How the built environments of small towns adapt to changing needs--and lessons for cities

Here's the feature from NPR, about the Rural Indexing Project, which features more than 50,000 photos from nearly 1,500 municipalities in 28 states.

The creators of the project are Zach Huelsing and Jon Lehman.  They started taking photos in 2007 of the places they drove through in rural Illinois and eventually expanded to other states.  Soon, they started to see patterns, which are a "central part" of the project. 

Because when they upload each photo to the catalog, they don't just list it as "grocery store, North Dakota" — they assign keywords like the materials used, the institution type, the architectural elements, and words on buildings. Basically, any kind of social marker they find relevant.

That meticulous indexing allows them to then compare images over time and location; like how a post office looks in, say, Douglas, Nebraska versus Ophir, Colorado.

It's also allowed them to bust a few myths and maybe even their own misconceptions about modern rural America.

"It's been interesting to have been working on this project over the course of ... so many politically divergent presidential administrations, for instance," Jon said. "We started out in the Obama years, sort of with the idea that, was this going to be rural America's last hurrah? And that's clearly not proven to be the case."

Still, the data does show rural America is slowly shrinking. Folks are leaving small towns, and cities are expanding with new homes and shops to accommodate surging populations.

In the face of this, Jon and Zach's project has picked up on a trend: there aren't many new buildings in the smallest towns. Instead, the old ones find a new purpose.

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"So many of the images that are propagated from rural parts of the country focus on decay or on destruction or abandonment, and we're very interested in the ways that buildings, in particular, continue to serve and continue to be adapted in ways that meet the needs of communities," [Jon] said.

"I think we can actually learn some lessons ... the stories that our photographs tell are stories of adaptive reuse."