I grew up in a city of about 25,000 people that has since grown to about 128,000. It is still a small city by modern standards, and it has retained many of the qualities that made it special. Everyone knew everyone, and most of what I needed was a short bike ride away. Going back to that time and place to relive it is impossible, and I never dream of doing so. However, learning from the past to build a better future is never a waste of time.
No Good Old Days
Yearning for the good old days and trying to recreate them is a waste of time. Time marches ever forward, and learning from the past can make that march much easier. I am not an urban planner, an architect, a climate activist, or an America-hater. I am an ordinary citizen who, like many others, loves this country, listens to the news every day, and has thought for the past decade, “A one-eyed monkey with his hand stuck in a jar could run things better than this!” We are all entitled to stop, think, and propose changes that would make us a better nation. It is an exercise we should do more regularly.
Frank Lloyd Wright noted these issues as far back as 1932 and returned to his plan, known as Broadacre City, repeatedly, making his final plea in 1958 for a different form of urban life. Without knowing about the scale of the technological advances to come, Wright made keen projections.
“The city is not a place of buildings, but a place of spaces. When those spaces no longer serve the people, the city must be rebuilt.”
“We must decentralize. The human scale is lost in the big city.”
Frank Lloyd Wright – Architect, Visionary
In his final work, The Living City, in 1958, Wright even argued that technology would free people from the need to cluster in major cities. The technology Wright imagined in 1958 barely hints at what we have today. But his warnings are as relevant today as they were in 1958.
The “Mill Town” in 2026
We have already proven we can build cities that work for both people and business. Some were built for specific purposes, some evolved, and some were created to produce industrial products. Over the years, these faded as technology allowed us to “bunch up” in larger cities and eventually take advantage of economies of scale and low labor costs abroad. At first, when the entire process was domestic, the benefit was symbiotic, with companies, municipalities, and individuals all benefiting from the proximity of resources. When proximity ceased to be a key factor, our cities began to die.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
But that was a structural era when proximity to labor and resources was key. That era is dead, replaced by an electronics-driven era that has reshaped the world. If a company in Detroit can outsource portions of its work to Mexico, India, or China, then moving work between American cities is easy. The higher cost of labor is real, but the negative offsets are even greater. Today’s cities are operating platforms, not factories. We spend vast amounts of capital to make large cities livable, turning them into cities within cities in an effort to reinvent the sense of community we lost. The things that made us more efficient have made us less effective and less connected.
Mill towns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced worker exploitation, but modern safeguards make that concern almost nonexistent. The mill town of yesteryear was a closed loop of production and community. In 2026, that loop reopens. It does not open around a single factory but around networks of digital work, modular energy, distributed logistics, and civic autonomy.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
The limitations of past mill towns that led to their decline can serve as a catalyst for rejuvenation that captures human benefits while preserving the productivity gains needed for viability. Many of the low-skill jobs that enabled worker exploitation have disappeared, replaced by automation. Connectivity, transparency, and worker protections prevent the abuses that once defined mill towns.
American consumers care about worker exploitation when it is domestic. We ignore foreign exploitation because it keeps prices low. That trade-off has never been morally justifiable and is no longer sustainable. We need to look at the full picture and reshore most manufacturing to achieve self-sufficiency and protect national interests. Smaller cities, with tighter personal relationships, are part of that bigger picture.
The 15-Minute City
Urban planners have long documented the benefits of neighborhood-scale geometry, now known as the “15-Minute City.” Not a political slogan but a design principle: the essentials of daily life should be reachable without a car (Uber, subway, or taxi). This single idea reduces infrastructure costs, strengthens the community, and makes a new city livable on day one. If built to emphasize walkability, mixed-use cores, greenbelts, and lower density, we are on the right path.
“The unit should be of such size as to permit the population to obtain the necessities of life within walking distance.”
Earlier discussions about the 15-Minute City concept often focused on making existing urban areas function like smaller cities. There is no need when we have abundant land and failing infrastructure. We do not need to redesign existing cities; we need new cities with new infrastructure. Repair, replacement, or retrofitting is almost always more expensive and less effective than building new. It is a politician’s dream: all talk, no substance, great political soundbites, and endless federal subsidies. These become a breeding ground for corruption, broken promises, and stagnation.
A 15-Minute City within a megacity is like an oasis in a desert. You are still in the desert, and no matter which direction you travel, you hit sand. It is the last healthy cell in a dying organism, surrounded by decay that threatens it every day. Fighting off that encroaching decay becomes a permanent chore, an effort that could be better spent building something new. You end up trapped in a cycle of decay – rebuild – decay. No progress, just the exhausting struggle to climb back onto a plateau you already built. A modern-day Sisyphus: no progress, just pushing the same boulder up the same hill, only to watch it roll back down again.
We tend in America to believe that if one is good, two are better; if two are better, three must be great, right up until the system breaks. The “one more is better” mindset only works until diseconomies of scale outweigh the benefit the next unit was supposed to bring. When the “one more thing” is people or quality of life, this stops being a math exercise and becomes the “tragic math” of predictable failure. As cycles of urban decay repeat, the cold arithmetic of bad planning and overwhelmed systems reveals itself again and again.
At some point, we must stop pushing the boulder and start asking why our world is shaped this way. Why are we condemned to repeat failures in urban planning? If reflection is the first step, resources are the second. With the tools and resources of modern technology, what does it take to build cities that work for business and residents? Anyone who thinks our megacities are working well is living in the alternate reality imagined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
Resource Management
It does not matter whether you are planning a city of 10,000 or 10 million people; eventually, the discussion must turn to resources. The larger the city, the greater the need for resources, and the more complex the resource logistics and systems must be to support the population.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”
Like Jules Verne imagining his Nautilus, sometimes you must think differently to solve problems. Today’s challenges cannot be solved with yesterday’s concepts in technology, architecture, or urbanism.
Cities fail when their resource systems become too large, too centralized, or too brittle to adapt. This “tragic math” shows up here more than anywhere else. A city with millions of residents cannot survive without massive, interdependent systems that collapse the moment a single link fails. A city of two hundred thousand can. The difference is not philosophical; it is physical. Smaller systems can be modular, redundant, and repairable. Larger systems become fragile, expensive, and impossible to maintain. If we want cities that work, we must design their critical resource systems: energy, water, connectivity, and transportation. Build each city around these constraints rather than pretending they do not exist.
Advanced Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)
In today’s world, everything runs on electricity. Without reliable power, factories stop, homes go dark, and modern life shuts down. Many cities have committed to energy plans that cannot meet that standard. The simple truth is that solar and wind do not work when the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow, and battery technology is not yet able to fill that gap at scale. These sources may be useful supplements, but they cannot be the foundation of a dependable system. Advanced Small Modular Reactors offer a different path. They are sized for local needs, provide steady baseload power, and are undergoing Nuclear Regulatory Commission review, with planned deployments in the late 2020s and early 2030s. For cities that want to be resilient, SMRs are the first critical piece of the resource puzzle in our smaller-city model.
Data Connectivity
Every modern city runs on data. Without reliable connectivity, businesses cannot operate, schools cannot teach, hospitals cannot function, and government services break down. The same is true for individuals, and universal connectivity is not a luxury; it is an expectation. Large cities depend on sprawling networks that are expensive to maintain and prone to predictable failures. Smaller cities can build modular systems that are easier to secure and repair and sized to local needs. Fiber, wireless, and satellite redundancy enable a city of any size to have the same digital capabilities as a major metro area. If a city cannot guarantee fast, stable, and redundant data connections, it cannot compete in the modern world. Connectivity is no longer optional; it is a core resource.
Transportation
Transportation is one of the most visible signs of a city’s functionality. When people must travel long distances every day, the system collapses under its own weight. Nowhere is this more evident than in Atlanta, a city that grew in every direction because nothing in the landscape forced it to stop. Its transportation system never caught up. Megacities like Atlanta try to solve this with subways, multilane highways, and endless construction, but these systems are too large and too expensive to maintain.
Smaller cities can avoid this trap. If most daily needs are close by, transportation becomes a support system rather than a crisis. In smaller cities, roads are easier to build, and repairs are less frequent. Public transit can be simple and reliable because it does not carry millions of people across vast distances. A city that keeps travel short and predictable is a city that works. A city that depends on long commutes is a city built to fail. Shorter commutes and simpler transit systems also mean cleaner air, healthier lives, and a more enjoyable way of life.
Water Availability and Independence
Water is the one resource a city cannot negotiate with. You can reroute power, expand roads, and upgrade data systems, but if a city runs short of water, nothing else matters. Large cities depend on vast regional networks of reservoirs, pumping stations, and treatment plants that fail the moment demand exceeds supply or a single link fails. Smaller cities have an advantage. Their water systems can match local conditions, use modern treatment technology, and operate with built-in redundancy. A city that controls its own water supply is resilient. A city that depends on distant sources is always one drought, one failure, or one political dispute away from a crisis.
Water is the only resource that still dictates where people can live, but modern technology can ease that constraint if cities remain small enough to manage the challenge. With SMRs, we have the power to solve water challenges that once limited where cities could be built. More effective desalination, water treatment, and waste management become feasible.
Complex Issues, Common Sense Answers
In this article, we focused on the foundations of a new kind of American city. The next article will examine the forces that break down our current cities and the structural reasons they cannot be fixed.
Every system has a point where it works, a point where it struggles, and a point where it fails. Most large cities operate at their points of failure. Smaller cities operate in the zone where systems work as intended. That difference is not cosmetic. It is structural and shapes everything from national security and resilience to quality of life.
In the next article, we will examine these points of failure, the diseconomies of scale that drive them, and why a dispersed population makes America stronger, more manageable, and more secure.
A Note on Article Structure
We target our articles to around 1,500 words or fewer. This topic is just too detailed to cover within that limit, so another article is coming to expand on these issues.
Resources and Further Reading
2025 Report Card: America’s Infrastructure Scores a C, Infrastructure Reports, infrastructurereportcard.org, Last accessed June 23, 2026.
Advanced Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Reactor Technologies, Advanced Small Modular Reactors, energy.gov, Last accessed June 24, 2026.
Assessment of Water Reuse as an Approach for Meeting Future Water Supply Needs, National Academies: Science, Engineering, Medicine, Various Contributors, nationalacademies.org, Last accessed June 20, 2026.
FCC National Broadband Map, Federal Communication Commission, FCC, fcc.gov, Last accessed June 26, 2026.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth , by Buckminster Fuller, BuckyVerse, buckyverse.org, July 15, 2008, Amazon, amazon.com, Wikipedia, wikipedia.com.
StreamStats, United States Geological Survey, usgs.gov, Last accessed June 24, 2026.
Strong Towns, Strongtown.org, strongtowns.org, Last accessed June 25, 2026.
Texas A&M Transportation Institute – 2025 Urban Mobility Report, by Staff, Texas A&M University, mobililty.tamu.edu, Last accessed June 21, 2026.
The 15-Minute City, by Carlos Moreno, Wiley Publishers, Amazon, amazon.com, May 7, 2024.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, Random House, New York City, 1961, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, Amazon, amazon.com.
The Living City, by Frank Lloyd Wright, A Mentor Book, Archive.org, archive.org, Published by the New American Library, 1958.
The Synergy of Renewable Energy and Desalination: An Overview of Current Practices and Future Directions, by Levon Gevorkov, Jose Luis Dominguez-Garcia, and Liuis Trilla, MDPI, mdpi.com, February 10, 2025.
To Improve Broadband Deployment, Enhanced Data Collection Is Key, by Staff, Pew Research Center, pew.org, July 8, 2025.
What Cities Can Do Today to Address Homelessness Better, by Paul Webster, Cicero Institute, ciceroinstitute.org, May 12, 2025.
Why Are There So Many Homeless in Atlanta? Understanding the Causes and Current Challenges, by Staff, Homeless No More, homelessnomore.com, January 15, 2025.
