Strengthening Rural-Urban Connections
Sharon March 24th, 2009
One of the things we point out in _A Nation of Farmers_ is how deeply similar the problems of inner city and rural cultures are. In both cases, there is often a great deal of poverty. In both cases, there is often inadequate access to decent food, since rural areas have lost much of their garden culture, and supermarkets are often far away for both populations. In both cases, there are inadequate jobs for younger people, and often high levels of unemployment for those committed to staying either in the neighborhood or the country. The ability to stay there, and transmit a local culture is thus very low. Urban dwellers become completely disconnected from subsistence culture, while rural dwellers are brought to believe, often, in the superiority of urban life, and urban culture, and strive to mimic it in destructive ways. Rural areas are colonized by industrial agriculture, polluting the area and reducing their ability to feed people in the long term, while urban areas are colonized by industrial business, and polluted and their environment degraded.
Nearly every society struggles, in some measure, with the disconnect between urban and rural life, but most societies have had more contiguity between the two than our own does. Having a local future, and enduring local foodshed requires that we start rebuilding connections between urban and rural cultures - because in many ways, the difficulties that both have could be partly ameliorated by closer ties - economic ones, of course, but not just economic.
Many cultures have traditionally had much closer ties between urban and rural populations. For example, in Russia, people often had small summer cottages that they retreated to, not just for pleasure, but to garden and forage in the woods. In parts of southern and central Africa, people have ties to the cattlelands, and even city people often keep a few cattle, usually tended by an extended family member, and return to the land for portions of the agricultural season. Northern native populations have fish or hunting camps, while even low income urban Londoners at the turn of the century would spend their summer vacations harvesting crops - hops or something else. This has evolved into the bucolic summer tourist vacation, the vacation home or the hunting camp, most of which have little to do with subsistence activities (some urban hunters that we see hunt for food, but many do not).
While it isn’t that hard to figure out what rural people might get from a trip into a city - better shopping and trade, cultural events, etc… The fact that trips out to the land have been part of the culture help keep this from being a one-way colonial event. When urban people come out to rural areas to participate in food production and rural life, they are implicity suggesting that rural culture has something to offer other than a tribute of food to be delivered. There is a reciprocity between the two cultures, a chance for people on both sides to begin to see the impact that they have on one another, to consider it, and most importantly, to build relationships. Tourism does not do this - instead of introducing rural people to real urban life, or urban people to the realities of rural practice, one gets a sanitized and processed and fundamentally artificial version of life, for the most part. Agritourism is a growing industry, for example, but it transforms farms (usually by economic necessity) into carnival rides or sites of nostalgia, rather than sites in a cultural foodshed.
CSAs and farmer’s markets have had a powerful role in connecting city and country, farmer and eater, but they are only a beginning. In order to, say, decide not to develop remaining agricultural land near a large city, or to understand the conflicts between watershed pressures in agriculture and city life, urban and rural dwellers have to understand each other well enough, and be invested in one another deeply enough to resolve their conflicts. Large chunks of both urban and rural populations truly have no idea how the other half lives.
Moreover, they really have no idea how they might improve one another’s lives. The chronic problem of access to food, for example, might be solved by creating markets that help low income rural dwellers take a piece of the 300+ million dollars even the poorest neighborhoods pour into the economy each year. Most of that goes to industrial corporations, and provides crappy jobs. What if rural poor people, who, after all, buy clothes and toys for their kids and tools for their garden could find ones that are manufactured in their local cities?
More importantly, what if we were invested in each other’s lives - that is, if people realized that they depend on their food shed and the people who support it - both economically in the cities and physically in the country. What if it were possible to make a decent living in both places? But to do this, we must increase the connection between the two.
I don’t have a full set of magical solutions for this, but one thing that occurs to me is that we’re going to have to find new ways to spend some time on each other’s ground, getting to know our food, water and economy-shed.
Sharon