And now for my 147th post on "defining rural"

The occasion for this post is Andrew Van Dam's piece in today's Washington Post, "The real (surprisingly comforting) reason rural America is doomed to decline."  It's partly about ecological definitions of rural and urban.  When Van Dam contacted me about 10 days ago, while writing this story, I referred him to the "defining rural" tag on this blog.  That's when I realized I'd written more than 140 posts on the topic--an average of once a month since I founded this blog about 12 years ago.  Van Dam found me, by the way, via my 2006 law review article, "Rural Rhetoric." 

Basically, Van Dam is using the federal government's classification schemes for rural/urban and metro/nonmetro to put a positive spin on the ongoing urbanization of America. This treats the process  or system as s a zero-sum game, which it basically is.  If rural is the remainder of that which is not urban, then as places grow and population clusters get large enough to meet the threshold for "urban"--or more precisely "metropolitan" (a county-level designation)--that which is designated or defined as rural shrinks.  It seems inevitable, right?   Van Dam uses a clever farm team v. big league analogy: 

In a way, rural areas serve as urban America’s farm team: All their most promising prospects get called up to the big leagues, leaving the low-density margins populated by an ever-shrinking pool of those who couldn’t qualify.

The problem with the analogy is that it could be read to suggest that rural people can't "qualify" for urban life--that if they could, they'd move to town where the successful folks inevitably go.  That is, you could read it at the individual level, as another way of looking at the rural brain drain.  On the other hand, you could also read it as referring just to the population clusters rather than to the individuals--those that grow will be redefined as urban.  I think this latter construction is Van Dam's intent. 

It's also worth noting that Van Dam's approach does not really account for the fact that many places are not only "not growing" and therefore not becoming urban, they are in fact shrinking.  Population loss--and not only stasis-- is a huge part of the rural American story right now--and it's not just loss to cities; it is natural decline because of low birth rates and such. 

In any event, read this clever piece in its entirety and note the references to Amanda Kool's recent piece in the Daily Yonder and to the fabulous demography work of Dan Lichter of Cornell, Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire/Carsey Institute, and John Cromartie of USDA, who have been tracking the extent to which "rural" places (as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau) are being subsumed into "metropolitan counties" (as defined by the Office of Management and Budget).

Then there are my quotes about the cultural angle on all of this:  how people and places "stay rural" culturally in spite of their "places" transmutation (by a government definition) into "metropolitan."  I also talk about how easy its gotten for policy makers to overlook rural needs, in part because of elite/progressive disdain for rural folks, which was also a theme of this piece, which showed how the rural bashing is not just a Trump-era phenomenon; it started in the 2008 election season.

Thanks to Van Dam and WaPo for the high profile treatment of an issue so important to those of us who advocate for and value the rural.  Here's to another 150 (or so) posts on "defining rural" in Legal Ruralism's next dozen years.