Editor’s note: This piece is part of a series of Community Voices essays related to the urban-rural divide ahead of Lisa Pruitt’s speech at the Westminster Town Hall Forum on Tuesday, Oct. 25. Want to weigh in on the discussion? You can submit a Community Voices piece (instructions here) or fill out our form asking both Greater Minnesota and Twin Cities residents to share what’s driving their votes this election.
Maybe there is a rural-urban divide. Or maybe it’s a myth. Regardless, I believe a more valuable discussion is how urban and rural communities need each other to function and prosper.
As someone who grew up in rural areas, lived in urban communities for 20 years, and recently moved back to Greater Minnesota, I see firsthand the similarities of — and interdependence between — rural and urban. Focusing on ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ as separate and divided entities, however, limits our ability to create solutions that move us forward.
Interdependence: What happens in your part of the country, happens in mine
Rural and urban communities depend on each other to grow their economies, establish commerce, exchange information, goods, materials, and services, to educate our students and build a thriving workforce, and to provide recreation and culture.
Urban areas rely on rural areas for food production and water supply, raw materials, labor, and recreation and nature. Rural areas, on the other hand, increasingly rely on urbanized areas for jobs, technology, health care, amenities, and entertainment. Urban America’s prosperity is intertwined with rural America. According to a study by Kate Searls, as rural manufacturing output increases in Minnesota, jobs and consumer spending in urban areas do as well.
Rural sociologists Daniel Lichter and David Brown describe the so-called rural-urban divide as not a divide at all, but rather an interdependent space of intense social, economic, political, and environmental interaction where interests are sometimes in competition but also interwoven. Would it be more useful if we focused on rural-urban interdependence — the key ways in which we intersect and how these connections add value — rather than focusing on our differences and how they divide us?
Rural and urban communities are more similar than you think
Many of our state’s biggest challenges do not affect urban and rural areas uniquely. For instance, in Minnesota, rural and urban communities are both struggling with affordability and availability of housing, access to affordable broadband, poverty, high rates of drug overdose deaths due to opioids, and inequality.
[image_caption]Ellen Wolter[/image_caption]Similar demographic changes are also occurring in rural and urban communities. Racial and ethnic diversity is growing in both urban and rural areas in Minnesota, as well as across the country. Yet rural America’s racial and ethnic growth is often ignored. Recent research from Brookings highlights the inaccurate and harmful dual narrative of rural-urban that often uses “rural” interchangeably with “white,” making rural BIPOC communities invisible and exacerbating racial inequalities.
Rural and urban interdependence exists in Greater Minnesota, too
Living in the metro area, it is easy to see Greater Minnesota as a monolith that is one large rural area. In fact, it is a complex myriad of geographies, ecosystems, landscapes, and identities. And there are interdependencies that exist between metropolitan areas, such as Duluth or Rochester, and surrounding rural communities.
The 11 Native nations that share borders with Minnesota also have their own unique governments, systems, and interdependencies with rural and urban spaces. Native communities have experienced significant harm from the rural-urban narrative and have been called “twice invisible.”
Within the Twin Cities metro, interdependent relationships between more urbanized areas in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties bump up against more rural areas, such as Carver or Dakota counties.
Focus on our interdependence to move us forward. Where do we start?
Rural sociologists have described urban and rural fates as being shared. To prosper together, we will need to better understand Minnesota’s rural-urban interdependence, to learn from each other and to work together to meet today’s biggest challenges. Climate change, food security, immigration and race relations, inequality, labor shortages — these are all challenges that do not affect and cannot be solved in only urban or only rural spaces.
The rural-urban conversation is often rooted in stereotypes, contempt, and rival narratives, and is enormously more complex than we are led to believe. Seek answers to different questions that will help us better recognize and foster deep connections between rural and urban. Consider getting engaged in a more productive conversation about rural-urban:
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Rural and urban issues tend to be discussed and addressed as separate economic, social, and political challenges. Be sure the complexity of the rural-urban relationship is reflected in your discussions.
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Work to better understand your relationship to urban and rural spaces. What are ways that you rely on rural spaces? Urban spaces? How will you serve as a rural or urban ally?
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Rather than assume you know rural or urban spaces in Minnesota, connect with your rural or urban neighbors and challenge your assumptions. You will likely be surprised.
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Consider what is lost by limiting your interaction with rural or urban communities. Not engaging across rural and urban spaces prevents connections from being developed across rural and urban systems and reinforces rural-urban divide narratives and competition.
Ellen Wolter is an Extension educator with University of Minnesota Extension. She grew up in rural spaces (Montana and North Dakota) and lived in urban spaces (Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis) for the past 20 years. She now lives in Sartell, Minnesota.
Once again, the rural/urban divide is looked at largely in terms of economics. It’s all well and good to consider that economic interdependence, but what does it do for the cultural divide? Those are the issues that are distracting the state and voters from making realistic choices based on that interdependence. That is also the divide demagogues can exploit.
To put it another way, who wants to take the time to figure out how to make broadband internet accessible to everyone when it’s easier to complain about having issues like same-sex marriage “forced” on your community?
Omar’s rhetoric, her votes in Washington and the rest of her Squad has had plenty of affect on people lives. She doesn’t need to be in your living room to do that.
How? How has the mere presence of Rep. Omar in Congress affected your life?
Be specific.
I just finished watching a candidate forum for two council seats in our town of 3,600. It was non partisan and focused on city issues and what the candidates had in mind for priorities and solutions. It was refreshing. In each of the two races, there is a candidate who lived here most of their life. And the other candidate being someone who had moved here from somewhere else 6 years and 12 years ago.
The reason it was refreshing was because all of the candidates expressed gratitude for being able to live here, and wanted to do what they could to solve problems, and improve our community. It was fun to see the candidates being friendly to each other and agreeing on what is important. What a contrast to the din of negativism in the contest between Democrats and Republicans. Part of the discussion centered around how to make the town safe for both visitors and those who live here. There isn’t much badmouthing the city people, because we all have family and friends who live in metro areas (the neighbor who got a job offer, the younger person who graduated from high school and is attending the U, or many who in retirement are returning to where they grew up.
To be fair, there are pockets of those who buy into the “us and them” B.S., thankfully, they are a minority. To acknowledge the comments above. In our District 8 contests, republicans are so focused on Biden and Pelosi and Minneapolis that if it wasn’t so pathetic, it would be funny. Nothing about what the would do to solve the real problems that we all face.
I’d prefer to illuminate the “interdependence” of American rural communities with their hated urban brethren by cutting them off entirely from the spout of public subsidy they so despise, and leave them to rot. I’ll live without their corn syrup and soy protein, not that much of it gets sold here anyway. When the fever breaks, and they understand their position in the world through the same painful lessons they’d like to inflict on me, MAYBE I’ll consider lending a hand at pulling them back from the self-inflicted misery they’ll be enjoying.
What about cotton for your clothing, any and all meat, wheat fir pasta and bread, fruit and vegetables, lumber fro you home, iron and other metals, to a great extent energy,
Goodluck to you, urban and rural wont.miss you
You overestimate your importance. Not to mention the fact that nearly all of those products require immigrant labor, that the politicians you support, oppose. Quite nearly all the products you list could be had elsewhere, from laborers far less hostile, and far more grateful for the business.
To be fair, Greg, most suburban people could supply much of that for themselves. Or rely on farmer’s markets, where close-in communities produce a lot of it. Many of the more liberal ones not only could survive without a lot of the basics you mention, they’d be happier because there’s less waste, less fossil fuels, and less animosity that comes with it. Maybe they wouldn’t be eating steak, but you’d be surprised how satisfying chicken and their eggs are for those who eat animal protein. The urbanites who need rural America the most are the poorest ones. And even they do better when LOCAL green spaces are dedicated to growing food.
I don’t fully share Matt’s position, but if you can’t imagine how urbanites could survive without products from rural areas, you lack imagination. We might even be better off for it if we designed our cities to be even more self-sufficient. In any case, some day, it’s very possible that there will be little need for human farmers for the commodities you mention. It’s not really that far off. Small farms will be the ones run by manpower rather than a corporation with a bunch of AI and satellite guided machines. Small communities will rely more on manufacturing. And when they need help with the housing to ensure that manufacturing is supported…it will likely be urban dollars that make up for the chicken and egg problem that the lack of rural dollars creates when opportunity arises. Rural areas aren’t getting more populated. They are not paying “their own way.” And honestly, the biggest reason they get urban dollars is because, for now, urban folks don’t think too much about how much our dollars are going to people who openly hate us. Our goal (most of us, anyway) is not to punish people for where they live, but the opposite doesn’t seem to be true. Something’s got to give, but I promise, we won’t be hurting as much as you think we would be (or wish we would be) if we significantly reduced the “import” of rural goods.