(Usually I do these demographic polls on Tuesday, but I got caught up in the tiny glimmer of hope offered by the report of back channel unofficial peace talks between Israelis and Syrians. Hereafter, I do plan to be back to a schedule of demographics on Tuesdays and health care on Thursdays.)
The social and political divides along the axis of Rural to Suburban to Urban have been a recurring theme in American (and other) history, which of course continues to this day.
But what is Urban? Suburban? Rural?
- How do we classify the apparent variety and continuum from most urban to most rural?
- How do we operationally define such categories?
- Where do you live?
- How does it affect the way you live, what you believe, how you vote?
As before, hopefully, if this poll is posted up in the "Recommended Diary" section, ideally for as long as 24 hours in all continental time zones, we will get a large, valid and representative sample of us.
The discussion below focuses on the question of definitions in the United States. It is important to remember that both the definition and meaning differs in different countries. I am leaving the discussion of what Urban and Suburban and Rural living means to all of us for the comments section.
Urban:
Urban areas are defined by having some higher level of population and population density. Since 1950s the U.S. Census has used a definition of "Urbanized Areas" as a central core or city and its adjacent, closely settled territory which have a combined total population of 50,000 or more. Supplmenting this, is the suggestion that an "Urban Area" has a density of over 1,000 per square mile.
The concept of Urbanized area as defined by the US Census Bureau are often used as a more accurate gauge of the size of a city, since in different cities and states the lines between city borders and the urbanized area of that city are often not the same. For example, the city of Greenville, South Carolina has a city population under 60,000 but an urbanized area over 300,000, while nearby Winston-Salem, North Carolina has a city population of 180,000, making it appear to be much larger than Greenville, but once the urbanized area is considered, the population is about 270,000 meaning that Greenville is actually a "larger" city for all intents and purposes.
A complete list of the 465 Urbanized areas is available.
Following from this, the term "METROPOLITAN CITY" means
- a city within a metropolitan area which is the central city of such area, as defined and used by the Office of Management and Budget,
or
- any other city, within a metropolitan area, which has a population of fifty thousand or more.
We will use this definition in our poll below.
"Metropolitan Areas" are even larger consisting of a large city and its adjacent zone of influence, or of several neighboring cities or towns and adjoining areas, with one or more large cities serving as its hub or hubs. Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that is socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market. The list of 361 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United can be seen here.
Suburban:
U.S. government statistics generally use an operational definition for suburban as Metropolitan areas but outside Central city. Suburbs are inhabited districts located either inside a town or city's outer rim or just outside its official limits (the term varies from country to country), or the outer elements of a conurbation. The presence of certain elements (whose definition varies amongst urbanists, but usually refers to some basic services and to the territorial contiguity) identifies a suburb as a peripheral populated area with a certain autonomy, where the density of habitation is usually lower than in an inner city area, though state or municipal house building will often cause departures from that organic gradation. Suburbs have typically grown in areas with an abundance of flat land near a large urban zone, usually with dispersed, less focused or nonexistent city center[1] and with transport technology that allows commuting into more densely populated areas with higher levels of commerce. Suburban communities are not far from urban areas. Families there mostly live in houses in neighborhoods with yards and quiet streets. Many people from the suburbs have to drive to the nearest city to work. Nearby parks and stores support family life. Typically, many post-World War II American suburbs have been characterized by:
- Lower densities than central cities, with single-family homes predominating.
- Zoning patterns that separate residential and commercial development, as well as different intensities and densities of development.
- Subdivisions carved from previously rural land into multiple-home developments built by a single real estate company.
- Shopping malls and strip malls instead of a downtown shopping district.
- Streets lined by off-street car parking and vegetation instead of buildings.
- A road network designed to conform to a hierarchy, including residential streets that curve and often end in culs-de-sac, in place of the grid pattern common to most central cities and pre-World War II suburbs.
- Ready access to freeways or tollways.
- Limited access to public transit.
- The importance of public space reduced in favor of private property.
In addition, suburban areas also encompass pre-World War II smaller towns and cities, as well as other mixed-used activity centers.
Rural:
- Rural areas are those that are not in a a Metropolitan area at all (Nonmetropolitan area).
- Area with total population of less than 50,000. No city, town or place within the area has population of 50,000 and total population of area is less than 50,000.
- They are areas with large expanses of undeveloped or agricultural land, dotted by small towns, villages, or any other small activity clusters.
- Places where there is lots of open countryside. Houses are spaced far apart. There aren't a lot of streets. Traffic is light. There are few stores and businesses.
- Places with populations of less than 2,500
But how to categorize and code this?
Standard Ways to Code:
The best ways to code where a place is along the urban-to-rural continuum requires people to know whether their county is part of a Metroplitan Statistical Area (MSA), as defined by the Office of Management and Budget. Since most folks don't know this information off hand, such a system is not useful for casual self-reporting such as in a dKos poll. Such systems are typically used when one is collecting data such as county name or address or zip code. The the investigator can code afterwards. The system comes from the U.S. Dept of Agriculture but is widely used throughout government and by academics. It is called Rural Urban Continuum codes. They form a classification scheme that distinguishes metropolitan (metro) counties by the population size of their metro area, and nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties by degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area or areas. The metro and nonmetro categories have been subdivided into three metro and six nonmetro groupings, resulting in a nine-part county codification. The codes allow researchers working with county data to break such data into finer residential groups beyond a simple metro-nonmetro dichotomy, particularly for the analysis of trends in nonmetro areas that may be related to degree of rurality and metro proximity.
You can look up where you live at this link.
There is also a related system that takes the classification-coding scheme down to the zip code level.
What System to Use for Self Coding?
But none of the above is conducive for a daily Kos poll which requires anonymous self coding. The problem with folks deciding whether they are rural or urban on their own is how relative such concepts are for folks. Clearly what is thought of as rural by someone in New York City is very different than a person in a small remote town in Montana. Often, folks do not accurately know the population of the place where they live. There are severe problems associated with how they perceive where they live relative to larger places (e.g., someone can say they live in a place of 10,000 which will turn out to be a sub-community of a large metro area).
So, after some consulting with experts off-dKos, the poll below is what I came up with. It does have the advantage of making only a single division by population size, making your determination easier. It does have the advantage of using the U.S. Census Metro Area and Metro City definition and cut-point of population above or below 50,000. It has the disadvantage of not distinquishing between larger and smaller cities. So a city of 60,000 is lumped together with a population of a million. People who do this work suggest that the real differences are between rural areas and any city, and not so much between a small city and a big city.
And once again, for discussion and comments we ask:
- Urban-Suburban-Rural social and political divides have been a recurring theme in American (and other) history, which of course continue to this day.
- Where do you live?
- How does it affect the way you live, what you believe, how you vote?
Update 1:
Hat tip to commenter below who referenced the Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company's Transect system. see: http://www.dpz.com/...
Graphic (.PDF): http://www.dpz.com/...
Details (.PDF): http://www.dpz.com/...
It looks very interesting. However, it is meant for urban planning and zoning in the context of "new urbanism" so I don't know that it works for this self coding where you live. It emphasizes rural undeveloped areas that should not be developed. It does not seem to have rural residential categories, farms, etc.
Update 2:
I think that the discussions in these demographic diaries is at least as important as the poll results. And there is interesting discussion below. But, I am surprised by the relative lack of overt discussion on the effect of Urban-Rural on beliefs and politics.