Quietness Should Not Be Mistaken for Emptiness

09/02/2026

On an ordinary weekday around 5 p.m., downtown Oskaloosa begins to empty as workers leave for the day. During event season, William Penn University sociology professor Michael O. Johnston noticed that movement reversing. People began heading toward the square as music replaced traffic and familiar streets filled with activity.

The repeated transformation became the foundation for Johnston’s upcoming book, Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America, which is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic and scheduled for publication in January or February 2027.

“It was less about one particular event as much as it was noticing a transformation that kept occurring in “smalltown Oskaloosa.”” Johnston said. “On an ordinary weekday around five o’clock, people are leaving work, getting into their cars, and the downtown is beginning to empty. But during the event season, that movement reverses. Instead of people moving outward, they begin moving inward.”

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oskaloosa and Pella, Iowa, Smalltown Urban examines how rural communities temporarily create the density and collective experiences commonly associated with larger cities. Johnston argues that urbanity is not determined solely by population or metropolitan geography. It can emerge through the rhythm of people gathering and collectively transforming a familiar place.

“The architecture didn’t change. The City of Oskaloosa was not suddenly a large city. What changed was the rhythm and density of social life,” Johnston said. “The downtown streets were filled with pedestrians instead of automobiles, people lingered instead of passing through, strangers were shoulder-to-shoulder, and a town square that is normally quiet was filled with music. The town felt larger than its census numbers.”

The book explores events including Tulip Time in Pella and Lake Red Rock BalloonFest, along with Oskaloosa gatherings such as BBQ 4 Badges and Sweet Corn Serenade. For Johnston, Sweet Corn Serenade may best demonstrate why a quiet downtown should not be mistaken for an empty one.

During the event, thousands of people filled the courthouse square as live music played and volunteers served food. Johnston watched teenagers dance on the sidewalk while the downtown was temporarily reorganized around a shared experience. However, one of his most revealing observations came the following morning.

“The crowd was gone. I noticed a mostly empty corn cob in the grass and a faint sheen of butter still on the pavement,” Johnston said. “They were tiny traces, but they made the supposedly ‘empty’ downtown feel different. The space still carried what I described in the book as the afterglow of the ritual.”

Those traces helped Johnston recognize that activity does not disappear entirely when an event ends. Memory remains, as does the community’s capacity to gather again. He describes this as urban potentiality: the knowledge and relationships that make recurring periods of heightened public life possible even after the stage has been removed and the streets have emptied.

“A downtown can be physically sparse while remaining socially and emotionally dense with memory, anticipation, and the knowledge that people will gather there again,” Johnston said. “The book ultimately argues that these downtowns ‘never fully rest because they never fully empty’; past gatherings shape how people understand the space and anticipate its next transformation.”

Years of studying Oskaloosa have also changed how Johnston experiences the community personally. A quiet walk through downtown now carries memories of past events and an awareness of how the same space will change during the next gathering.

“Researching the town has therefore made Oskaloosa feel almost temporally layered to me,” Johnston said. “I experience the present downtown alongside memories of what has happened there and anticipation of what will happen there again.”

That attention to ordinary places also shapes Johnston’s teaching at William Penn. Throughout the development of Smalltown Urban, he regularly brought ideas from the project into his classes before he had fully determined what they meant. Students’ questions encouraged him to explain concepts such as urbanity and community without relying on disciplinary shorthand. In the book’s acknowledgements, Johnston thanks his students for pushing him to clarify his ideas and consider perspectives he may have otherwise missed.

“Their feedback reinforced a principle that is central to this book– the everyday is sociologically important,” Johnston said. “Students repeatedly demonstrated that ordinary spaces and ordinary interactions become analytically interesting when we slow down and pay attention to them. That is essentially what Smalltown Urban asks readers to do with places such as Oskaloosa, Iowa.”

The research also challenges the assumption that a small community necessarily limits the college experience. Oskaloosa’s public life moves between familiar periods of relative quiet and moments when concerts, festivals and other gatherings bring heightened interaction to spaces students encounter every day. Johnston’s work encourages William Penn students to view the city as more than the location surrounding their campus. It is a community in which they can participate and make an impact.

Johnston found that vibrant public life depends on sustained involvement. Community events require volunteers who organize activities and prepare spaces. Participation can move students from being temporary residents toward becoming recognized contributors, while repeated encounters can build trust and lasting relationships.

“I would encourage prospective students to evaluate Oskaloosa by participating in it rather than simply looking at its population or driving through town on an ordinary afternoon,” Johnston said. “The social life of a small community may require greater intentionality because opportunities are not always continuously concentrated in the way they are in a large entertainment district. However, that difference can also create opportunities to become more than a consumer of entertainment.”

With the manuscript complete, Smalltown Urban has entered production, including typesetting and indexing. The forthcoming publication will bring Oskaloosa and Pella into a broader sociological discussion about what qualifies as urban life.

“What is especially exciting to me is that it will take these very local places, the City of Oskaloosa and the City of Pella, and put them into a much broader sociological conversation about what counts as urban life,” Johnston said.

For William Penn students and prospective families, the research offers a different way to understand the community beyond campus. Oskaloosa does not need to imitate a metropolitan area to offer meaningful public life. Its character lies in the recurring movement between quietness and collective energy, and in the people who make each transformation possible.

“I would encourage that student not to equate quietness with emptiness,” Johnston said.