Not in My City

Rural America as urban dumping ground. 

Lipschitz, Forbes. “Not in my City: Rural America as Urban Dumping Ground,” Architecture_MPS, Vol 6. No. 2

The ideological divide between “urban” and “rural” is deeply rooted in the American consciousness, fraught with tensions stemming from false memories of a pastoral past on the one hand and the American yearning for progress as exemplified by the industry of the city on the other. Over the last twenty years, however, rural issues have been wholly overshadowed by design’s fixation on urbanization. Though urban design and planning are well established subdisciplines of the design professions, rural issues receive limited pedagogical or practical emphasis. Across design disciplines, the contemporary city is touted as the key to technological, economic and cultural innovation while rural decline is accepted as inevitable, if not necessary. This resignation to the eventuality of rural decline has facilitated an exploitative relationship between urban hubs and their rural hinterlands.