Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America

Boldly reframes the small town as a site of urbanity produced through civic celebrations, festivals, and parades in collective expressions of memory, ritual, and emotional energy.
Rather than frame rural towns as in decline or frozen in nostalgia, Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oskaloosa and Pella, Iowa to argue that urbanity is not solely a demographic or environmental condition of large metropolitan centers. Instead, urbanity emerges as a rhythmic, performative, and cultural accomplishment produced through collective participation, volunteer labor, and tourism.
Michael O. Johnston shows how ordinary rural spaces periodically become sites of heightened social interaction, symbolic spectacle, and shared attention. He takes the reader to Tulip Time, Sweet Corn Serenade, BBQ 4 Badges, Lake Red Rock BalloonFest, and others. The events, he argues, create collective effervescence, strengthen civic engagement, and challenge conventional distinctions between rural and urban life.
Through these symbolic arenas, communities undergo the crucial work to assert their relevance, build continuity, and negotiate their public identities. In a political moment shaped by polarized perceptions of rural America, this book offers an empirically rich, theoretically grounded, and emotionally resonant account of the performative vitality that shapes small towns.