million, and these ten collectively make up much of the social, cultural and economic prominence of our country on the world’s stage. And yes, New York City (1), Los Angeles (2), Chicago (3), Houston (4), Philadelphia (5), Phoenix (6), San Antonio (7), San Diego (8), Dallas (9) and San Jose (10) do mean a lot to our country, and to our country’s standing in the world economy. But these 10 cities account for just about 25 million people, which is less than 8 percent of the United States’ population.

So, let’s consider the 92 percent of U.S. population, and look at the rest of municipal America. For this, I'm relying on my friends from the National League of Cities. According to NLC, the Census Bureau reports there are almost 20,000 local municipal governments in the U.S. As just mentioned, 10 of these have populations of more than 1 million. Moving on through population cohorts, there are about 100 cities with populations over 200,000, and 90 percent of U.S. municipalities have populations below 25,000.

So, we see the vast majority of Americans (and the bulk of U.S. economic activities) are located in places that have populations below 200,000. This is an incredibly diverse macrocosm, but has a few common features. For one, there are a lot of truly nifty things that take place in these smaller and mid-sized places. Another common element is that most of these places have small professional staffs and finite resources; not that their larger-city counterparts don’t face those same issues, but smaller places have to be extremely judicious in how they deploy skilled staff and how they harness the smaller economic resources they face. Related to the resource issue is that most smaller places’ leaders and planners are nervous about being “first out of the gate” when taking risks or trying innovations, and so they really want to learn from one another, and build progress experientially and incrementally.