Overview

All-American City investigates the recent history of Wichita, Kansas, and illuminates the challenges—and opportunities—facing midsize cities throughout the nation. Distinctive. Unique. Authentic. These were the watchwords in the 2020 campaign to revitalize Wichita, Kansas, and to set it apart in the perpetual competition among American urban centers for jobs, investment, population growth, and stature. The master plan to overhaul the riverfront was one of many efforts in which business leaders, elected officials, local boosters, and the general public frequently conflated seemingly contradictory impulses: the aspiration, on the one hand, to make the city stand out as a unique, authentic destination, and the obligation, on the other, to offer a suite of amenities to visitors, residents, and businesses similar or identical to those that could be found in other places believed to be competitors in a zero-sum contest for lucrative, but elusive, urban prizes. In All-American City, sociologist Chase M. Billingham recounts the recent history of Wichita as a case study of a broader phenomenon across the American urban landscape in which the leaders of midsized cities embrace similarity, even while touting distinctiveness. Many cities appeal simultaneously to both authenticity and mimicry, with the result that cities across the country—and even across the world—that had previously enjoyed their own local flavors, regional cuisines, unique accents, and quirky customs increasingly look and feel the same. Wichita’s story serves as a window through which to examine the delicate balance between sameness and distinction that characterizes many cities’ economic development strategies. With a journalist’s eye for detail, Billingham chronicles the city’s effort to attract a new Minor League baseball team, the closure of an underutilized park and the removal of unhoused people in an effort to revitalize downtown Wichita, local leaders’ repeated efforts to cultivate civic pride in order to drive economic growth, and the increasingly vexed relationship between Wichita and its key economic base, the aviation manufacturing industry—compounded by a series of economic crises and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. All-American City reveals the challenges and perils that cities face when trying to stand out from the crowd.

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9780700640928

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Reviews

""There should be more books like All American City. Billingham masterfully demonstrates the value of looking beyond our largest metropolises to understand how and why cities change. Any comprehensive understanding of contemporary urbanism should rest on carefully researched, comprehensive, and engaging books about mid-sized cities like this one.""--Japonica Brown-Saracino, author of The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea ""Urban sociology tends to focus on large cities and the problems that come from either rapid economic growth or decline. In this refreshing and engaging book, Billingham examines how Wichita, a mid-sized Great Plains city, has warded off severe decline but repeatedly struggled to compete with its peer cities and realize its dreams of growth. I hope this book inspires scholars to tell the story of other cities like Wichita that have too often escaped our attention.""--Richard E. Ocejo, author of Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City ""From urban renewal demolition to riverfront festival marketplaces, pop-up placemaking, and city flag hoopla, downtown Wichita showcases almost the entire gamut of development 'best practices' that growth coalitions in small-to-mid sized cities have used to respond to urban decline and post-industrial change. A compassionate and thorough investigator, Chase Billingham documents the many initiatives, actors, and rationales that have each tried to restore Wichita to past glories, reserving his critical focus for the corporate power and public sector austerity that never gave the city a fighting chance.""--Leonard Nevarez, author of Pursuing Quality of Life: From the Affluent Society to the Consumer Society ""All-American City leverages the detailed experiences of locals with 'small city'-focused sociology to produce a compelling and clear-eyed vision of Wichita's past, present, and future. From a stream of city branding mottos like 'Cow Town, ' 'The Air Capital of America, ' and 'Detroit of the Small Plane Age, ' to the Osage-inspired Keeper of the Plains, Billingham expertly charts the city's complicated cultural and historical landscape with a battery of important symbolic touchstones in between. This book firmly places Wichita on the great map of Urban America.""--Jonathan Wynn, author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport Billingham's history of contemporary Wichita serves as a stark reminder of the economic exigencies that impel even smaller cities to adopt financialized models of urban development. These policies promise to make cities economically competitive by promoting tourism, building entertainment complexes, and attracting a footloose creative class. As All-American City vividly shows, too often they exacerbate urban inequalities and erode local histories and culture.""--Jacob Lederman, author of Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires ""Billingham has, in exacting detail, outlined what happens when all the tricks and strategies of urban growth fail. All-American City shows us that Wichita's reticence to pool resources prevents it from building the predictably unique urban amenities that have defined American cities in the first quarter of the 21st century.""--David A. Banks, author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

Author Information

Chase M. Billingham is associate professor of sociology at Wichita State University.

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