WASHINGTON, April 22 (UPI) -- There is a general assumption among commentators -- the majority of whom are urban -- that cities are where the future is germinated, while rural areas represent the backward, ignorant and politically naïve. As communications improve, this may become the reverse of the truth.
The urban/rural divide is universal, but has never been precisely correlated with left/right, advanced/backward or clever/stupid. In some countries, notably France, China and the centrally planned economies where agriculture was collectivized, there is no doubt that the intellectual life of the society and most of its wealth was concentrated in the big cities. In those cases, there was also a correlation between high levels of education in the cities and lower ones in the countryside, higher incomes in the cities and lower in the countryside, and unpleasant political movements tending to come from rural rather than urban areas.
Even in France, however, both Communism and, as witnessed Sunday, Le Pen nationalism have considerable support, both urban and rural, with extremism in both directions simply tending to come from lower socioeconomic strata.
In other countries, notably including Britain, the social divide between urban and rural has almost been reversed: The British aristocracy, far more than the French, tended to live on its estates, and intellectual life was notably not concentrated in the great metropolis of London, but spread through the cathedral and university towns of the provinces.
Both Britain's greatest scientists, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, were provincial, as were Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes, its greatest economists -- the later primarily Cambridge and Sussex, not Bloomsbury -- and William Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, its greatest writers, although Charles Dickens and Alexander Pope, for example, were Londoners. This social superiority of the provinces dates back to the English Civil War, when London was the principal source of opposition to the monarchy, thus leading kings and nobility from Charles II on to lead heavily rural-oriented lives.
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, there was no doubt that the future lay in the cities. The percentage of the population employed in agriculture declined in all advanced economies, as mechanization increased and city factory jobs opened up. Certainly, in the large unit, centralized economy of the early 20th century, there was little reason to suppose there to be a viable economic future for rural areas beyond a modest population of farm laborers on ever larger, more mechanized farms.
Primarily rural societies seemed to be limited to countries like China and India, where technological and income levels were low and an ever-growing population remained close to its Malthusian subsistence limit. The "green revolution" that finally lifted India from the specter of mass famine seemed merely to have increased the tendency towards ever larger conurbations, with teeming slums like Calcutta, Bandung, Lagos and Mexico City witnessing unprecedented levels of population growth and lifestyle degradation.
In the 21st century, this process may be going into reverse. First, the level of world population increase is lessening, while the largest population poor countries, such as India and China, seem to have established themselves firmly on a path that will lead them towards economic sufficiency in a generation or so. Should this happen, world poverty will become a minority rather than majority problem. In that event, the inexorable process whereby an ever increasing population moved from subsistence agriculture to teeming conurbations will also become a factor in only a minority of countries. In countries with the majority of human population, including India and China, subsistence agriculture will no longer be the occupation of more than a dwindling minority, and the division between the urban and rural populations will become much more a matter of choice than of economic necessity.
Add to greater wealth a greater devotion of resources to rural education, which has in the last decade alone increased India's basic literacy rate from 52 percent of the total population to 65 percent, and we will reach a situation in which the ignorant rural proletariat of myth is a shrinking minority. Further, as secondary and tertiary education for the cognitive elite open up in rural areas through better transportation and more high schools and universities, the rural and small town population will achieve educational and cultural levels close to that of their urban cousins.
At that point, with agriculture mechanized and employing only a minority of the rural population, and literacy universal, rural areas in developing countries will no longer be population sinks for the proletariat.
They are unlikely, however, to become deserted. There are a number of countervailing trends, instead, which taken as a whole make me think that gentrification of the countryside, on the British model, is likely.
First, communication technology is continuing to reduce distance, except in those areas in which population concentration is greatest. As the freeway developments in the Bronx of megalomaniac New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses demonstrated fifty years ago, excessive devotion of an area to transport infrastructure degrades the quality of life in the area to such an extent that it becomes a slum -- after Moses' freeways, designed to improve access to Manhattan for suburbanites, were completed, the area through which they ran declined rapidly in status and became the notorious South Bronx. Excessive urban density, too, either produces breathtakingly high real estate prices, as in Manhattan, central London or Tokyo, which force all but the richest out to the suburbs or, if the development is artificially socially mixed by government, produces high-rise urban slums. Public transport is at best a partial solution; by depriving commuters of their cars, and thus of their short-distance transport flexibility, it produces a highly concentrated urban core with outlying regions that are poorly connected to each other.
It therefore follows that for people with choices, in other words for all but the poorest, life in the largest cities is an unattractive option, except for the very wealthy. It is made particularly unattractive by the increasing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of our societies, which in big cities, as has been abundantly shown throughout the West and demonstrated through counterexample by the homogenous, low-crime Japan, tends to produce high crime rates. Even suburban life, if it requires commuting into a core city, becomes fairly unattractive as metro area population continues to grow.
Hence, in a society that is no longer poor, conurbations become self-limiting. This has limited the population growth of London, Paris and New York since 1950 or so. Other cities in wealthy countries, such as Los Angeles and Washington, can grow to the approximately eight to 10 million maximum conurbation size that seems to be the limit, but are unlikely to grow further.
To a limited extent, large conurbations can grow further through the construction of "edge cities" -- complexes containing large office, retail and housing clusters, that form a self-contained nexus of residents, shoppers and workers, while remaining distantly connected to the core city for specialized services such as international airports, art galleries, museums and opera companies. These are however at best a compromise; the international airports, museums and opera companies become overcrowded, inefficient and unpleasant as the conurbation continues to grow.
However, modern road and air communications, while self-limiting in the case of very large conurbations, are empowering for small cities and medium-sized towns. Such areas can build their capability in specialized economic areas, attracting the necessary workforce and infrastructure, some of which may well be shared with neighboring towns and cities, the whole held together by a freeway network that, provided population does not grow too great or increase too rapidly, can remain relatively fast moving and enable commuters to travel distances of up to 30 to 40 miles to their jobs relatively quickly.
Unlike public transportation networks, freeway networks of this type also do not limit access to non-core services, so that a shopping mall, for example, can be located on relatively cheap land at the edge of a medium sized city, and can draw shoppers from rural areas many miles away -- the Mall of America, south of Minneapolis, is an example of this.
The Internet, in turn, has made it possible for people to live beyond commuting distance from their primary employer, and to carry out assignments at a distance, visiting their colleagues weekly, monthly or even less frequently. At that point, provided the rural area in which they live has access to good telecommunications, there is really no limitation on where people live. Journalists, of course, have always been examples of this, but I do not think it would have been possible, twenty years ago, for United Press International's chief economics correspondent to live in Queretaro, Mexico and yet remain fully au courant with the world's new developments, and fully in contact with his colleagues in both the journalism and business sides of UPI.
At this point, rural areas can come fully into their own. Except for the occasional hermit, it will remain rare for a service industry worker to inhabit the Australian outback; however good the telecommunications, he will lack human contact and the simple facilities of everyday life. But it will certainly become possible for a highly educated service industry worker, however connected to the global economy, to live three miles from a small village that is itself 50 miles from a regional airport and shopping center, and maybe 200 miles -- or even 1,000 miles with a good cheap air connection -- from the nearest major museum or opera company. His real estate costs will be relatively low, or his house relatively grand, while he will be electronically in contact with the entire world, and physically in contact with shops and neighbors on a frequent basis, and high level services and culture on a less frequent basis. Such a lifestyle is already possible and indeed not that uncommon in the United States; in twenty years, if India continues to develop economically, it will also be common in India.
As the world becomes richer, it will become much less common for people to live in the traditional rural ghetto of subsistence farmers. However, it is likely that through the 21st century it will also become less common for people to live in the gigantic urban conurbations of crowds, pollution and slums. Lagos is, thank God, not the future of mankind. Instead, while there will no doubt continue to be large urban conurbations for the young, the rootless, those with bizarre lifestyle choices, and the nouveaux riches, it is likely that the majority of humanity, including the established rich, will live in small cities, medium-sized towns, or, for those who prefer it, deep in the countryside.
At that point, it will be the urban ghetto dweller, not the rural village dweller, which is truly cut off from the mainstream of human life.
(The Bear's Lair is a weekly column which is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that, in the past 10 years, the proportion of "sell" recommendations put out by Wall Street houses has declined from 9 percent of all research reports to 1 percent. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)
