(Re)Introducing Wichita and the Mittelpolitan, Again

A re-commitment to a local project, hopefully

Hello, all. I can’t imagine that there are many people reading this, at least initially, who won’t know what this is all about—but let’s do an introduction anyway.

By “Wichita” I mean my adopted home of the past 17 years: Wichita, Kansas, the largest single municipality in the state with a population of just under 400,000 people, which is more than two-thirds the population of its whole four-country metropolitan region. And by “mittelpolitan,” I mean a city—or cities, or more theoretically just a way of conceiving of urbanism in general—that is, among other things, often not considered at all “metropolitan,” whatever else Census categories may say. So in other words, a “middling” or mid-sized city: not a small town, but not a large urban agglomeration either, and not one that is growing or changing in the ways that “metropolitan” areas are assumed in the popular imagination to be. An imagination that is very much on the minds of many of the people who live in such second (or third, or fourth)-tier cities, whether they agree with it or not, as this old and unintentionally (and frustratingly) insightful ad campaign for a failed independent newspaper here in Wichita nearly 15 years ago makes clear.

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, the idea of exploring what community, democracy, sustainability, and more meant as a citizen in a mid-sized urban place, a place that couldn’t lean on the theoretical and sociological tropes associated with “The City” (as opposed to “The County” or “The Village” or whatever) to explain itself to itself, much less anyone else, really captivated me (partly due to the writings of Alan Jacobs, who “City Meditations” I return to with a 10th-anniversary tribute of sorts here). Since that summer, I’ve blogged and wrote and talked and presented about my ideas and explorations a great deal, but I’ve published, outside of the internet, exactly nothing about any of it. So some years ago I put up a blog titled “Mittelpolitanism” (see here), determined to try to force myself into getting my old hopes of writing a book on mid-sized cities off the ground. That didn't happen--so now I want to reconfigure things, and attempt a relaunch of this particular organizational effort. Hope springs eternal, I guess—and after all, it is June.

Part of this effort is to move over to Substack, dismiss the thematic tags I'd originally developed, and try to use this space both more frequently and also more organically. Basically, I think I need to stop holding back and stretching out and excessively molding those theoretical reflections of mine which occur to me in connection with my home of Wichita, all so as to make them "fit" with whatever theme I associate with "mittelpolitanism," and instead to write about my city as I see fit, and see what I can discover about mittelpolitanism through whatever patterns emerge. Of course, that means I need to produce more content; the mystic can only discern patterns among the tossed chicken bones when sufficient bones have been tossed. So this will require both a certain degree of discipline, as well as the ability to be undisciplined in my approach. We'll see if it works.

By relaunching this website with the title "Wichita and the Mittelpolitan," I am hoping to accustom myself to this perspective; it's a hack, in other words. If I have anything to say about Wichita and its environs, its politics, its people, its culture and arts and more, I'm going to put it here, whether or not I can draw any kind of theoretically mittelpolitan insights from those comments. I'm also going to attempt to regularly review, update, and rethink what I've written before about mittelpolitan concepts, and urban issues pertaining to scale, governance, sustainability, identity, and more which attend them. Most of the data in the early posts—and please, feel free to scan through them!—here is nearly if not more than 10 years old; hopefully, by the end of 2023, that won't be the case any longer. If I am at all successful with making this blog a more regular contributor to the discourse about Wichita and cities like it, then maybe in time I'll actually have some readers who will appreciate seeing that updated information. If not, well, at least I'll be maintaining a place to pull it up when I need to find it.

Okay, onward!