Tyler Cowen offers a distressingly un-systematic look at the question of what is the most perfectly average place in America, recapitulating the excessively anti-urban bias of conventional thinking about the American character.

He offers as his candidate Knoville, Tennessee the center of a metropolitan area of just 824,000 people. Fully 180 million Americans live in larger metropolitan areas than Knoxville. The larger Tennessee city of Memphis is almost spot on the average, but I'd say Memphis is a bit too distinctive to qualify as "perfectly average". Fortunately for us, if you rank US metro areas by population size and then add up the cumulative totals you get the conclusion that the median American lives in the Jacksonville, Florida metropolitan area. And Jacksonville, though it may have its virtues, is not especially distinctive or noteworthy. It's a great example of a generic American city. It's in the south, but not really all that southern. It's on the coast, but it's not "coastal". And since the City of Jacksonville is consolidated with Duval County, it doesn't feature any kind of urban-suburban divide. The typical Jacksonviller, just like the typical American, lives in an auto-oriented suburban-style community that's part of an integrated urban area. In educational terms, Jacksonville has fewer high school dropouts than the average American city and also fewer college graduates than the average American city. In other words, its citizens are exceptionally average in their educational attainment. 

If you're ever in the Jacksonville area and get the chance to visit the White Oak Conservation Center, I'd recommend it. Very much a non-average experience.