Fiction to reality: Bridging the urban-rural divide – Grist todayheadline

The vision

“Vivian’s loved images of cities ever since she was little, thrilled by the novelty of crowds and skyscrapers and teeming streets. She knew she’d been born in Chicago, had even been a baby there for a few years before her mama died, so that added to her interest. Whenever she saw a city in movies or pictures, she could imagine her mysterious ghost mama wandering through it.

Her pa thought cities were one of humanity’s biggest mistakes, and when she got a little older his disdain became another factor in her fascination. She read everything she could about how cities came to be, how they were arranged, the many ways they grew and changed. She loved reading about plans gone wrong — Brasília, Dubai, Las Vegas — but also about the more recent successes in adaptation, mitigation.”

— a passage from “This View From Here,” by Rich Larson

The spotlight

When you envision the future of sustainable living, do you picture a dense city or the rural countryside?

The hyper-urban and the hyper-rural have both appeared in different visions of what a green future might look like, from sci-fi to pop culture to actual policy proposals. You may have a gut reaction that one of these visions is “better” for the planet; you likely jump to one or the other when you imagine what a truly sustainable society could look like.

In “This View From Here,” one of the winning stories in this year’s Imagine 2200 short fiction contest, author Rich Larson explores the tension between contrasting urban and rural visions, in a future where that divide is still alive and well. The main character, Vivian, is preparing to leave her rural hometown in North Carolina to live out her dream of becoming an urban planner, which her father finds difficult to accept:

“I knew you’d move to the city someday.” He shrugs those broad bony shoulders she used to ride on. “I was figuring on Asheville, though. Maybe Charlotte. Not all the way across the country to one of the world’s worst flood-and-fire zones.”

“That’s where they need planners most,” Vivian says.

He shakes his head. “That’s where people shouldn’t be living at all. It’s hubris, pure and simple.”

“There’s no undo button for urbanization, Pa,” she says. “Even if there was, I wouldn’t push it. Humans group up for a reason. It’s resource-efficient, it’s space-efficient, it’s —”

“It’s exactly what got us into this mess,” her pa cuts in. “Bigger, newer, bigger, newer, tear it down and build it again —”

“You know that’s not what I’m going there to do,” Vivian snaps.

In the story, the father’s resistance comes partly from the fact that he fears his daughter will be in danger from climate impacts in a western city, while their southeastern town enjoys relative stability. Larson noted that he wrote the story after a visit to North Carolina in the summer of 2024, before the devastation of Hurricane Helene. At that time, Asheville and the surrounding area was considered something of a climate haven. “The fact the region has since experienced horrific flooding underlines the reach and unpredictability of the climate emergency,” Larson said over email.

But the story’s central conflict is based not on a question of where a person might live to try and escape the impacts of climate change, but a debate about the best way for humans to live if we want to mitigate it. Larson was inspired in part by a conversation with an urban planner friend in Montreal. “He poked some holes in the hyper-rural techno-village idea that often crops up in [sci-fi] — I’m guilty of it myself — by pointing out that cities are incredibly resource efficient when it comes to energy and infrastructure,” he said.

The lead artwork from “This View From Here,” showing Vivian and her father. Violeta Encarnación

Whether you tend to imagine that hyper-rural existence, or immediately picture a future cityscape, looking at the relative sustainability merits of dense cities and close-to-the-land agrarian communities reveals something much more interesting than a contrast between competing ideals — the possibility that both belong in our visions for the future, improved by existing in closer relationship to one another.

Small footprints in the city

While the concrete, crowds, and bright lights of the city may seem to contrast with visions of living in sustainable harmony with nature, the truth is that there are real advantages city living creates when it comes to lowering carbon footprints. So many people living in close proximity both demands efficiency and creates it. (As Vivian tells her father in the story, “Humans group up for a reason.”)

“In cities, you tend to have more compact living spaces,” said Mark Chambers, an architect and city policy expert who now leads partnerships for the cleantech investor Elemental Impact. Homes that are smaller and closer together — in the same building, or wall-to-wall — tend to be more efficient to heat and cool. And where there are masses of people, there is the opportunity for mass transit, in the form of trains, buses, and other communal offerings like bike shares and rideshares.

“There’s an efficient use of resources, because your proximity to those resources enables you to tap into them without having to have them isolated solely for your use,” Chambers said.

Those working on the future of city living are focused on how to make the most of those inherent efficiencies — concepts like the 15-minute city imagine dense, walkable neighborhoods that create connected communities.

But one of the biggest challenges to realizing the sustainability benefits of denser living is that, in reality, many people still don’t want to live that way. Most Americans still aspire to own larger homes that are more spread out from one another. The chokehold that the single-family home has on the American consciousness — not to mention, our zoning codes — creates a significant obstacle to implementing denser housing arrangements in places that don’t currently have them.

“Urban environments force compromise,” Chambers said, suggesting that may be viewed as a negative for many in the U.S., because it runs counter to deeply ingrained ideals of rugged individualism. “We don’t necessarily have a lot of great narratives around collectivism that are aspirational,” he said.

His hope is that this can shift, and city life can become not just aspirational for its efficiencies, but also be a desirable lifestyle. That mindset would not only shift our willingness to imagine cities as the future, but also how we imagine the future of rural areas. Even in hyper-rural settings, the most sustainable version of country living might look a little more like the efficiencies of dense urban centers.

Spencer R. Scott, a former career scientist turned writer and environmental consultant, felt the draw of the agrarian ideal. Scott and his husband left San Francisco to start Solar Punk Farms in 2020 — a queer-run land regeneration project in Northern California.

“There is a lot that we can learn from why cities can be enjoyable and why density can be enjoyable — but we can also have that at a smaller scale in rural places,” he said. “I’ve seen a couple places in Eastern Europe, these small, rural farming towns are all kind of packed close together on a road, with the farmland extending back in these long lines. And so they all live very close together, but then they have all of this open space around them where they’re farming.”

He hopes to be part of creating that mindset shift. “That is kind of our explicit purpose with Solar Punk Farms, is changing what is seen as aspirational,” he said. But, in addition to the messaging and educational work it takes to change attitudes, there are some practical barriers to building that dream vision. Policy shifts — for instance, upzoning for denser housing — can be more difficult to achieve in rural areas, for logistical reasons. Solar Punk Farms is on unincorporated territory in Sonoma County, meaning the area doesn’t have local governance. Scott and his husband have been working toward incorporation, “which is the process of becoming a town or a city so that you can have a mayor and set your own laws and have a little more agency over zoning and permitting and things like that,” he said.

Production in the country

While density is desirable from an efficiency standpoint, it also comes with a sustainability disadvantage: Cities rely on food, energy, and other goods produced elsewhere and shipped in.

“We often are fairly disconnected from the origins of our food,” Chambers offered as an example. And the long, brittle supply chains that support cities are vulnerable to shocks, as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated.

In a rural setting, there’s a more obvious connection to the land and systems of production. That may be why many visions of a sustainable future idealize rural settings and an agrarian way of living.

At the same time, living close to the land on a small-scale, restorative farm, like the one Scott and his husband are building in Northern California, is not the norm in most of the rural United States. The current realities of our mainstream agricultural system leave it pretty far off from the vision of a future of sustainable agrarian living.

Sarah Carlson, senior programs and member engagement director at the nonprofit Practical Farmers of Iowa (who was featured on the Grist 50 list in 2019), notes that many commercial farmers in the Midwest aren’t actually growing food. Her family’s farm, for instance, in northern Illinois, grew corn and soybeans largely for animal feed and biofuels. While people might assume that farmers are likely to grow at least some food for their own use or local use — neighbors trading fresh eggs for fresh vegetables — that isn’t always the case.

“My grandparents, who were Depression kids, they had gardens, but then my mom and dad never had gardens,” Carlson said. She would bet that there are more people tending gardens — food that they themselves will actually eat — in the suburbs where she lives now than on farms in Iowa.

Plus, the methods of conventional farming mean that the natural environments surrounding large-scale, conventional farms are far from a pastoral ideal.

At Practical Farmers of Iowa, Carlson is working toward a vision of healthy and resilient farms that amplifies the inherent sustainability advantages of rural life — and, she hopes, will attract more people to rural places, creating more vibrant communities. For example, planting cover crops — her number one “low-hanging fruit,” she said — can help reduce dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, reduce erosion, and bring more diversity to the landscape, as well as more jobs.

She wants to see a world where more people are drawn to rural life, rather than lured away by opportunities elsewhere, creating diverse, thriving communities.

But her dream vision would involve an even greater overhaul of land use. “To me, it’s concentric circles,” she said. “Nearest to the humans would be the most highly perishable crops — so, around small towns is more fruit and vegetable production. The next layer out from that would be milk and dairy systems that would be grass-based as much as possible.” And extending out from there, fields of broad acre crops would be grown in varied rotations.

Bridging the urban-rural divide

Scott, Carlson, and Chambers all expressed that, in a sustainable future, there needs to be more connective tissue between cities and rural areas. It’s not about favoring one ideal or the other, or even what each can learn from the other — a truly sustainable future requires both working together, and visions that imagine that harmony.

For Carlson, that harmony is closer than people may think. “Rural and urban places are actually probably more similar than I think is given credit,” said Carlson. They suffer from some of the same challenges — like “brain drain” to the suburbs. And both can facilitate tight bonds between neighbors. In the city, it’s because there’s no getting away from each other, as Chambers alluded to. In the country, it’s because residents rely on one another to fill needs that aren’t provided by centralized public services. “I would have to depend on my neighbors to pull me out when there’s a snowstorm or whatever happens,” Carlson said. “So I think there’s actually more in common culturally, with dependence on community.”

Like Carlson, Scott sees a future in which the separation between urban and rural communities is less stark. A future where perhaps, a character like Vivian’s father wouldn’t need to have as much anxiety about what awaits his daughter in the city, as we see in Rich Larson’s short story.

Where Carlson imagines concentric circles, Scott sees sheds. “I think that we are in this shift to more bioregional thinking,” he said, including greater awareness of the ecosystems and human systems that we are a part of, wherever we live — our watersheds, fibersheds, and foodsheds.

One thing that always struck him living in San Francisco was how few people knew where the city sourced its water. In fact, that was another impetus for Scott in starting Solar Punk Farms. “We want to be a little satellite off from the city in a more rural space, where people can start to weave that relationship,” he said.

— Claire Elise Thompson

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See for yourself

What about you? Where do you envision living your best, greenest, most fulfilling life? I’d love to hear from you at cethompson@grist.org.

A parting shot

Still one of my all-time favorite examples of solarpunk imagery is this Chobani commercial from 2021 — an animated short titled “Dear Alice.” The action takes place on a family farm, but a big city with plant-covered skyscrapers is visible in the distance, looking like a friendly neighbor. Although it is an ad, and ostensibly designed to make me want to buy yogurt and oat milk, what it really makes me want is to live in this future. Like, now.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Violeta Encarnación

Parting shot: Chobani / YouTube