Rationalizing Rural Area Classifications for the Economic Research Service A Workshop Summary (2016) / Chapter Skim
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5 Different Ways to Conceptualize Rural Areas in Metropolitan Society
5 Different Ways to Conceptualize Rural Areas in Metropolitan Society
Pages 61-80
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From page 61... ...
The first part began with a presentation of a commissioned paper, Conceptualizing Rural America in a Metropolitan Society, by Michael Woods (University of Aberystwyth) , followed by two discussants and open discussion.
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From page 62... ...
Third, he said with the increasing integration of rural and urban economies, cultures, and social structures, defining rural from an urban perspective leads to describing that process as urbanization because that high state of development is viewed as an urban feature. The term "urbanization of rural" is used, even though these processes may have consequences that are just as transformative in cities as they are in the country.
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From page 63... ...
38) , who called lay discourses of rurality "all the means of intentional and incidental communication, which people use and encounter in the processes of their everyday lives, through which meanings of the rural, intentional and incidental, are expressed and constructed." In other words, he asked, how do people who live in the countryside and engage in the countryside understand the place in which they live to be rural on an everyday basis?
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From page 64... ...
There is also correspondence with residual definitions of rurality in terms of people seeing local areas as rural because of the absence of certain urban features from that landscape. He said perhaps a more interesting observation is the positive associations of the things people see in a landscape, which to them makes it rural.
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From page 65... ...
for his presentation at Rationalizing Rural Area Classifications Workshop. Figure 5-1, fixed image R02926 Community Woods stated that a third theme identified in his analysis is about community, reflecting the importance of people and the interactions between them.
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From page 66... ...
At one level, he said, there is little persuasive evidence that rural residents define the rural in significantly different ways than urban residents or urban agencies. He noted rural understandings of being rural go beyond simple definitions or lines on a map.
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From page 67... ...
The purpose was to examine how systematic social observation can be used in each context to document the social conditions faced by residents at the "neighborhood" level. Logan noted that a key interest was in the spatial scale of neighborhood conditions, whether the neighborhood is a single street segment, an extended group of segments, a census tract, or a whole zone of the city.
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From page 68... ...
STATEMENT BY DISCUSSANT GREGORY HOOKS Hooks provided a discussion from a regional inequality point of view. He discussed challenges presently confronted by Native Americans, with a focus on reservations in rural areas.
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From page 69... ...
The BIA was charged by Congress in the early 1980s to conduct a survey to obtain information on the number of American Indians and their needs for purposes of developing funding formulas and other things. The data suggested improbable demographic and labor force stability over the period for the Nez Perce tribe.
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From page 70... ...
There are no valid data about population, poverty, labor market activity, and other characteristics. As long as the underlying data remain imprecise, American Indians and Native Americans, especially those residing on and near rural reservations, will remain the "Asterisk Nation," Hooks stated.
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From page 71... ...
Logan said the idea of a survey using word clouds was very interesting and noted it could be used to compare very small populations with the total rural population. Woods responded that starting with the perspective of lay discourses, a diversity of opinions can emerge.
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From page 72... ...
Some examples of social boundaries are class boundaries, such as rich versus poor; racial boundaries, such as black versus white; disciplinary boundaries, such as economics versus sociology; and spatial boundaries, such as rural versus urban. Changing Boundaries Lichter described how boundaries can shift, cross, or blur: Shifting -- People move from one side of the boundary to the other, or the boundary or border changes.
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From page 73... ...
Urban-rural economic networks also include urban absentee owners of industry, such as coal, natural resources, or urban agriculture. He also pointed to interactions with rural areas being an urban dumping ground for hazardous waste and human populations.
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Lessons for Rural Classification Lichter described how the ideas of shifting, crossing, and blurring affect rural classifications. He said that it is important to note that urban influence does not just mean spatial proximity, density, or heterogeneity.
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For the most part, rates of growth are highest further away from urban clusters in metropolitan functional areas in the exurban and peri-urban areas. In most of Pima County, growth spreads out from the urban core.
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From page 76... ...
Finally, nonmetro counties with at least 10 percent commuting to at least two micro/metro areas would also be listed as influenced by multiple urban areas in which the specific metro/micro areas would be listed. 4 Statistics Canada census metropolitan area and census agglomeration definitions are described at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/92-195-x/2011001/geo/cma-rmr/def-eng.htm [November 2015]
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From page 77... ...
6 The limitation of the traditional measures is they are arbitrary and do not reflect access to multiple levels of the urban hierarchy like central place theory. They reflect labor markets only indirectly through viewing metropolitan areas as labor markets, he noted.
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From page 78... ...
OPEN DISCUSSION Woods commented that while he agreed with much of the presentations, he wondered whether the session focused on last century's rather than this century's questions, such as changes and linkages resulting from globalization. He asked about other kinds of relationships of areas and widened connectedness, whether to multiple metropolitan centers or to other rural areas around the world.
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From page 79... ...
Logan asked Lichter if he believed that much of rural America actually could be described as totally disconnected from urban enough to salvage the urban-rural boundary. Lichter responded that the rural-urban boundary is important, but he is trying to figure out how the sociological concept of boundaries shifting, crossing, and blurring can inform these definitions.
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