Connecting better also important goal for Wichita

An Eagle editorial, pointing out that Wichita has surpassed both Cleveland and New Orleans in size, encouraged our city to “think and act like the top 50 American city it is” (June 5 Opinion). One key to doing so, apparently, is to grow more, and more quickly.

There’s some truth to that: More people often means more opportunities. But would such continued growth, if we can achieve it, actually help that much? I wonder.

More than population, Wichita struggles with perception. Too often, we measure ourselves against standards that, however appealing they may seem, result in us faulting ourselves for not being something that global demographic trends may not enable us to become anyway.

This isn’t a unique problem. Many small and midsize cities are deeply affected by the world economy but are limited in their ability to respond to them, mostly due to being located outside the urban agglomerations that anchor the major global flows of human and investment capital. “Small Cities USA” by Jon Norman characterized as successful only those cities that become “glocal” – that is, they become the regional hubs of “globalizable” industries and, consequently, absorb into themselves a regional population of workers and consumers.

When you look at movement of people out of small cities and towns of western Kansas, it’s obvious that Wichita is benefiting from that dynamic. But hoping a regional urban concentration will eventually reach critical mass and transform Wichita’s whole global situation feeds, I think, into expectations that miss what Wichita might better be able to achieve.

Rather than judging ourselves so much on downtown development or corporate investment, Wichitans should also recognize that our geographic situation allows us to develop strong connections to those products most essential to sustainable living: food, housing, energy and more.

As Catherine Tumber argued in “Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World,” cities like Wichita, which have natural and rural resources immediately at hand, can work with what is “proximate” to them, instead of obsessively trying to lure something (or somebody) new in. This is the kind of local work that ICT Food Circle, Seed to Feed, and dozens of other farmers and businesspeople are already heavily engaged in.

Obviously, Wichita needs to think about population trends. But let’s not focus so much on growth. Connecting better with what we already have, as opposed to always reaching for something more, is a good goal as well.

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 12:06 AM with the headline "Connecting better also important goal for Wichita."