About Us
Small Town Vibe: An Origin Story
Jason and I LOVE to travel, explore new places, meet new people, and experience new cultures and new things. We enjoy taking photos and collecting stories about the places we visit. Most of all, we love to experience the energy of a place – seeking the Vibe of what makes it unique and special to its community and visitors.
The Joy of Exploring a Place while Walking!
Over the years, we have been fortunate enough to travel to other countries. Generally, we stay in city center locations, where we explore neighborhoods on foot, coupled with mass transit for more distant neighborhoods and regional day trips. No need to rent a car! We find that cities and towns in other countries are generally easy to explore on foot. It struck us how dependent we are on our car back home in the United States to do similar types of exploration. We realized how efficient and rewarding it is to spend our vacation days out and about in a place, without fussing with cars, gas, parking, etc all while getting some much-needed exercise.
With this “explore by foot” concept in mind, we decided to try a similar approach in our own US Cities. Over time, we found that the “secret” is to find the town center business district(s) – and then park (or better yet, park and stay!) in these downtown areas. With a little help from our friend ‘Google Maps’ and ‘Google Reviews’, we can find fun restaurants, quaint coffee shops, interesting markets, local shops, local breweries, lovely parks and all kinds of art – all on foot! In this way, we have explored from Durham, NC to Santa Rosa, CA and from Santa Fe, NM to Fargo, ND as well as Colorado Springs, CO, Omaha, NE, Sioux Falls, SD (we highly recommend visiting all of these places!) and many more medium-sized cities. Over time, we realized our favorite locations tend to be in historic downtown business districts and those places closely adjacent.
Vibe (noun) | Vibes (plural noun)
Oxford Languages
Definition: a person’s emotional state of the atmosphere of a place as communicated to and felt by others
Downtown business districts: Experiencing the Vibe!
Why do we enjoy downtown business districts? As visitors in a new place, we find that we are drawn to the places that attract other people and the energy that comes from them. We have learned that in general, downtown businesses and adjacent civic areas tend to attract people! Historically, a downtown footprint will have tightly spaced buildings and community-centric businesses and spaces. This makes a downtown business district the perfect place to explore by walking – and by proxy, a good way to experience its Vibe!
Although we are exploring cities and towns at a specific point in time, we try to recognize the many ways these places are evolving and changing to meet community needs. Great places do not happen by accident – they are brought to life through the efforts of community, business, and civic leader and their actions. We see much evidence of this when we write up our blog articles, supported by online research.
In simple terms, we borrow the term ‘placemaking’ to describe the efforts required to create great places, and the resulting energy as the ‘Vibe’ of the place.
Placemaking is a participatory process for shaping public space that harnesses the ideas and assets of the people who use it.
What is Placemaking? (pps.org)
Why Small Towns? They have a Vibe!
Recently we have become particularly interested in smaller towns, with populations under 10,000. In our opinion, this size small town can often seem overlooked and underappreciated when compared to its bigger town and city counterparts. While visiting smaller communities with a ‘placemaking’ lens, it is readily apparent that many small towns are doing the hard work required to maintain and revitalize their places – we have visited some very cool small towns! Often, they have beautiful historic buildings in their downtown business districts. Like places of any size, each small town has its own feel and culture, in its aesthetics and its level of energy. We have come to think of the downtown as representing the general feel of a town – and refer to this feeling as the ‘small town vibe‘.
SmallTownVibe.org is our way to showcase some of the amazing small towns we visit, by sharing our personal experiences and online research. In my reading on placemaking, i have found many interesting concepts associated with creating and evolving great places. I try to share some of these concepts and insights in our travel articles when we see them in action in the towns we visit.
And while we enjoy the fun experiences gained while visiting new places and meeting new people, we also find ourselves on an educational journey. With each new place visited, we tend to compare and contrast and try to identify what seems to work in some communities and ponder whether similar ideas could work in others.
One of the obvious learnings to us along the way is that local businesses are a critical component of great places – we encourage everyone to support these businesses with your dollars and dine and shop local!
We hope you enjoy our journey as much as we do and are motivated to visit these great places 🙂
-Dawn & Jason (with road trip support from family and friends… Thanks to all!)
RELATED: The CONCEPTS that Influence Small Town Vibe Thinking
