Becoming Uniquely Urban: A Small City’s Socio-Environmental Development Since 1945

Recent scholarship has called for renewed critical interest in both small cities and urban-environmental relationships. Work focusing on small city economic development as a socio-environmental process is well-positioned to address both of these calls. In this article, I track the small city of Geneva, New York’s socio-environmental development since 1945, using primary and secondary archival documents including planning and natural resource reports, personal correspondences, meeting minutes, and newspaper stories. I ask: how and why have developers engaged with nature to make and remake—and in doing so, imagine and reimagine—the small city through time? I find that local developers remade and reimagined the small city’s connectedness to nature to portray Geneva as urban, rural, or both in response to shifting economic opportunities. Geneva’s official “urban” status, small scale, and proximity to scenic nature played into a “uniquely urban” brand that developers used to bolster economic growth. In this way, developers render the small city a growth machine in ways that are comparable to both larger cities and smaller rural places. These findings shed greater light on the varying political-economic processes and relationships between larger “urban” and smaller “rural” places.