ABSTRACT
Recent statistics show that more than one-third of the world’s urban population(1.2 billion) live in small urban localities with populations less than 100,000 (UN 2009). Moreover, these small towns play a vital role in structuring human settlement patterns, shaping urbanization trends, and the functioning of national economies and administrative processes in many countries across the world. Yet, these towns do not attract the attention of a vast majority of urban scholarship emerging from planning and related disciplines, mainly because the focus is on large cities and metropolitan regions. Although there is much to be studied in large cities, narrowly focusing on them eliminates more than one-third of the urban population and a considerable portion of the world landscape from the attention of scholarly investigation. Hence, there is a necessity to include small- and medium-scale urban areas in urban literature and debate.
