So, “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan”?

By “Wichita,” I mean Wichita, Kansas. It’s a city of roughly 400,000 people, located in the south-central part of the state, and is the largest single municipality in the state (the Kansas City area is far larger, but only because Kansas City, KS, Oletha, and other suburbs and bedroom communities on the Kansas side of state border all get lumped together in with Kansas City, Missouri). Nearly half-million people isn’t a huge urban agglomeration, but it does make for a genuine, cosmopolitan city—but frequently the people who actually live here, as I have since 2006, don’t seem to believe that, or don’t understand what it means to act as if they did. So Wichita is a “mid-sized city” (though on the large end of how those are defined), and I’ve spent years, on and off, trying to figure out the implications of that particular urban reality.

By “mittelpolitan” I mean what I just wrote—a “mid-sized” city, and therefore not one that is truly, at least in terms of perception, though also arguably in terms of culture, economics, politics, and more, “metropolitan.” But it’s not small: not “micropolitian,” as U.S. Census defines these things. Can someone actually articulate a theory, a thesis, regarding a city that is definitionally, or at least as I am defining things, stuck between? That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, and am continuing to do here.

The image above is from an advertising campaign the was launched for now a long-defunct independent newspaper here in Wichita; the idea was to present the paper as a new “face” in the city, but obviously the actual effect of the visuals and the wording ended up only underscoring the rueful, “settling” attitude which so many struggle with here. That struggle is, I think, inseparable from the fact that we don’t have a good language for identifying with a city mainly defined as being not something else. So I hold on to the image, as a reminder of the language I hope to clumsily, eventually, work out.