At first glance, the
made-for-TV Christmas movies that have
come to dominate the holiday season on certain channels – and recently, Netflix – are profoundly anti-urban. They usually feature
a woman – or more rarely a man – from the big city who for some reason has to go to a small town for the Christmas season. There, the protagonist discovers that the town embodies the true spirit of Christmas, and invariably meets a romantic partner who persuades the heroine/hero to abandon the urban lifestyle and settle down in this small-town idyll.
The big city is generally portrayed as alienating, materialistic and careerist – everything contrary to the “Christmas spirit.” The fact that the main character is being sent away to work during Christmas is itself symptomatic of this lack of spirit. Often there is a boss and/or existing romantic partner who embodies these negative big-city values and calls regularly, reminding the main character about the stress associated with living and working in the metropolis. The brief establishing shots of that city inevitably involve heavy traffic, the blank glass walls of tall buildings, and soulless corporate interiors.
All this urban negativity is contrasted with the friendliness, strong social ties, slower pace, and rather overwhelming Christmas decorations of the small town. It’s just flowing with the kind of social capital whose passing the sociologist Robert Putnam lamented in
Bowling Alone. The contrast feeds on the long-standing imagery of an amoral and atomizing metropolis versus the supposed authentic, transparent social interaction and traditional values of small towns, where people support each other. These movies are ultimately a
conservative form of drama.
What’s fascinating, though, is that the appeal of the small town is, itself, strikingly
urban. The towns portrayed in these Christmas movies possess the walkability, active public spaces, and low motor vehicle presence that urbanists strive for. They have thriving, walkable main streets full of independent retail shops tightly packed together. Every building faces on to the street, and everyone strolls along the sidewalks and interacts with each other in person. There is always a car-free public square at the centre of town that is the focus of attention and the site of a Christmas festival of some kind, like lighting a Christmas tree, that brings the whole community together. And everyone is always crossing the street safely mid-block despite not looking both ways, because vehicle traffic is always somehow limited and slow. These movies know that speeding cars would ruin the atmosphere they’re trying to create.
Watching a Christmas movie is like the scene in
Back to the Future where Marty McFly lands in his town in the 1950s and discovers that the town square, neglected and abandoned in his own time, is suddenly kept up, active and surrounded by bustling stores. It’s also reminiscent of the town of Stars Hollow in the TV show
Gilmore Girls (whose spunky female leads and small-town vibe surely make it a relative of the Christmas TV movie), whose action is also focused around a town centre where all the characters bump into each other regularly, and where everyone constantly crosses the street safely without looking. No town in a Christmas movie has a Walmart on the outskirts that has sucked all the life out of its main street, a six-lane fast-moving “
stroad” lined with strip malls, or cookie-cutter subdivisions that have drawn all the residents out of the older parts of town.
It’s a vision of the kind of small-town urbanism championed by the organization
Strong Towns, which promotes relatively dense residential neighbourhoods around a vibrant downtown main street full of independent stores and services, with attractive and well-used public spaces that bring residents together in person. This vision both looks to the way towns developed in the past before motor vehicles became dominant – a sense of nostalgia shared by Christmas movies – but also to a future for small towns that is economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.
As my
Spacing colleague Glyn Bowerman
recently noted, this underlying appeal of small-town urbanism is often reflected in plots that deal with the minutiae of municipal management. After all, becoming interested in city politics is a first step on the road towards becoming a full-blown urbanist.
