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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
The fact that we have rural being essentially defined as non urban plays into narratives about it being the other. You know, about the backwater, about the ghetto, the food basket, the dumping ground, the place where we consume and take things from, a place waiting to become urban. And there are no metrics for presenting differences across rural landscapes. So we get a very unnuanced, very crude differentiation of our total landscape, which does nothing to support ideas about the contribution that rural places make to the total.
Ellen Wolter:That's Brian Dabson. He is a rural policy analyst and researcher who has been studying rural areas for more than 3 decades. His research looks at rural urban interdependence, which is as he defines the symbiotic relationship between rural and urban spaces. And that's the backbone of our nation's prosperity. Brian is describing the negative impacts of how we typically define a rural area.
Ellen Wolter:For example, the US Census Bureau defines urban areas first, and then they define rural as everything else, whatever is left over, whatever is nonurban. In this conversation, Brian talks about how these commonly used definitions of rural can undervalue the contribution of rural places to our overall prosperity and the need for better metrics that capture rural contributions. Brian also shares his insights about how rural areas will play a significant role in how we adapt to and manage climate change And the need for our best minds to be working in rural communities because of their importance to all of our well-being, regardless of the space where you live.
Ellen Wolter:When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started. Just to travel along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Ellen Wolter:I erroneously thought you were a rural sociologist. So maybe if you could share a little bit about your career and background focusing on rural areas.
Ellen Wolter:I I'm probably quite difficult to pigeonhole. People make all sorts of assumptions about what I am and where I come from, which I guess is is good. I began life as, as a planner. And in the days when I did this, which is a long time ago, it was called town and country planning. Subsequently, it all became urban planning, which is interesting.
Ellen Wolter:So, almost a full circle. Right from the very beginning, I was interested in town and country as a unified, approach to to planning. My career is in 2 parts. First of all, in the UK and for the last 30 plus years in the United States. While I was in the UK, I was primarily working in big cities on urban regeneration projects in Glasgow and Liverpool.
Ellen Wolter:When I came to the States and I lived in Washington DC, I was running the Corporation For Enterprise Development or CFED, but quite a bit of my work took me into, rural places. When I moved over to Missouri, the University of Missouri, I did a lot of work on, regional analysis, but I also was involved with rural policy. I did quite a lot of, thinking about where rural might go and what the future of rural America might look like. And I began to watch with some consternation about the increasing disparities between urban and rural, and the somewhat disdain that there was from urban commentators about rural people and rural places. And that took me into other forms of inquiry about, regionalism and what that means for rural development right up to the the present day where I'm still, writing and thinking about, the future of rural America and where it might go and what might stop it from fulfilling its full potential.
Ellen Wolter:Brian, one of the reasons I was so excited to talk with you is because you have a large footprint, I would say, on the rural urban interdependence work work here in the United States. I followed your research, and you're one of the people. I I don't think there are many. I think one of the the folks that has really honed in on what rural and urban interdependence is. And you kind of alluded to this a little bit in sharing about your background, but what are some of the ways in which you started to get interested in this idea of rural urban interdependence?
Ellen Wolter:When I moved to the United States over 30 years ago, I spent a lot of time working in primarily poor rural communities. And what I was doing was getting involved in helping them think through their futures, their economic prospects, their links with the environment, the steps needed to improve education and health opportunities and outcomes. And I developed this admiration for their commitment to place and their resilience in the face of all manner of economic and weather related challenges. And I became highly sensitized, I suppose, to the way in which, urban commentators talked about their rural counterparts. In the early 2000, many economists and The New York Times and other outlets started to write about rural America's demise.
Ellen Wolter:And, you know, economists were saying, well, the answer is that people should relocate to the cities to find jobs, that the future was in cities, and that urban taxpayers were already over subsidizing rural America through farms, so the subsidies and welfare payments. And, of course, little later on, this was supercharged after the 2016 elections when rural voters came under intense scrutiny for acting in way they did. So this got me thinking a lot about how do we get to this point. And the more I thought about it, the more I I focused on this urban rural interdependence or interaction. And I I felt that the significance and magnitude of rural contributions to overall national prosperity were generally unrecognized, undervalued, and almost always unmonetized.
Ellen Wolter:So we ended up with, policy debates which were framed as a false choice between rural and urban, and drowning out the fundamental truth in my view that everyone benefits when both urban and rural places are doing well. So I backed into this whole area of rural urban interactions by feeling that rural people were being badly treated and probably worse ignored as being anything any group of people that were worth consideration by, researchers and commentators at the time. And the way I got into this was thinking, well, actually, you can't separate the rural people over here and urban folks over here. You had to think the the sensible way of way of approaching this is that there is constant interaction between these two. We're all rural and urban together.
Ellen Wolter:And so how can we talk about, rural urban interdependent in that way? I'm not the first person to have come across that, but it it seemed to be one area where I I felt I might be able to offer some sort of contribution.
Ellen Wolter:How would you describe what rural urban interdependence is to somebody who's never heard that concept before? What does that look like in practice?
Ellen Wolter:Well, first thing I would say is that rural urban interdependence means, implies that rural and urban places, their economies and their people have mutual and deep connections and ties. The strength and the nature of these ties may vary over time and across geographies, but they still remain part of the whole. So, a holistic approach that includes both rural and urban places. The way that I introduced, myself into this discussion was in a Brookings paper in 2007, which is a very long time ago now, where in civil terms, you say that on the one hand, rural America, provides the food, the fibre, the natural resources, the energy, and is a crucial contributor to the national economy in that way. The common factor in all this is rural places and people, their connection to the land.
Ellen Wolter:In addition, these spaces, the rural spaces provide, ecosystem services to provide recreational opportunities and just the great outdoors, primarily to urban audiences and consumers. And you could argue that the hardworking people in rural places who commute 50 miles to get to a job provide the labor that fuels certain urban economies. So that's on one side. That's what rural is offering. On the other, urban offers, bustling markets, there are abundant resources, job opportunities, capital, essential services.
Ellen Wolter:They're essential, I think, to ensuring rural sustainability and competitiveness and vitality going forward. So I would say that interdependence describes the sort of symbiotic relationship, between urban and rural, which actually is the backbone of our nation's prosperity.
Ellen Wolter:So, Brian, so rural and urban, you know, it's typically defined as a binary as you described. Right? And it's Mhmm. Defined that way based on specific definitions that federal agencies put out. There are ways in which these definitions are used to allocate funding and, you know, do various research.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. And I'm just curious what ways you have seen how those rural and urban definitions have had implications for policy and resource allocation program design. What are some of the ways in which that dichotomy has really put rural policy at a disadvantage?
Ellen Wolter:Yes. Well, there are two main ways in which we distinguish urban from rural, using federal statistics. The Census Bureau has this classification, which is tries to define what an urban area is, that a densely developed territory, which includes all the usual urban functions. And certain specifications and some new ones in the latest centres. So about it must have at least 2,000 housing units and a population of at least 5,000 people.
Ellen Wolter:And so that's urban. Rural is everything else. So you define urban first, and what's left over is rural. So that's how the Census approaches it. The Office of Management and Budget defines metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas based on contiguous counties clustered around a core of, in the case of metropolitan areas, 50,000 people or more, and some sort of social and economic integration of counties around it.
Ellen Wolter:And micro pollutant counties have a core of of an urban area of 10 to 50000. Any area of the country which is neither metro or micro is called rural. And unfortunately, this is the most used framework by policymakers and researchers because it's easy. Urbanier, rural there. So not only is rural separate from urban, it's a sort of residual category.
Ellen Wolter:The bit that we don't know how to describe except that it's it hasn't got so many people in it. Now the implications for this, I think fairly serious. The first one is that if you combine the census and the metro and the OMB stuff together, you find that many metropolitan areas have quite substantial rural populations in them. And, in fact, if you do the math, over half of the US rural population actually lives in metropolitan areas. Another quarter live in, micropolitan areas, and just a quarter, therefore, live in the rural areas so defined.
Ellen Wolter:So, in simple terms, that means 3 quarters of the people who live in what would be accepted as rural places are not counted when we look at rural policy, which is based just on rural America as defined by, the Census and OMB. So I think that's a fairly serious implication. I'd suggest also that the fact that we have, rural being essentially defined as non urban plays into narratives about it being the other. You know, about the backwater, about the ghetto, the food basket, the dumping ground, the place where we consume and take things from, A place waiting to become urban. So it's not good for the narrative to be able to classify places as not being urban.
Ellen Wolter:And the third thing, which I think is just as serious, is that it reinforces the narrative that rural places are homogeneous. They are the same because they are rural and not being urban. And there are no metrics for presenting differences across rural landscapes. So we get a very unnuanced, very crude differentiation of our total landscape, which does nothing to support ideas about the contribution that rural places make to the total. Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Yeah. Those are such important points, Brian. And then if you're thinking about developing rural policy or ways to support rural areas, it really leaves out a pretty big piece of the story that you need to develop that policy. What are some better ways that folks have thought about to measure rural and urban or to kinda get away from that dichotomy?
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. There are 2, 3 different thoughts that, have. And the one that one of them that I particularly like was work that was done by Andrew Iserman, back in 2005. Unfortunately, he passed away just a little later than that, so he wasn't able to fulfil the potential of this. And he came up with a typology, which is basically rural counties at one end, urban counties at the other, defined by the both density and the percentage of populations living in an urban or rural context.
Ellen Wolter:And then in between had mixed rural and mixed urban, the difference being question of density. And he made the argument that if you had that sort of categorization, which was inclusive of all rural populations, because most people live in a mixed rural or mixed urban, you're actually counting more of the rural population within these categories and actually allowing for some differences. And he argued that it would allow a much finer grain, set of analysis understanding the continuum across rural and urban. Another way is to really focus on the region, which encompass both rural and urban. Up until about 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis defined economic regions, which included interactions between urban and the periphery, both based on commuting and trade flows and all the rest of it.
Ellen Wolter:And these regions cross state boundaries. They they didn't really follow all the normal categorizations that we're used to in terms of legislative boundaries. It gave you a much better basis for looking out how urban and rural areas interacted within and between regions. And we did some work in Central Appalachia when I was in Missouri, and we were able to look at what happens when you put a slab of public money investments into a region. What happened to the flows of money, and who would benefit from it?
Ellen Wolter:And that analysis showed that if the money went to the cities, it tended to stay there and didn't really filter out to the rural areas. And if you put all the money into the rural areas, it quickly drained off into the cities. Now that sort of understanding could have been really helpful, I think, with all this this massive flow of public dollars, which are going into rural areas now under the build back better and all the rest of these things. So it gives us a better understanding of the interactions between rural and urban and units of analysis. In the past, there have been other attempts to define regions in different ways, watersheds for instance.
Ellen Wolter:If you're concerned about water supply, about habitats, ecosystem protection, you define the areas around the rivers and the drainage channels, which includes both rural and urban and gets us a better understanding about what happens when you have fast urban development, what implications does it have downstream and upstream in rural communities and the linkage between them. So there are different ways in which you can think about these in a little bit more. None of them are as simple as the urban rural distinction, but none of us seem to like Nuance these days. But actually, if you're trying to do policy that works, nuance is really important and being able to understand the specifics of, local and regional circumstances seems to me to be really important for us to have a better handle on.
Ellen Wolter:There was an article that you were quoted in. It was called our shared fate. It's from 2008, and I think it kinda gets to what some of the things you're describing. And I'm just gonna quote what was what was said because I really like this quote. It says, in America, we have no metrics for counting how rural fits into the totality.
Ellen Wolter:So thinking about what role does rural America play that can be valued by all. And so I one of the things I think a lot about is, you know, what would some of those metrics be to help think about how rural fits into the the totality? And this might get to one of my other questions, which is what research is lacking on rural and urban interdependence, and
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:What are some things that we can do to to push that research forward?
Ellen Wolter:It's interesting. That quote came out of a a weekend that a group of us spent on on a vineyard in, California. So, it was well oiled discussion. But we were trying to get a handle around this urban rural connection at that point. And I think my argument then, and it remains to this day, is that rural spaces and places provide us so much that is not widely recognized as being valuable.
Ellen Wolter:We can get into some really strong arguments about whether one should try and monetize things which shouldn't be monetized, you know, like aesthetics or beauty or things of that nature. But, nevertheless, if you can monetize an asset, let's say, for instance, wilderness, totally unspoilt by human development, and then a proposal for a pipeline or a highway, it goes straight through that wilderness And from a strict economic point of view, it makes perfect sense. You can demonstrate, in terms of the scale of private investment, the financial return on investment to shareholders, the jobs created, the contribution it makes to the broader economy. And after all, it's just a piece of empty land. The fact is that because we don't have a better way of placing a value on that type of land, then always, it's going to be a hard battle to argument that you shouldn't drive road through it.
Ellen Wolter:So we need some way of measuring emptiness of space of beauty, aesthetics, of wildness, of nature. And I don't profess to have any great ideas about how you do that. But I do know that because we don't have it, it makes it much more difficult to defend against those sorts of the hard economic logic, which is constantly used in just about everything that we look at. You can apply the same thing to farmland. Now there are values attached to farmland in terms of how good it is, the crops it returns, and all the rest of it.
Ellen Wolter:But when economists and land agents start talking about the best highest and best use of that land, Housing and retail malls, commercial development are going to win out every time. Things like the long term loss to food production or to environmental values are just not included in the math. So, again, I think we we're constantly not able to steward our natural resources in a way which in the long term makes, will make sense. And I want to underscore this by the fact that I think the question is even more urgent. Now, we're faced with the effects of extreme weather events, shortage of water, the need for alternative energy, the need for climate adaptability in our crops and our farming systems, and the possibility of zoonotic disease spread, we need a much better accounting system for saying what what the value of these places are, and how they should best be looked after.
Ellen Wolter:And I would argue, and I continue to argue, that we need our best brains and talents now working in rural areas to and to pay the people who work there well to be stewards of something that we haven't even begun to measure yet in terms of its contribution. But I think we know instinctively if we don't and we continue to let the development go, urban development encroach on these areas, we're all doomed. So I think they're probably taking us off on a a tangent here, but I think it just illustrates particularly well that we do need much better metrics, for measuring where rural fits in. And I would argue that rural has a great role to play in our next 20, 30, 40 years as we try and figure out the impacts of climate change and all the things that go with
Ellen Wolter:it. No. I I I don't think it's a tangent, Brian. I think it's a very well taken point and, you know, I'm, saying that as we have wildfire smoke from Canada coming into Minnesota. Right.
Ellen Wolter:With their air quality being really low. So I think we are all navigating what that looks like, and I think it's a really important point. And, it brings me to actually another quote from the that same Aspen article, which talked a little bit about how in Europe, there are rural protection zones, and maybe also in the UK.
Ellen Wolter:And Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:Is that something that could work here in the United States? Is that different from, like, a national park, for example, that we have in the in the United States? Could you just share a little bit about that idea?
Ellen Wolter:As you know, I was brought up in in England, and we have national parks there and a green belt, which is a deliberate policy established after the 2nd World War to to stop the encroachment of urban places into rural. I mean, you're talking about a country where most of the towns are fairly close together, and therefore, the the open country spaces between them are much more valuable and more vulnerable. So there were policies called green belts, which were to limit the amount of development that took place and increase the density of the towns and stop the sprawl of the suburbs. That's been constantly attacked over the years as increasing the price of housing and other things within the cities. But there's no doubt about it that there's been benefit in keeping large areas undeveloped and undamaged by, development.
Ellen Wolter:I don't think you could do anything like that in in the states on any wide area. I know it happens in certain communities, where they have a sort of agricultural zone around to prevent development expanding. The national parks here are interesting in the sense that, they've become sort of exclusionary zones for recreation and for open air opportunity. The national parks in the UK are slightly different because they are working landscapes. So people farm there, people run little businesses there.
Ellen Wolter:They're controlled in terms of their environment and what they look like, the aesthetics and all the rest of it, but there is economic activity going on within those areas. They're not exclusionary zones as are national parks. And my observation here is that, obviously, on public lands we somehow are quite happy with mining and oil drilling going on in our public lands and for very little return to the public purse. But we do have these national parks surrounded by the some of the tackiest development you could see trying to make, take advantage of their proximity to the parks. It seems to have distorted things a little.
Ellen Wolter:So I don't know, Alan, whether there's any lessons to be learned there. The cultures are very different, and there's much more land here and more space, and so forth. People don't feel quite so protective of it. But I think, I've always liked the idea that you're in town one minute and then you're in the country. And you can see that in Australia where these country towns, lovely dense towns, and there are no suburbs.
Ellen Wolter:You either live in the town or you live in the country and the ranches beyond. There's a certain attractiveness to that rather than what we seem to have, which is just endless sprawl and every intersection looking like the the one you've just been through and the one you will go through for miles ahead. We've not been very careful to protect, open spaces, I'm afraid, except through the national parks and the forest service activities.
Ellen Wolter:What do you think the barriers are to researching rural and urban interdependence, particularly in the United States? Because I think there is much more research happening on rural urban linkages and international settings.
Ellen Wolter:Yes.
Ellen Wolter:And I'm curious what what you have found to be some of the barriers. I have some of my own own ideas, but curious what your thoughts are.
Ellen Wolter:I think some of the barriers are really two types. One, I think, is there's far less interest these days in in researching rural affairs more generally. I mean, there used to be a lot of activity in rural sociology and rural economics and what have you, and I don't think there are so many researchers as there used to be, but that might be a minor thing. I think there's a more, sort of, broader issue to do with the fact that the rural urban divide narrative has made it increasingly hard to find common ground. There's a lack of trust.
Ellen Wolter:There's an imposition of national agendas that drive out consideration of local concerns. And so it's harder to set up research and dialogue around what are the connections between rural and urban communities because all the discussion tends to be on polarization. And I think you probably can get more research dollars to think about, well, what's wrong with rural? All the the sort of divide narrative is a lot more attractive for research and discussion and debate than what brings us together and and what are the advantages of thinking holistically about urban and rural together. And there is another thing which I'm not sure how this plays out, but the power and capacity imbalances between urban and rural places.
Ellen Wolter:Places rural communities always at a disadvantage in discussions about key policies and projects. If you bring urban and rural people together into a conversation, say about housing or transportation. The loudest, voices are always going to be the ones from the city. They have all the research capacity behind them. They have the data, and they have the people who can specialize in specific topics.
Ellen Wolter:And until you get some sort of greater balance between urban rural voices at the table, then it's harder to think about positive interactions because those interactions leave a really bad taste in the mouths of, of the rural participants. On top of that, those communities which have been researched have a very dim view of academic researchers coming into their communities and treating them as anthropological, topics. They get involved in discussions and then they never see the results. And there's always a suspicion that those results are are not in their favor, and it's particularly the case in rural and tribal communities where research is done to you and you're not really part of that process. I think those are all individual things, which I set the context for, or make it difficult rather, put it this way, to bring urban and rural people together to look at what those linkages might be and how they might mutually benefit.
Ellen Wolter:It occurs to me, Ellen, too, that and this is a long standing thing, is that people tend to think about rural research in terms of agriculture.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:And certainly, the USDA's agricultural research budgets are mainly geared towards crop production and, different ways of using soil and mechanization and all the rest of it. A small proportion goes to rural development. Placing rural development within agriculture sets it apart. Again, makes it difficult to start to think about linkages out from rural to other disciplines or other parts of the economy. It's just harder to do all this work.
Ellen Wolter:Just not impossible. It's just harder.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's transition to maybe thinking about some ideas or solutions. You know, we focus so much on the divisions and differences across rural and urban spaces for all the reasons that we've talked about. What are some ways that we can focus on how rural and urban spaces are interdependent?
Ellen Wolter:How can we how can we do that in a way that helps to move this idea forward, moves, you know, ideally policy and program design forward? What could that look like?
Ellen Wolter:I've been very interested recently in looking at what's been going on and, research in Canada around what has been termed new regionalism. It's not new in the sense that the discussions been going on for the last 50 years internationally, less so here. We're used to a certain amount of regionalism in the in the United States. We've had the Tennessee Valley Authority. We've had the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Ellen Wolter:We've got all the regional development organizations through the Economic Development Administration. But the history of regionalism as a broader, political construct has seen ebbs and flows of enthusiasm over the last century and was never really reaped the benefits of the implications of that, of cross jurisdictional working or cross functional working. Everything still remains in jurisdictional or functional silos, which makes it really hard for the sorts of discussions we're talking about. I would argue, and this is not hardly a stretch, is that most of the major problems we face, ecological, economic, social, they have strong regional dimensions that cannot readily be tackled solely at the local level, at the state level, or the national level. There's this intermediate level of problems and issues which could be solved at that regional level.
Ellen Wolter:Now in various parts of the world, this notion of new regionalism has started to take some root. And in in Canada, where they've been doing quite a lot of research on this and where there are quite a lot of people who are interested in rural and regional research, so we have to move up north. Rural urban interdependence is really part of the new regionalism as far as they're concerned along with, 3 or 4 other things. First of all, what they call multilevel collaborative governance, which is a fancy way of saying you make decisions at the right level over the right geography. So for different functions, you need a different group of people involved.
Ellen Wolter:But if you're talking about air pollution or wildfires for instance, it's a different set of people who are involved in that than something that's to do with housing. So why do you have the same unit of governance related to something which has a much narrower geographic spread to something which covers, large geographic areas? And so and it's really important that local and state and national governments actually talk a lot better rather in hierarchical terms, but actually in collaborative terms to try and do problem solving. So governance around problem solving at the right level and the right geography. The second piece is place based development.
Ellen Wolter:Taking decisions which reflect, regional identities, local assets, and encourage as much local control and ownership as possible. I think that's entirely consistent with a regional approach and the urban rural interdependence is that sometimes urban and rural can actually share the same regional identity, whether it's around geography or culture or music or whatever it is. The next one is integrated development, which is just finding solutions across economic, social, and environmental functions. I've just been doing quite a lot of work in preparing for a book I'm writing about the future of rural America, and I'm really struck with the conversations I've had in rural places about how difficult it is to think in in integrative terms because everything is in silos in terms of the money that comes down from federal and state governments and really prevent the possibility of exploring the linkages between housing and transportation, between health care and food systems, all the rest of it. And we need to have a figure out a way of how do we better integrate these activities and have the funding streams which support integrative activities.
Ellen Wolter:And it also enables us to talk a little more creatively about issues of equity and how that all fits into the the totality. And the final piece is innovation and learning. How do you set up systems which allow us all to learn from and adapt to the experiences we've had with all this joint working and collaboration, what have you. So that we're constantly influencing the systems and the structures and policies to enable us to get to a place where we need to be. And just to put a final point on that, the urgency that we should be given now to the implications of climate change should make all these pieces blindingly obvious of what we need to be doing if we're going to stand a chance of having any quality of life over the next 30, 50 years.
Ellen Wolter:Do you feel like new regionalism is something that could be implemented here in the United States? Do you feel like that is a a possibility for how we could maybe change some mental models, if you will, for thinking about rural urban interdependence?
Ellen Wolter:I have my doubts as to whether the fully fledged version of that, will take place. But I think there are I'm beginning to think that there's some room for maneuver here and actually using some of the infrastructure that we already have. Let's let's take the economic development districts, the regional development organizations. Let's invest in them a little more, give them greater opportunities and funding to explore some of this collaborative work, charge them with thinking more holistically about rural urban interdependence. You know, the, some of the the work that the USDA has been doing in rural development, trying to build capacity in local communities and all the rest of it.
Ellen Wolter:All that will be so better enhanced if we did it through these established or some variant of those regional development organizations. And I think we could make some progress that way. But I I think we've got to find a way of changing the narrative. Whilst we still got it's us versus them, we're never going to get to where we need to be to achieve this collaboration, this integration, this holistic view of where we're going to take, our country, and particularly what rural America's contribution to that will be. So we have to make a effort along those different lines and let's see whether we can be a bit more successful.
Ellen Wolter:Incidentally, Minnesota has been one of those states which has got a history of these regional foundations and thinking regionally about its problems. The infrastructure is there to build on and maybe that's Minnesota could be a place where we could try more of these things out and for the future.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. I think I think you're right. The infrastructure is there at various levels whether it's philanthropy or even government and there's a very strong civic engagement, legacy here too.
Ellen Wolter:It just needs to be reinforced, encouraged, awarded, if you like, in order to say, you're right, you're going in the direct right direction. This is where we should be this is what we should be striving for going forward.
Ellen Wolter:Well, Brian, thank you so much for your insights today and and sharing your expertise with us, and thank you for being a contributor to changing the narratives, around rural and urban interdependence. I have been using your work a lot, and and so I encourage my listeners to look you up and and find your great work.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you so much, Ellen. Thank you.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jekala, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
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Ellen Wolter:get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is Side by Side.