Urbana, IA

Urbana is a Benton County city roughly midway between Cedar Rapids and Waterloo, where Interstate 380 meets Iowa 150. The 2020 census counted 1,554 residents. The city is part of the Cedar Rapids metro, but its local map is very much a corridor map: farm roads, the interstate, Highway 150, and a school district shared with Center Point. Urbana was laid out in 1847, and the town's identity is still tied to being a place you pass through on the way to somewhere else. The road network is part of the town's personality, not just its address.

ATTRAmanda Bengtson / CC BY-SA 2.0

Center Point-Urbana Community School District keeps one of its school buildings in Urbana, with the intermediate school on Main Street and the other grades in Center Point. That split gives the two towns a shared routine and makes the district more noticeable than the city line. Urbana's local scoop is a small I-380 city whose main landmarks are its road connections, its school building, and the larger Cedar Rapids-Waterloo corridor running around it.