According to many historians and geographers, the great transformation of the twentieth century – one that continues into the present – is the global mass migration from rural places to urban spaces. The twentieth century demarcates the first time in human history when the preponderance of the world's population lived in cities. In this historical context, the central claim of Miles Orvell's new book may seem counterintuitive and even shocking: in the United States, the small town remains a central symbol and a structuring myth.

The Death and Life of Main Street is an impressive, wide-ranging survey and history of the American small town in popular US literature, film, and culture. Orvell uses a diverse archive, including over a hundred images, to think about the complex ways in which the small town has become crucial to the nation's identity and its ideals. While some texts analyzed may be anticipated – Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Disneyland's “Main Street, U.S.A.” – on nearly every page surprises abound, including Walt Whitman's writing on the small town as a social ideal; the prominent place of small towns in photographs produced for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression; and the history of US mall culture, a history in which the small-town ideal played, and continues to play, a salient role. But perhaps the greatest surprise of this important study is its trajectory: The Death and Life of Main Street begins with a critical analysis of the small town as a cultural form and concludes with the provocative claim that the small town may be central to rethinking and redesigning US cities.

Orvell analyzes with sophisticated thinking and beautiful prose how the small town has transformed from a material place into a prominent symbol in American culture. In fact, Orvell positions his study as a return to the “myth-and-symbol” school that once dominated American studies. In contrast to early examples of this school that frequently reified and perpetuated monolithic and essentializing national myths (the American Adam, virgin land), Orvell analyzes the symbol of the small town as one that is materially and historically contingent and conditioned. Therefore, as Orvell demonstrates, the small town isn't a fixed symbol that perfectly reproduces, but rather one that is continually refigured in unexpected ways. In 1920, to cite one path traced by Orvell, “Main Street” – a synecdoche for the small town – became a popular signifier of myopia, due in large part to Sinclair Lewis's scathing critique of small-town culture in one of the best-selling American novels, Main Street. However, during the Great Depression, the small town became refigured as a “paradise lost”; capitalism's violent vicissitudes created the material conditions for the small town to be reimagined as a space of stability and continuity.

Orvell insists that the small town and the nation are inextricably conjoined. But the question that haunts the study, and the small-town symbol more generally, is: for whom? In his introduction, Orvell admits that in multiple discourses the small town has become a symbol of conservatism and homogeneity, in contrast to the city, which frequently circulates as a symbol of diversity and openness. However, Orvell seeks to show that this formula is reductive, and that the small town should be recognized as a dynamic symbol with a complex history and myriad meanings. Orvell, for the most part, succeeds in this objective, yet in nearly every chapter the small town continues to emerge as a cultural form and force that gains its legibility by appearing as a homogeneous community.

One of the most provocative chapters in the book, one that successfully illustrates the small town's continuing importance, turns to US public housing. Orvell demonstrates that the failure of urban planning in the twentieth century is largely due to the influence of modernist architecture manifestos that celebrated and championed high-rises as solutions to the growing crises and inequalities defining cities. The result, as Orvell rehearses, is notorious housing projects such as St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe. These housing projects concentrate predominately African American, working poor populations into highly visible, highly congested high-rises. In contrast to such a modernist model, Orvell argues that urban spaces should be reformed by using successful small towns as models, implementing attributes such as low-density living areas and copious communal green space. This is not just utopian thinking; rather, Orvell discusses how this small-town model is being used to re-create low-income housing in Philadelphia.

The Death and Life of Main Street demonstrates that the meaning of the small town is not fixed, but one that is continually being inscribed anew. This book should spark important conversations about the small town's significance in the nation's past and for the nation's future.