One cool thing about using small communities is that you end up with a bunch of contrast.
Instead of using one city split into -- say -- a dozen interesting locations, you can use a handful of places, each split into a couple locations. A smallish town might have 3 detailed locations, the next town over might have 2, and the nearby park might have another couple. If one of those towns is a tourist town, while the other is a factory town, you're going to have a good deal of variety in locations you have there.
Though I haven't tried it, I must imagine that groups of smaller towns will work much like using a big city. Instead of traveling from Staten Island to the Bronx, you go from Gloucester to Rockport, or Amherst to Northampton. The particulars of travel will be different, but the trip will take comparable time and effort.