Six. Small Towns, Poverty, and Addiction

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was launched in 2005 to address the growing challenges of urbanisation by improving infrastructure, governance and the quality of life in cities. This chapter assesses all the four sub-missions that fall under the JNNURM that is to say UIG (Urban Infrastructure and Governance) and BSUP (Basic Services for the Urban Poor) for big cities and UIDSSMT (Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns) and IHSDP (Integrated Housing and Slum Development Program) for small and medium towns. Being the largest and only scheme directed at urban rejuvenation, it merits research to understand the course of urban policy in India. Within the policy framework, a bias towards developing big cities at the cost of small and medium towns is an important question for any subsequent policy on urban development. The analysis ascertains that a larger proportion of the urban population resides in the small and medium towns that are eligible for the UIDSSMT and IHSDP schemes rather than in the big cities, which can access funding from the UIG and BSUP sub-missions. However, this larger share of the urban population that falls under UIDSSMT and IHSDP has received a much smaller share of central assistance as compared to the big city UIG and BSUP schemes. The chapter therefore discusses the rise in urban poverty, lack of capacity building and poor performance in the delivery of basic services in small towns in India, arguing that central funds could have been more useful in these small towns than in big cities. The chapter finally attempts to emphasise the benefits of small town development that can help neighbouring villages access urban amenities, employment and eventually aid their transformation into urban centres.

The industrial small-town development process in Shandong is influenced by the urban agglomeration strategy and the regional collaborative production, thereby resulting in a challenge of growth boundary planning. How to build a growth forecast decision support system to help small industrial towns maintain sustainable development with limited trial and error costs is an essential topic in the current research of small town-related fields. Empirical analysis reveals that the growth factors of small towns differ from the factors of cities due to the other-organization planning management system and self-organization construction activities that coexist in small towns. Besides, due to the size of small towns, the impact of policy changes in small towns is more significant than in cities. Furthermore, as part of the regional production chain, small industrial towns are most vulnerable to uncertain external disturbances. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate different development scenarios according to possible disturbances and output corresponding development forecasts. The research aims to build a decision-making support system for Shandong’s small-town planning based on an urban modeling approach using geographic information technology and scenario planning. Considering the mutually driving effects of the objective environment and subjective policies of Shandong’s industrial towns, as well as the corresponding dynamic mechanisms and comparing the theoretical basis and limitations of the different modeling approaches, this essay constructs a model system based on a mathematical model and a system dynamics model. It is also an interactive model accompanied by applicable rules and factors so that initial information and relevant development goals can be inputted into the model system to simulate the influence of different policies and identify the small industrial town growth scenarios.

Small towns remain an important element of the settlement framework in the Russian Federation. Socio-economic status, settlement functions and motives of residents determine the prospects for the development or degradation of small towns. The article aims to classify existing and identify new factors in the socio-economic development of small border towns. The paper examined and analysed a set of Russian and foreign publications, as well as collected statistics from small towns in the Russian-Belarusian border area. A scientific hypothesis about the influence of border factors and interstate integration on socio-economic changes in small towns of the Russian-Belarusian border area was tested. As a result, new functions and socio-economic factors of small border towns were identified. The border position of a small town can be a development factor if the barrier of the interstate border remains. It was established that the population decline in small towns of the Russian-Belarusian border area is greater in comparison with its regional indicators and large cities. Investments in fixed capital per capita during the analysed period, with rare exceptions, do not exceed 50 % of the region’s value. However, the number of square metres of housing per capita in small towns is higher than the regional average. A proposed supranational strategy for the development of the Russian-Belarusian border area will help stimulate the economy of small towns and improve the quality of life of the population. When strategically planning the development of small towns in the Russian-Belarusian border area, it is necessary to determine their economic functions, define a specialisation to emphasise their identity and use competitive advantages in the struggle for resources with larger agglomerations.

Reviewed by: The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch Emily Prifogle Julianne Couch, The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $35.00. Since at least the early nineteenth century, travelers, politicians, and reformers, as well as urban and rural residents alike, have claimed that the small midwestern town was disappearing, for better or worse. The decline of small-town communities is discussed today most frequently in the context of the rural opioid crisis and the voting patterns of the 2016 presidential election. The message is clear: rural communities are struggling in terms of economics, health, and education. Yet, Julianne Couch's The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century examines small communities that are surviving, some even thriving, in the Great Plains region. [End Page 142] Her travelogue visits nine small-town communities to seek out "the qualities that make people stick to small, rural places" (3). Couch's nine chapters, each devoted to a particular community, take her reader on a journey from Wyoming, where she lived until recently, through Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and then finally to Iowa, where she now resides. Couch tends to use the term small town more than rural to describe the communities she visits, and she focuses on using population size and access to goods and services to define what counts as "small." Couch implicitly recognizes the diversity among small towns. She likewise recognizes that the nine communities in her book might not be representative of even the Great Plains region, let alone the census-designated midwestern states. But that seems to be—at least partially—the point. There is far more variation across, and less harmony within, heartland small communities than many might expect. Moreover, Couch approaches the towns and her writing as "an interested traveler." While her work is informed by social science research, she does not purport to engage in academic analysis (9). Indeed, those looking for a sharp-eyed account of the underbelly of midwestern small towns will not find it here. The reader encounters most frequently the successful town boosters that have managed to keep a small community afloat, and that is the book's strength. Couch takes residents and their communities on their own terms with a healthy dose of skepticism but without condescension. From this perspective, she reveals the hope and resilience that remains within small midwestern towns. The reader meanders through the towns with Couch, being passed from one store owner to another, or from the local historian to the director of the local development organization. As the reader meets the towns' boosters, many recurring issues will be familiar to those who have studied or lived in small towns: outmigration, conservative politics, local history and tourism, homogenizing pressures, infrastructure challenges, aging populations, lack of healthcare services, and the centrality of local schools. One of the most striking themes is the mobility of rural residents. We know that many rural people travel long distances to work in more densely populated hubs, but in Couch's travels, the reader finds a different type of mobility. Many, perhaps even most, of the civic leaders Couch interviews have not lived in the same small town for their entire lives. Some were born into a rural community but moved away for education or a career only to find that employment, family, or retirement brought them back to the same [End Page 143] or a similar small town. Still others have left their city life to "escape" to the country. Couch herself is one of the latter type of rural itinerants, many of whom (like Couch) are creative individuals who provide rural communities with art, music, and theater. These residents add dynamism to the communities chronicled here, and it is primarily through their eyes that Couch explores the qualities of small towns that draw people to them. This dynamism, however, is matched by a "social-norming machinery" in the communities that sanctions transgressive behavior, including holding liberal political views, living outside of a heterosexual nuclear family, not attending a Christian church, or even proposing too bold...

Ancient towns and villages are an important cultural heritage of the Chinese nation. With the acceleration of urbanization, many ancient towns and villages have been blindly developed and destroyed without proper protection planning, leading to the increasingly prominent contradiction between protection and development of ancient towns and villages. Using the concept of "grey land" as reference, this paper explores the multiple planning of ancient villages and towns and the small-scale progressive protection, development and utilization in the process of new urbanization. Taking puqian town, wenchang city, hainan province as an example, this paper deeply analyzes the status quo of puqian town and makes a phased plan for it. On the basis of the initial planning meeting the needs of the current situation, the follow-up planning leaves room for transformation and renewal, so as to construct a new round of protection measures and planning methods for puqian town. Through multiple rounds of protection guidance planning, puqian town has improved its functions, business forms and space environment, and put forward the strategy of progressive space protection and development of ancient villages and towns, injecting new impetus into the protection and development of ancient villages and towns, and promoting the protection and sustainable development of ancient villages and towns.

This book explores how some of the specific sectors, organisations and actors influence and shape the functioning of small towns in Africa. A number of the contributors of the volume point to the resilience and ingenuity of Africa's rural and urban population and demonstrate how they adapt strategies which enables them to survive and, in some cases, even to thrive. Case studies are drawn from Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The volume fills a gap for undergraduate and graduate courses in geography, sociology, anthropology, development studies, as well as urban and rural planning.

Relevance. Small historical towns in Russia are currently facing many problems. At the same time, they play a special role in the socio-economic and spatial development of their regions and the country as a whole. A huge number of small towns have significant, often hidden reserves for their successful development through the improvement of the tourism industry. The cluster model of tourism organization is very effective due to the cooperation of various enterprises and elements of urban infrastructure and as a result of creating a high-quality tourism product and increasing the competitiveness of small towns. A promising territory for creating a tourism cluster (TC) is the city of Torzhok, Tver region, Russia. Torzhok is located in relative proximity to big cities and is a monument of Russian urban art. This fact indicates the real possibility of the city to become an attractive object of cultural tourism. In urban planning, the greatest interest in the organization of tourism clusters is their spatial organization and elemental composition. To date, none of the developed TC models reflects the characteristics of the spatial organization of TC elements on the territory of small historic towns. It is necessary to develop a model that would eliminate this drawback. The purpose and objectives. Development of a model of spatial organization of tourism clusters in small towns of Russia, which will take into account the needs and preferences of potential tourists, pedestrian and transport accessibility of cluster elements. To achieve this purpose, the following objectives were solved: - to analyze domestic and foreign experience in studying the structural and elemental composition of tourism clusters. Identify the main elements of the TC. - to conduct a sociological study in order to determine the tourist demand of travelers to small towns in Russia - to develop a model of the spatial organization of a tourism cluster. Methodology. When studying the theoretical foundations of the formation of tourism clusters, scientific articles and abstracts of dissertations were considered. The subject of the study was the structure and elemental composition of the TC. As part of the study, a sociological survey was conducted among potential tourists traveling to small historical towns of Russia to determine the necessary set of TC elements and their pedestrian accessibility. Results. The article considers the issue of spatial organization of tourism clusters on the territory of small historic towns of Russia and their elemental composition. The developed models of the spatial organization of the tourism cluster are presented, taking into account the needs and preferences of potential tourists, namely the necessary set of elements of the tourism cluster and their pedestrian accessibility. The models were built on the basis of the results of a sociological study conducted by the author of this article. Conclusion. The proposed models of the spatial organization of the tourism cluster will allow the most rational arrangement of tourist infrastructure facilities, which will create comfortable conditions for tourists and, as a result, a high level of tourist services. The model can be used by local authorities when developing planning solutions for tourism clusters in small historic town of Russia.

The relevance of choosing small tourist towns with a population of up to 50 thousand inhabitants as research objects in terms of supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is explained by the difficulty of achieving financial self-sufficiency of these territorial entities. The subject of the study is the system of state support for SMEs in small tourist cities of Russia. The objectives of the work are to assess the current development of SMEs in small tourist towns, systematize measures and tools of state support for SMEs and develop proposals for their improvement. The hypothesis of the study is the assumption that small and medium-sized businesses are a catalyst for the economy of a small tourist city. The article combines the concepts of "small town", "tourist territory", "resort town", "small tourist town". As research methods, the article applied a systematic approach to the study of the characteristics of SME activities in small tourist towns, analysis of the regulatory framework, statistical analysis of the dynamics of SME performance indicators. The practical significance of the study lies in the formation of proposals based on the systematization of state support measures for SMEs in relation to small tourist towns, providing for increased transparency of information and simplified reporting on support measures provided to SMEs; stimulating local brands; improving the investment climate by reducing the complexity of business procedures through the creation of roadmaps; development of tourist clusters through participation in more global value chains; providing high-speed Internet access and promoting high-speed broadband access to it. The tax instrument is the tourist tax introduced from 2025, the introduction of which is ambiguously assessed by experts due to the fact that it will be levied from places of collective accommodation of tourists, increasing the tax burden on them and thereby causing hoteliers to leave the shadow sector.

Two small villages in Nepal are the subjects of case studies that illustrate the role of small towns in provision of services, employment, and market operations. Some general findings are that small towns act as service centers for distribution of basic essential goods such as food grains, salt, kerosene, and fabric for hill and mountain areas. The role of small towns as market centers and in the provision of employment is limited. In resource-poor areas small towns are less diversified. Towns with agricultural surpluses are more developed. Small hill towns satisfy consumption rather than production needs. The growth of rural areas and towns in rural areas in Nepal is dependent on arable land and levels of production in hill areas. Limited land and low levels of production have an adverse impact. Movement of people, goods, and services is limited by difficult terrain and lack of access to good roads. Variability in access to off-farm jobs and services available in small towns varies with ethnicity and place of residence. The best development strategy for small towns in Nepal is market-oriented territorial development, which retains surpluses in the local area and integrates markets in the larger economy. The strategy would decentralize planning into small territorial units that include both small towns and groups of villages, provide institutional support for the rural poor, expand off-farm employment, and include investment in region-serving functions. Subsistence agriculture needs to include diversification of high value cash crops based on local comparative advantage suitable for hill climate and terrain. Small farmers must produce both cash and subsistence crops. Government should provide market space and paved areas, weighing facilities, and overnight storage facilities. Products would be processed at the village level. Subdistricts must be established according to spatial and social linkages between villages and the service center and coordinated at the district level. Group marketing, transport to large urban centers, and agricultural technical services are needed.

Efficient space utilization to address territorial imbalances is one of the key conditions for ensuring Russia's national security. Achieving balanced spatial development necessitates tapping into and consolidating the potential of diverse types of locales. However, a substantial portion of the economic bonds forged during the Soviet era, particularly along the "city-village" axis, have been lost. The negative consequences of these processes have been acutely felt in the small towns of the North, which represent the predominant settlement type in this region. This article seeks to evaluate the state of affairs and establish the priorities for modernizing the economies of small Northern towns through the activation of intermunicipal economic ties. Methodologically, the study draws upon principles from regional, spatial, and urban economics, and harnesses data from Rosstat, SPARK and Contour.Focus databases, and local government reports. The article is based on case study, historical, economic, and statistical research methods. The novelty of the study lies in its assessment of the emergence and trajectory of economic relationships among small Northern towns in Russia. It unveils that in the post-Soviet period, city economies underwent simplification due to the collapse of certain specialized sectors at regional and local levels and the disintegration of economic ties between small towns and villages. However, cities embedded within networks of large vertically integrated corporations and exhibiting robust industrial connections with urban agglomerations possess the potential for modernization. Conversely, detachment from these networks can cause economic stagnation. The article underscores the priorities and instruments for revitalizing small towns, aimed at diversifying their economies by intensifying economic collaborations with major cities and rural areas within both traditional (industrial) and innovative economic sectors. The research results can serve as a scientific and methodological foundation for crafting development strategies and programs for small Northern towns. Further research avenues include substantiating promising city specializations at the macro and national levels.

Small towns under influence of multiple factors become a new type of human settlement. As new urbanization picks up speed in China, the prime time comes for rapider development of small towns. Countryside landscape is a kind of humanized natural beauty, which brings into environment natural idyllic scenery and simple regional culture. The paper attempts to introduce countryside landscape into landscape design of small towns, with a view to finding principles and methods to apply countryside landscape into landscape design of small contemporary towns of China. This includes integration of styles and features of countryside landscape on a macro-level, and application of countryside landscape into landscape design of small contemporary towns on a micro-level. Keywords—Countryside Landscape; Small Towns; Landscape Design; Integration of Styles and Features

The paper focuses on the changes to the industrial structure of small Moravian towns as these towns are part of the settlement structure that connects urban and rural systems. Small towns (of up to 15,000 inhabitants) are the most industrialized part of the Czech settlement system. They were the subject of capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as socialist industrialization in the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, the research question asks how the small-town sector coped with the transition to a post-productive society and how small towns were differentiated during this process. Population censuses were the main tool used to gather data for comparison. Today, small towns have preserved, in particular, less innovatively demanding industries, which have been pushed out of large and medium-sized cities. At the same time, they are undergoing a process of post-productive transformation which is associated with a massive transfer of job opportunities to services, but they can also become starting points for cultural tourism in rural areas. However, their future development will be very differentiated depending on their location concerning regional centres, on the quality of human and social capital and also on their historical pathways.

Reviewed by: Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History Jack Glazier Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History, by Lee Shai Weissbach. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 436 pp. $45.00. Patterns of Jewish life in small American towns took shape from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II. That period began with the settlement of German and Central European Jews throughout the United States, followed by the settlement of eastern European Jews in the four decades after 1881. By the mid-twentieth century, Jewish communal life in small towns had reached a high point, but an array of social, economic, and demographic forces pointed toward the inevitable decline of those communities. Small Jewish communities emerged in small American towns, although most of the latter lacked any Jewish population at all. American cities by contrast consistently attracted large Jewish concentrations, and indeed our understanding of the American Jewish experience is conditioned by the predominantly urban character of Jewish life. By the mid-1920s, nearly 200 American cities had Jewish populations of at least a thousand people. At the same time that most Jews were gravitating toward large and midsize urban locales, others were establishing themselves in towns of modest size, many of which counted their Jewish population in the hundreds. Understanding the organization and dynamics of these "triple-digit" communities—those places with a Jewish population of more than a hundred but less than a thousand—is the worthy task that Lee Shai Weissbach has set for himself. In 1927, 490 triple digit Jewish communities dotted the country, yet until the publication of this important volume we have had very little analytical understanding of how Jews made their way in these locales. Instead, we have had to rely on amateur local histories, synagogue commemorative volumes, and the like. But this is not a dry, academic account. It is instead a lively, well written, and accessible book, rich in illustrative cases, about a segment of American Jewish life long neglected by historians and social scientists. It is sure to interest a lay readership as well. Ranging widely across the 490 communities, Weissbach singles out a dozen representative towns for closer scrutiny. He relies on demographic data from the federal census as well as population figures from various Jewish [End Page 204] sources. City directories, local community and synagogue histories, newspaper and magazine stories, and archival papers, including those of the Industrial Removal Office, also provided very useful material for the author's painstaking research. In chapters on settlement patterns, population stability and mobility, livelihood and class, family life, congregational organization, synagogue history, religious leadership, cultural patterns among both German and eastern European Jews, and prejudice, Weissbach argues that "place matters." "Place" is indeed the leitmotif of the book. Small Jewish communities and their larger urban counterparts of course shared many common features, including the estrangements and affinities between German and eastern European Jews and Jewish efforts in general to remain distinct while still seeking acceptance by non-Jewish neighbors. Large and small communities alike also struggled with their desire to insure Jewish cultural and/or religious continuity between generations at the same time that those efforts were undermined by cultural assimilation and other blandishments of a society gradually removing its barriers against Jews, if not Americans of African descent. Yet because place matters, triple-digit communities were not simply projections onto a smaller screen of Jewish life in cities. Rather, Jewish institutions and conduct in small towns were adaptations in their own right to the distinctive local environment, including its social, economic, geographical, and demographic features. Triple-digit communities were, for example, more economically monolithic—almost completely middle class—than either large or midsize Jewish communities, where a Jewish working class and Jewish poverty were apparent. Middle-class status in small communities was established predominantly through retail trade as Jews became merchants or entrepreneurs in such businesses as junk collecting. Challenges of small town living such as providing a Jewish education for their children, promoting endogamous marriage by expanding their children's Jewish contacts beyond the community, organizing synagogues, procuring the services of a rabbi, arranging for a kosher meat supply...

The paper explores the role of small towns in the Mazovia region in Poland which is both characterized by rural areas and the suburban zone of Warsaw. The analysis of changes in the local labour markets reveals that microregions formed by small peripheral towns were more resistant to changes than those located in the suburban area of Warsaw. The latter were absorbed by the capital city whose zone of influence expanded in the detriment of adjacent small towns and their microregions. Using the concept of exogenous functions performed by small towns, we also shed light on their role with regard to the surrounding areas (with dominant agricultural function) in the past decade. The values of the service concentration index (SCI) and the level of population concentration showed that the majority of services to local and neighbouring inhabitants were delivered in small county towns located in the periphery. On the other hand, small county towns located in the vicinity of Warsaw mainly provided services to their inhabitants.

In the spring of 1959, with the approval of the General Assembly and the signature of Governor Abraham Ribicoff, Connecticut officially proclaimed itself the “Constitution State.” The nickname, later emblazoned on license plates from Greenwich to the Quiet Corner, represented a claim on the state's place in constitutional history. Connecticut, the birthplace of what sympathetic historians and proud state residents claim was the Western Hemisphere's first written constitution, congratulated itself for helping develop a system of government that changed the world.1Only six years later, the federal courts found Connecticut's constitution guilty of “invidious discrimination” against the state's residents and forced the “Constitution State” to completely rework its approach to political representation at a mandated and long overdue constitutional convention.2 Generations of failed attempts at reform had left Connecticut's legislature under minority rule, with the state's many small towns using their guarantee of equal representation in the state's General Assembly to overwhelm the political and legislative power of much bigger cities and towns. Despite its proud history, Connecticut was an example of constitutional failure and political inequality.3 How did Connecticut's constitution become so outdated and its system of representation so unequal, and what does this history reveal about the potential fallibility of constitutional government?From the Connecticut constitution's first iteration in 1639 to its repudiation by the federal judiciary in 1965, entrenched power, unforeseen societal change, and partisan incentives caused the state's founding document to become increasingly discriminatory against the state's population centers. Over centuries, Connecticut's struggle to reform its inequitable system of representation demonstrated how politics and partisanship can keep even the most outdated constitutional provisions firmly in place.Extensive literature has shown that state constitutions are more readily reformed than the United States Constitution. According to the legal historian Lawrence Friedman, state constitutions “have tended, on the whole, to be less durable,” receiving thousands of amendments throughout their history, compared to just twenty-seven for the United States Constitution.4 As Michael Besso wrote in a 2005 article published in The Journal of Politics, “the procedural burden for amendment of the federal constitution is significantly greater than the comparative burdens in states,” making state constitutions easier to change.5Despite this greater level of flexibility, the high bar for revising even state constitutions, combined with the forces of entrenched political power, has at times protected outdated and unequal political structures. As Friedman wrote in his classic text A History of American Law, “old rules of law and old legal institutions stay alive when they still have a purpose.”6 In the case of Connecticut's town-based system of representation, the old rules of law served a purpose for the dominant political faction, which then used its disproportionate power and the rigidity of the constitutional system to maintain discriminatory and archaic institutions and oppress rival constituencies. The story of Connecticut's constitution over three centuries demonstrates the problematic durability of written constitutions. Although written constitutions are fundamental to most modern systems of government, their inflexibility can also block crucial change, lock in enduring inequality, and cause potentially dangerous political strife.In the spring of 1638, the leading men of three Connecticut towns—Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield—sowed the seeds of future discord when they drafted one of the Western Hemisphere's first written constitutions. In this document, referred to as “The Fundamental Orders,” Connecticut's founders made a crucial and fateful choice: they established equal town representation in the colony's new legislature. “It is Ordered, sentenced, and decreed,” the Fundamental Orders declared, “that Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield shall have power, each Town, to send four of their Freemen as their deputies to every General Court.”7 With this decision to establish equal representation for municipalities rather than people, the founders of Connecticut unwittingly laid the foundation for their state's three century-long crisis of political inequality.The Connecticut Charter of 1662 further formalized this practice of equal town representation. In 1660, after Charles II assumed the throne in England, the new king negotiated with the Connecticut Colony to produce a charter that would cement the status of its government under the monarchy. The charter, which the king signed in 1662, continued the government set up by the Fundamental Orders, but with the royal stamp of approval.8 Much like the Fundamental Orders of 1639, this document provided for a legislature of “assistants” “not exceeding Two Persons from each Place, Town, or City.”9 By outlining this system in the state's supreme legal document, Connecticut's colonial political leaders embedded the principle of equal town representation in the heart of their government.The decision to grant each town equal representation in the chartered legislature was not a political choice or an ideological stand. Connecticut's founders likely derived this decision from the structure of the March Commission, which governed Connecticut from 1636 to 1637 while Connecticut negotiated its relationship with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The March Commission consisted of eight local magistrates: two each from Windsor, Hartford, Wethersfield, and the northern town of Springfield, which later left the Connecticut colony.10 Giving each town the same number of representatives caused no grave injustice, because each of Connecticut's original towns had similarly small populations. Finally, the decision to limit representation at two per town probably reflected the repeated requests of town leaders to reduce the number of representatives in order to save money.11Equal town representation, while uncontroversial in the 1600s, contradicted a principle expressed elsewhere in the state's founding documents: People, not towns, were the fundamental unit of politics in Connecticut. “We the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield,” the Fundamental Orders proclaimed, “do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth.”12 Reverend Thomas Hooker, a leading figure in Connecticut's founding, similarly emphasized the centrality of “the people” to the colony's new government. In a famous 1638 sermon before Connecticut's inaugural General Court, Hooker declared, “The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people. . . . The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance.”13 While Hooker's address and the text of the Fundamental Orders indicated that Connecticut's government should be based on the principle of political equality between people, the equal town representation system instead granted political equality to towns. This misalignment of law and values would become a key point of contention during later debates about the apportionment rules for the Connecticut General Assembly.The process by which the people of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield created the state of Connecticut differed from the way in which Connecticut's older sibling to the north, Massachusetts, had been established years earlier. Whereas the inhabitants of Connecticut's first three towns came together to “conjoin” themselves “as one Public State,” the Commonwealth of Massachusetts instead grew out of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the towns of Massachusetts were each created in turn by this higher, original body.14 The precedent and proximity of Massachusetts, with its corporate town-state relationship, may have contributed to the persistent myth that Connecticut evolved from its towns, three of which had preceded the state, rather than the people, who the Fundamental Orders cited as Connecticut's true creators.In addition to establishing the people as Connecticut's basic political unit, the Fundamental Orders explicitly suggested that population should be considered when determining the representation given to new towns in the future. The Fundamental Orders stated, “Whatsoever other Town shall be hereafter added to this Jurisdiction, they shall send so many deputies as the Court shall judge meet a reasonable proportion to the number of Freemen that are in the said Towns being to be attended therein.”15 This gesture towards proportional representation never amounted to anything in the decades after the signing of the Fundamental Orders, because the similar populations of Connecticut's first collection of towns made it mostly irrelevant. The language requiring that representation be based on population then disappeared when the Charter of 1662 guaranteed two representatives to each town.Through the American Revolution and beyond, each new town in Connecticut was treated as if it were a new shareholder with equal voting rights on a corporate board. Despite the fact that equal town representation actually contradicted Connecticut's original theory of itself as a state created by its people, the practice continued even as the colony became a state. The system's longevity owed in large part to Connecticut's early leaders’ decision to include equal town representation, without much thought to its long-term consequences, in the state's founding documents. Thus, constitutional inertia exerted its power on Connecticut.Even as dozens of new towns incorporated and earned representation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Connecticut was one of only two states (the other being Rhode Island) that did not write and ratify a constitution during the revolutionary era. Instead, Connecticut allowed its constitutional charter—and its system of equal town representation—to persist into the nineteenth century.16 In the 1780s, Connecticut modified its town representation system slightly, establishing that towns created after the revolution would receive one representative as opposed to two. Notes from General Assembly business in 1786 and a letter published in the Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer in 1787 show that this decision was mostly about saving money and preventing the House of Representatives from becoming “a cumbersome over-grown body.” (At least one legislator, however, argued that the entire system of equal town representation needed reform because “the present mode of representation is very unequal.”)17 During this period, Connecticut's larger cities and towns were somewhat disadvantaged by the equal town representation system, though they still managed to exert significant influence over state politics through their power on the Council, the archaic second chamber of the Connecticut legislature which was a bulwark of Congregationalism, federalism, and “aristocratic” urban power in the state.18 The power-balancing effect of the Council, Connecticut's fairly equal population distribution, and simple political inertia allowed the state's process of legislative apportionment to continue into the early nineteenth century in much the same way as had been outlined in Connecticut's founding documents.19In 1817 and 1818, a coalition of Tolerationists and Republicans swept the long-governing Federalists out of office, and Connecticut's new General Assembly quickly called for a constitutional convention. The coalition sought to disestablish the Congregational church, expand the franchise, and create an independent judiciary. The Tolerationists and Democratic-Republicans’ electoral victory brought Connecticut its first significant opportunity for constitutional reform. Yet the delegate selection process for the constitutional convention demonstrated the self-perpetuating nature of political power: every town sent the same number of delegates to the convention as they had representatives. Thus, each town founded before 1780 sent two delegates, while the newer towns sent one each.20 Any controversy over this decision is not apparent in the historical record, possibly due to tradition and the fact that the towns were of reasonably similar sizes.Though the Constitutional Convention of 1818 focused primarily on debates over religious toleration, a few delegates called attention to the issue of equal representation. When the convention's agenda turned to Article III, Section III of the constitution, which outlined the structure of the legislature, several delegates moved to amend the system of equal town representation so that larger towns would get more seats in the General Assembly. According to an account of the convention by the Connecticut Courant, Robert Fairchild of Stratford proposed that “each town containing 2,500 persons or more, shall be entitled to two Representatives, and every town, containing a lesser number, shall be entitled to one Representative only, the population to be ascertained by the census next preceding any election.”21 James Stevens, a Tolerationist from Stamford, immediately moved to change the threshold to 4,000. With little recorded debate, however, both proposals were brought to a vote and rejected.22The somewhat equal geographic distribution of Connecticut's population during this era weakened the arguments of reformers seeking to change Connecticut's system of representation. Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary, a Democratic politician who wrote a historical account of the Connecticut constitution that was published in 1900, explained that in 1818, “Connecticut was made up entirely of country towns and the difference in population was comparatively unimportant.”23 At the time of the 1820 census, 102 of the 122 towns had between one and four thousand people, and no town had more than 8,327 people or fewer than 731. Though the population of Connecticut in 1818 was more unequally distributed than it was in 1639 or 1662, at the time of the 1818 Constitutional Convention, equal town representation did not yet severely disadvantage urban residents relative to their more rural neighbors.Following the defeat of Fairchild and Stevens’ proposals to enhance the power of larger towns, the 1818 Convention delegates continued to discuss the issue of representation, revealing a philosophical rift between advocates of equal representation and supporters of proportional representation. James Lanman, a Democratic-Republican from Norwich, spoke first. Lanman “declared himself opposed to doing any thing at all” to change the system of representation. He argued that “the people had not sent” the delegates to the convention; “the towns had sent them.” “Representation right was secured to the Towns,” Lanman claimed. Lanman, citing a belief that towns had corporate rights under state government, questioned his colleagues: “Would gentlemen destroy corporate rights?”24 “As the law now stands,” Lanman argued, “the right of franchise, was predicated on property,” a system “agreeable to the personal rights of the people, and the interest of the inhabitants.” Lanman believed that towns and property, not people, should be the basic political units in Connecticut. Additionally, he argued that the convention did not have the power to change the system of apportionment because the towns were entitled to equal representation. “It was vested in them from the beginning, and the Convention could not touch it—the spirit of the time would not admit of its being touched,” he declared.25Former Governor John Treadwell, a Federalist from Farmington, believed, by contrast, that Connecticut should operate under a system of representation based on population. Treadwell “doubted very much the correctness of [Lanman's] opinion.” He argued that the delegates “were representatives of the freemen, and not of the towns; and justice required the representation to be regulated by the census.” Treadwell believed that “the most populous towns should be entitled to the greatest number of Representatives.” While Treadwell acknowledged that complete equality in representation “was impossible,” because the number of people and legislative districts did not divide perfectly, he nonetheless argued that Connecticut should “fix on a proportion” so that the people could “have a full representation.”26General Nathaniel Terry, a leading Hartford Federalist, went further than Treadwell, arguing in favor of a theory of representation that would generations later be known as “one person, one vote.” While Terry admitted that his speech “might be unavailing” to the small-town delegations opposed to reform, he felt obligated “to advocate correct principles.” “The theory of this government is a democracy,” Terry declared. “A representative democracy,” in fact, which “is a form of government derived from the people.” Terry asked his fellow delegates to consider the first democracies, in which every citizen convened to make decisions: “If the people meet as originally, to transact their business, would there not be an equality of their votes? Would not each vote count, and the vote of one individual be equal to that of another? If so, ought we not then, to follow the same rule?” Terry warned of a future Connecticut when population imbalances between towns might lead to extreme inequalities of representation: The time will come, when certain towns in the state will have fifteen thousand inhabitants, and shall no provision be made for such a state of things? We are sanctioning the very principle, which was the cause of the unequal representation in England—if you sanction this principle, you break down the land marks of democracy, and you destroy the foundations of democratic government.27Terry believed the 1818 convention presented an opportunity to save Connecticut from the “evil” of continuing political inequality, and he urged his fellow delegates to consider the fundamental democratic principles of Connecticut's government during this window for change.28Despite Terry's forceful case for population-based representation, political opposition from the smaller towns thwarted reform, and the “land of steady habits” kept its 180-year-old system of legislative apportionment. Article III of the Connecticut Constitution of 1818 stated, “The number of Representatives from each town shall be the same as at present practiced and allowed. In case a new town shall hereafter be incorporated, such new town shall be entitled to one Representative only.”29 Ultimately, too many delegates, especially those from rural areas, agreed with Lanman's belief that equal representation “was vested in [the towns] from the beginning, and the Convention could not touch it.” U.S. Congressman Timothy Pitkin, a Federalist from Farmington, exemplified the common sentiment that it would be “inexpedient” to change the system of representation. “The representation of Connecticut has always been by towns, and I would keep it so,” said Pitkin.30 The small-town delegates agreed that reform would be an objectionable overruling of tradition and far too disruptive, not to mention detrimental to their political interests, and their disproportionate majority prevailed.Connecticut's legislative apportionment system became increasingly imbalanced after 1818, as societal changes began to concentrate more and more residents in urban areas. The growth of industry and urban commerce in the state, spurred on by the passage of Connecticut's Joint Stock Act in 1837, caused “economic changes of great importance,” according to a historical account in the New York Times. As “a of the people came according to the Times. “The from the to the cities and for the population of Connecticut's centers. As the cities small towns while to no population changes the more population distribution of Connecticut's In of the state's population in in to expand the during this the of the in and the of after the also the number of in Connecticut's the in representation between and small population had become a with a population of had the same representation of two as New which had a population of Hartford, a with a population of the same legislative power in the state House of Representatives as a town in Connecticut with a population of just As Connecticut's cities the system of apportionment outlined by the Constitution of 1818 became increasingly out of with any of political equality individual to reform the system of equal town representation as Connecticut's apportionment system grew more to democratic the Hartford Courant called for a constitutional convention to the in the mode of representation which the present of The Courant We that no who system of representation and who is not by the power which it into the small towns, will continue to advocate its when they the and of its and its system, the Courant argued, had only the 1818 convention because the delegates had been to the defeat of the of that constitution's as the small towns might have down the entire document their unequal representation were from them.” The Courant “the system in this state, is a representation of not of the the and legislature, however, to be Though the General Assembly used the legislative amendment process to change the 1818 Constitution a number of times during the nineteenth Connecticut's small towns, by their in the legislature, always constitutional reform to the system of legislative apportionment. for a over the state's system of representation, of the General Assembly to a constitutional convention in and their In the early advocates the of Governor Charles a New who served from to In however, the the House a for a constitutional convention by a vote of to with the small towns Representatives from Hartford and New the most populous in the state, to in but the of the state's to The failed in Connecticut, always by its dozens of small and towns, a system those rural power, granted by the constitution, to the reformers did to make small According to Melbert Connecticut the of the census of were the of the system had become so that there was a in many of the state to the the Constitutional a to Connecticut's system of representation. According to Cary, of the leading of both political were and the throughout the state and to the legislature to a constitutional In the legislature to this a constitutional amendment every town of at least people two representatives in the state In the legislature on this reform by amendment that said that no new town after that point could have any representation at in the General Assembly it had at least 2,500 amendments to of the most inequalities caused by the legislative apportionment system, such as the fact that a new but town with a population of more than had only one while many towns with fewer than residents had two with Connecticut's system of representation went far the state House of Connecticut's state was also of the state's population. The 1818 constitution had mandated that there be with no mention of districts or In a constitutional amendment the state into had been the number of from to a larger number, set by the legislature at in The amendment that the districts should be with being had to the and that the General Assembly have the power to the districts “to a equality between said in to the number of inhabitants According to The Connecticut State however, was to make the districts the to become A in the amendment that each of the state's eight receive at least two to the between districts that later over the of the nineteenth The of state that by the Connecticut's state had times the population of its with inequitable representation went the General for both federal and as first used in Connecticut in were not between and 1900, the state's districts continued to be using the At the of this in each had between and By however, Connecticut's second had while the had only less than as This was the in the and had significant population between several of their but this to the of the seventeenth amendment to the federal Constitution in the Connecticut General Assembly the state's United States the system of equal town representation in the legislature further to the will of the majority or of According to the New York Republicans in six out of between and During this period, the legislature and therefore the power to Connecticut's In and Connecticut's legislature United States even though the state's Democratic Despite Democratic in only Republicans represented Connecticut in the United States between and the of the this the rules for the state legislature yet way to its disproportionate the 1662 Charter and then the 1818 if no an majority in an for office, the General Assembly between the two the of and the legislature this power to in who had not or were In three during the the Democratic more on but the General Assembly his as of even more and than those in preceding the that Democratic had more than he needed for an the House of Representatives to citing what they were if would the of the vote that he needed to the The General had more than fewer than With the and House to on which should as the state's