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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.
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:A lot of agrarian settlements could grow to be fairly sizable, but not to the same extent as the truly urban settlements, which did not have any self sufficient activity going on. It was all carried out through trade. If you have this external source of food and resource coming in, the sky's the limit. Opening up the floodgates of all the resources in the surrounding countryside to the city, populations can just blow up. There's a tendency...
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:That tendency tend... Tends to span across time of urban areas to get more and more hungry. So no matter how much they've got, they always want a little more. The more resources you bring in, the more people you can support. The more people you support, the more resources you need to bring in, which means you're putting more and more pressure on rural areas to sustain you.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It has the same end, which is to supply an almost endless array of items from rural areas into the city. That's where you see emerging industry because you're able to combine rural commodities from different locations into new and more advanced urban products. They can only be made because you have access to so many different rural resources that are combined in unique ways. In medieval times, that was guilds. In later times, it was factories, but it's the same basic idea.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:When you're looking inward in rural areas or inward at cities, you're not looking at the relations between them and how those relationships are tied together and what the implications of those relationships are for both of those places in the end. That's what gets missed.
Ellen Wolter:That's doctor Greg Fulkerson, professor of sociology at SUNY Oneonta, where his research focuses on community development, globalization, and urban rural issues. He's talking about how trade connected urban and rural places thousands of years ago, creating an urban rural system. Rural communities supplied the resources urban settlements needed, which supported growth and economic development. Along with his collaborator, Alexander Thomas, Gregg's work explores how urban and rural places have been connected for thousands of years, from early human settlements and agrarian societies to colonialism and today's era of globalization. Their work also examines concepts like urban dependency and urban normativity that have emerged from their research.
Ellen Wolter:Greg joined me to discuss his series of books exploring urban and rural places as part of a larger system and what the dynamics between them reveal about how our communities develop, depend on one another, and change over time, and the need for rural and urban places to be studied not in silos, but as a complex adaptive system.
Jim Griswold (Music):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:You've written many books on the dynamics of rural and urban systems and connections, interactions, intersections. But you've spent a lot of your career looking at rural communities and demographic change and the intersections of rural and urban places and people. What first drew you to this work?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Well, it's a long story and a somewhat biographical story, and it goes back to my childhood. And actually, Alex Thomas, who's my central collaborator, has a similar kind of background, I guess, in that we both kind of moved around a lot as children between urban and rural places and just kind of began observing these contrasts in the way of life that people have, the way that people make a living. I was switching between rural Kansas, rural Pennsylvania. I was born in the suburbs of Chicago and wound up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Alex was between Long Island and Ocala, Florida, rural before it was developed.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So we both bonded on this shared experience growing up, living in just a variety of places, and that kind of shaping the way we think about place. I think people who live in one type of place take it for granted, but much like my trip to Greece when I was in high school, You don't realize what you live in until you see it from the outside in. But also, something else that we share in common is this kind of fascination with deindustrialization because Ann Arbor in the 1980s, most people think of that as a pretty hip and vibrant city, which very much is today. But in the nineteen eighties, everything in Michigan was depressed, and there was just an onslaught of closures of auto factories and plants. The fortunes of pretty much all of Michigan were tied to the auto industry.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Both my parents grew up in Michigan, and it was their grandparents who moved them to Michigan off the farm to work in the factories. There was a lot of civil unrest. There was a lot of disappointment and anger because of really failed social progress after civil rights to a large degree is how I see that. And so seeing the city go from 2,000,000 to now, what, 700, 100,000, something like that, It's imploded. Of course, Lansing and Kalamazoo both have their own stories of deindustrialization.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It's like everywhere I went, you could just find a downtown with empty buildings, empty factories. It was just part of my upbringing all through college. I wound up studying environmental justice issues that were tied to industrial settings mostly. I wound up going into rural sociology because there were a whole new set of issues that I hadn't really thought about tied to agriculture. Apart from rural memories of Kansas and Pennsylvania where it's pastoral landscape, I remember seeing Amish people going fishing, those kinds of things.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It didn't really dawn on me the environmental problems of rural areas. I've always thought of rural areas as ideal environmentally, but that kind of blew my mind when I started thinking about the environmental costs that rural areas have to pay to provide a livelihood for themselves and to sell their products to mostly urban populations.
Ellen Wolter:Well, to that end, Greg, I think that'd be a good place to start with my next question because I think one of the things that that I certainly didn't grasp are some of the historical components of rural and urban connections and systems and places and what that looks like. And so in your book City and Country, you have a really comprehensive history of urban rural systems beginning in ancient times, and you laid out different eras of how urban rural systems developed over time starting from nomadic foraging to more agrarian societies urban rural systems that we know today. And so I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about what that looked like. And I think one of the things that struck me was how the systems really started to evolve when trade started to happen.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. And interestingly, even going back thousands of years to places like Afghanistan and in the Persian Empire, pre Persian Empire, Iran, there was long distance trade in luxury goods primarily, like, you know, precious stones, precious metals, those kinds of things. Not so much your everyday needs, not your textiles, your food, that stuff was more or less locally produced, at least to an extent regionally produced. But essentially, some of the first emerging settlements that are different than anything that preceded them because they existed primarily as almost just trading posts, Those were the first settlements where people were living without having to directly engage in their own kind of food production, their own kind of sustenance. There wasn't any kind of self sufficient economic activity going on, and that goes back all the way to 4,000 BC.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:If you go to the Fertile Crescent, the Fertile Crescent is modern day Syria and Iraq, and although it's a pretty dry and difficult terrain now, if you go back then, was much wetter and greener, and area was blessed with all these naturally occurring grasses and grains that would enable large populations to emerge. They had naturally occurring wheat, pine corn wheat. And we speculate that it was nomadic people who had just started learning about these plants. There's some evidence that they found batter for bread twelve thousand years ago, which blew my mind because that tells you that there is already an emerging knowledge about grain, which is critical. If you want to support cities of thousands of people, you need grain.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:If you go to New Zealand, where nothing like that emerged, there are zero naturally occurring grains. Even like Central America, where cities merge much later, the Mayans had to basically invent it through teosinte, which became maize, but it started off as a very different plant. They actually invented maize through selective breeding. So why aren't there these ancient cities around the world? Because they didn't have those conditions.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They didn't have the right environmental conditions. So, yeah, you see a lot of the initial settlements that we might call urban occurring in parts of Turkey or Anatolia at the time or the Fertile Crescent, and some of the first trade relations, some of the first empires emerged there thousands of years ago. So those kinds of things are interesting when you think about it because we're reading urban sociology texts that are saying cities form because of capitalism. Was there capitalism twelve thousand years ago, six thousand years ago? I mean, it depends on how you define capitalism.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:There are scholars like Xingqiu, who's more of an ancient historical world systems theorist, who would take that approach.
Ellen Wolter:Could you share a little bit about what it looked like before those urban settlements occurred? What life was like for folks?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, these were hunting and gathering people. And if you were to just put that down on a piece of paper, the timeline, it's only the last little sliver that would be anything besides nomadic foraging. It served human beings well for millions of years.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Then as long as human beings lived in a population of between four and six million globally, which isn't very much, that could be sustained if people could essentially just move around to finding the resources they needed to support themselves. We think... This is mostly Alex's innovation. There'd be kind of these gathering places, and we think mostly for religious purposes, and those are the ones, the earliest settlements, like Obelekitep and Turkey, which were probably just like settlements that formed out of the need to come together for religious worship for extended periods of time, which kind of evolved into just a settled village. But that took a lot of experimentation on food production, learning how to basically sow seeds.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But if you have naturally occurring grains, you have an excellent place to experiment with farming and producing. Just over hundreds of years, thousands of years of learning how to cultivate, you've got to transition from being nomadic to being settled. It isn't an overnight matter. A lot of times you read these sociology books about social change, and it's presented like chapters of human history. I I was guilty of thinking that way, and Alex set me straight and he said, The best way to think about this stuff is through a complex systems framework because there were a lot of failed attempts before anything like success happened.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:People would try to create settlements, they would wind up abandoning it because it didn't work. So they'd leave behind these kind of structures and if somebody were to come in later, they might think, what happened? Maybe they were invaded and attacked. No, they just left. They just decided that didn't work for them anymore, so they went back to living in the woods or just patrolling around the savannah or whatever.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And that's happened on every continent to some degree, where this experimentation has just resulted in the discovery of settlements and trade always preceded that. There was long distance trade through nomadic foraging for for centuries before there was ever a settlement.
Ellen Wolter:And when you say settlement, Greg, what did that look like?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. Well, it wouldn't fit very well with today's modern thinking of urban design. Thrown together of mud based dwellings. People would walk around on the roofs. There was this kind of intricate...
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It's almost like a series of caves, but also some relics of religious importance, statuettes that were created representing different religious beliefs and figures. And that's what led us to think that these were mainly established for religious purposes, and then evolved later in time into the separate arrangements we see between functional buildings and that sort of things. Not just people lumping themselves together under a roof. Then you see later in South America, like the Inca, they developed pretty sizable settlements, but they never really had distinct trade networks between urban and rural. They did have long distance trade.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:There's actually evidence they traded with the Maya, but that was quite a terrain to get through from the Andes Mountains to Central America. But the Incans, they had settled cities that almost had farms and garden plots scattered throughout all the settlement space. So they didn't have a distinct urban and rural settlement spaces. That was a version of what we call agrarian settlements because it's self sufficient. We're living here and we're supporting ourselves.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:We don't rely on trade to live. We grow our own stuff. There's a little bit of up and down trades, but the Andes Mountains didn't really allow for the kind of flat separation between urban and rural that could take place in the Fertile Crescent. But even so, lot of agrarian settlements could grow to be fairly sizable, but not to the same extent as the truly urban settlements, which did not have any of that kind of self sufficient activity going on. It was all carried out through trade.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And then at that point, if you have sort of this external source of food and resource coming in, the sky's the limit. When it's nomadic foraging, there's a carrying capacity. It applies to all humans. It's kind of the basis of sustainable thinking. Once you remove that by opening up the flood gates of all the resources in the surrounding countryside to the city, populations can just blow up.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:That's how we started to see the first large scale cities in Iraq, which might have had 50,000 people going back several thousand years. So not just like a a rudimentary city, but a pretty well advanced one with chariot races. A lot of things we associate with the Roman Empire existed thousands of years earlier in Iraq, basically.
Ellen Wolter:And Greg, what is carrying capacity?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. That's the... That balance between environmental resources and population size. This kind of ceiling on how many people can be supported based on the available resources. But here's the question, what is the resource horizon?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Because if you're dealing with a village next to you, then you have access to its resources. But if you are dealing with a village further down the line, but you still have a trade network, now your resource base can keep growing. So if you're depending on one rural community, you don't have very much food or resources. If you have two or three, now you're starting to have an abundance. And if you have 10 or 12, you can actually develop something of wealth, and that's really when you started to see the seeds of inequality form.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:People don't realize that even though there was a certain amount of gender inequality in nomadic foraging populations, Because people lived at the level of subsistence, there was very little material inequality, maybe a few precious stones or something to indicate the head of the small foraging group. Nomadic foraging groups tend to be pretty small. They weren't the large bands that we associate with like chieftains. That's a completely different arrangement that we refer to as pastoral nomadism, which is a very different kind of nomadic lifestyle that depends on herding animals. The Mongol Empire was pastoral nomadic.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Not only did they herd animals and learn how to ride horses prolifically, but use them in warfare to raid in whatever cities had formed in the twelfth century were easy targets for these mobile assault units to just go in and plunder whatever they wanted, and then take them over and basically demand tribute because they had superior military capabilities. So that's very different than the small group of 30 or 50 people living at subsistence.
Ellen Wolter:I'm gonna jump time a fair amount here, Greg, because I know we only have we only have an hour. So listeners, my apologies. You're gonna have to dig into Greg's book to get the time jump. One of the things too I was struck by in your book is, you know, urban rural systems and then colonialism and what those systems look like globally. So, again, I'm jumping ahead Yeah.
Ellen Wolter:Thousands of years from the time period we were just talking about. But could you talk a little bit about that intersection between global urban rural systems and then colonial... Colonialism?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. Absolutely. And it... It's interesting because, you we kind of view urban rural systems as like a substructure that have been coordinated through different economic systems, whether it's just simple trade, whether it's feudalism, or whether it's advanced capitalism for what Marx called primitive communism, which we think is more closely associated to the the pastoral nomads. But, you know, colonialism really emerged in a period of feudalism when essentially people who were rural residents had to pay tribute.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So they would farm and they would, you know, gather whatever rural resources and commodities that they could grow and feed themselves, essentially living in agrarian settings, what we would call agrarian settlements. But they were forced to be rural trading partners when they were asked for a tribute, So when you have to part ways with some of your bounty or your harvest in order to buy protection from the kingdom, then you're now a rural trading partner. And now the urban center of that kingdom can count on your portion, your tribute. You can find a lot of stories of when serfs failed to produce tribute, what would happen? They would burn the villages down, they would punish them brutally, so there was a lot of coercion involved in medieval kingdoms and that sort of thing in terms of securing rural compliance and production.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:If there was a bounty and things were going well, maybe there was a certain amount of predictability and stability in that. But there's a tendency, That tendency tends to span across time of urban areas to get more and more hungry. So no matter how much they've got, they always want a little more. And some of that's because of what I said about population. There's no limit.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:The more resources you bring in, the more people you can support. The more people you support, the more resources you need to bring in, which means you're putting more and more pressure on rural areas to sustain you. And whether that's carried out through brute force or through cultural means, it has the same end, which is to supply an almost endless array of items from rural areas into the into the city. And in the city, that's where you see emerging industry because you're able to combine rural commodities from different locations into new and more advanced products. Urban products, we call that.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They can only be made because you have access to so many different rural resources that are combined in unique ways. In medieval times, that was guilds. In later times, it was factories, but it's the same basic idea. And when you look at the way people describe colonialism and sociology today, a lot of it's through this kind of economic political lens without really paying attention to that urban rural substructure. Maybe just maybe just seems to be something that's there, but sort of unimportant to them.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But for us, it's fundamental because that's what's the underlying drive for the whole system. And the entire economy is built on top of that substructure, which preceded it. Colonialism, what was that? That was European powers basically going out to Asia, Africa, South America, The Caribbean, and transforming what were agrarian settlements, well advanced ones, if you look at the Mayans or the Aztecs or the Inca into rural peasants essentially, forcing them into slavery a lot of times. The Inca were said to be so afraid of going into the silver mines that they would often maim their own children by cutting off their hands so they could never be counted on to mine silver in the mines.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Like, it was that desperate. So there's this kind of just brutal subjugation of rural people during colonialism. And of course, we're talking about native people. So this was native people around the world, North America, South America, Central America, all around Oceana, Africa, Asia. They all had the same thing in common.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They were being subjugated and forced to farm, forced to mine, forced to produce forest products, other kind of rare materials, gemstones, precious metals. And it was all just brutally done. If you read the the worst kind of accounts of colonialism, it was all the horrors of slavery essentially, which carried over into the history of The United States and subjugation of native American populations as well. And then the subsequent transportation of native Africans to other parts of the world through the slave trade, And that just became another chapter in an older story of subjugation. Essentially, what was going on was you were building these tentacles of trade to every corner of the world, giving you immense access to the world's riches.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And where was it flowing? Back to places like Madrid, back to places like London, or the Dutch Empire, going going back to the cities of The Netherlands and Portugal, Lisbon. Those cities were able to build these impressive castles and kingdoms because of those resources that they were plundering from around the world. And the crown jewels came from rural mines for all those kingdoms. And that's just not something...
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:That's just not the way that most people have framed it. There's an exception, Lipton, who looked at this through what he called the urban bias theory. There was actually in the nineties, this kind of world system debate between dependency theorists and urban bias theorists. And they concluded that dependency theory won and that was the end of the debate. But it was kind of like a straw man debate in my opinion.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It was kind of an unfair comparison, and maybe there just wasn't enough opportunity to think through those urban rural dynamics of what was underlying the thrust of colonialism and subjugation of rural people around the world. So it also transforms, by the way, you're thinking about European and native relationships as fundamentally an urban rural relationship. But if you look at the Dutch Empire coming into North America, the reason they came was essentially to get beaver pelts, So they would contract with the native populations along the coast, the Manhattan people, others of that ilk, similar neighboring tribes. They'd pay them to go out and kill beavers and bring back pelts. They would then put those onto ships.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They'd go back to Amsterdam and then they would combine that through this complex process and factories where they made felt hats. So essentially, all of that was for a luxury item. Right? It was just so the people... The wealthy people of Amsterdam could have hats that signify their importance and their wealth, much like a polo shirt or an expensive suit might do today.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But those dynamics were well in place five hundred years ago in those colonial centers. And of course, they remain advantaged cities throughout all this time even though they've lost a lot of their global reach. It's not a hard transition going from medieval colonialism to modern capitalist global trade because it's the same cities at the center of it and it's the same rural areas dealing with the brunt of the trade relations. Except now, instead of going in with flags planted in soils and guns pointed and whips being lashed against people. It's carried out through economic means.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And essentially, there is an entire complex process by which rural products are assigned a very low value economically. Look at coffee farmers in Ethiopia. They're out there cultivating what much of the world enjoys as this wonderful luxury drink. After oil, coffee is the most heavily traded global commodity. Ethiopian farmers are starving to death even as they produce a bounty of coffee beans because the beans themselves, the raw beans are worth almost nothing.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Once you roast those beans and grind them and package them, all sorts of value is added on top. And when you use it to make a cup of coffee at Starbucks, you're getting $3 a cup. Right? We once did the math, and essentially, an entire 80 kilogram bag of coffee beans might be worth $240 at the point of sale. And for that, farmers were getting about a nickel.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So it's just an immense amount of value added processing that happens in rural centers and that rural people don't experience any benefit from.
Ellen Wolter:Greg, how would you define or describe what an urban rural system is? And how is that... Because I think this is a reframing. I don't think a lot of folks, for example, think about colonialism through an urban rural system.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah.
Ellen Wolter:How is thinking about that urban rural system different from how rural and urban communities are typically conceptualized in dominant culture and and certainly academia?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:The reason we don't really fundamentally understand urban rural systems is, I would argue, because of globalization, because we have now figured out ways to extend the the trade networks for even basic products. Whereas before, when we were talking about the first cities thousands of years ago, long distance trade was limited to luxury goods. You got all your food from neighboring rural communities. Well, that was it. When you had a regional system of urban consumers and rural producers, They knew each other.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:There was familiarity. It was all naturally regionally situated. But now, because of global trade and commodity farming, the way that we produce food and the way that farming is done now, we can go to the grocery store and I can get grapes grown in Costa Rica, you know, in Upstate New York. And it's expected. Not only is it something you might hope to see, it's like a guarantee it's gonna be there.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:I don't ever come to know the people who grow my grapes. There's nothing seasonal or culturally appropriate about grapes for Upstate New York from a historical standpoint or bananas for that matter. It's kind of perverted our relationship not only with each other, but with nature and the environment. And it's also undermined more responsible and sustainable farming techniques and crop varieties and all that sort of thing. So I would say that we're not really totally original on this.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:I always... I I say bioregionalism as kind of a very similar idea, an idea from the nineties, mostly in geography, literature, eating food in season, eating regionally appropriate crops, and that kind of thing. So yeah, it's... There's a natural spatial component to urban rural systems and even like water systems. Like, if you look at New York City, has it evolved and had to build this extensive network of aqueducts just like roamed it two thousand years earlier.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Right? And in the process... And this is something Alex wrote about. He wrote a book called Gilboa. A lot of the rural communities in the Catskills had to be put underwater because the way they built their aqueduct system was by creating these giant reservoir lakes by damming up rivers.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But there were a lot of rural villages located on the banks of those rivers. So when you dammed them and turned them into these reservoirs, places like Gilboa got sent to the bottom of the lake. It looks very imperialistic from the rural standpoint when you have Gotham down the road exercising its might and basically telling you that you're gonna be evicted from not only your house, but your entire community is gonna be destroyed by water permanently so that they can have a reliable water source. So now, you're you're now a rural provider of a natural resource that that city needs to survive. And globally, New York City is known as having one of the best water systems of any city.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But in order to achieve that, look what had to happen. That was just a very brutal form of domination. But it doesn't always look like that. It doesn't always look quite as domineering. It does often take that shape the larger cities get.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:New York is a global city and it started its march towards that four hundred and fifty years ago.
Ellen Wolter:Two concepts that you and Alex write about, which is this idea of urban normativity and urban dependency. And I think they have both... I... It seems to me kind of caught on, particularly in rural sociology. Yeah.
Ellen Wolter:So how do you think about those concepts, and and how are they connected to urban rural systems?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. Well, I mean, urban normativity is something that once we coined the term, we started seeing it everywhere kind of thing.
Ellen Wolter:Speaks to rural people. It really does.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. And I'm told... I've had this experience teaching classes when I have students who are rural. Actually, my classes tend to be a nice blend of people from the city, people from Long Island, and people from Upstate New York sometimes, but at least I hope so because that part of their identity is something most people don't even think about because it's just not part of our daily vocabulary. Our identity is our gender, our race, our sexuality, but very rarely is it, well, I'm a city person or I'm a country person or...
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:When you start getting people to explore that part of their identity, they're like, yeah. I'll ask somebody from a rural area, Where are you from? They'll say, It's nowhere. Oh, what do you mean? It must have a name.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It must be a place. Well, trust me, it's in the middle of nowhere. It's a podunk town, and there's all those disparaging language that follows. It's like, Why are you ashamed of your hometown? I legitimately just want to know the name of it, what people do there.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:That kind of dynamic, that sort of phenomenon is just fascinating, right? There's so much stigma attached to being born and from a rural place. And with that, all kinds of assumptions are made about you, your intelligence level. We have all kinds of tropes culturally that you see in popular culture. Karen Hayden, wrote a whole book about horror films and the way they've capitalized on world stereotypes.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Usually, it created this impression that rural people are just dangerous, out of control, wild.
Jim Griswold (Music):Mhmm.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:We have so many cultural ideas like that that we don't really stop and think about. How does that really shape the way I think about people who live in rural places in real life? I
Ellen Wolter:think the same could be said for urban places and urban people too. Right? Same idea, different stereotypes that exist there.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Well, we say when we go... If you live in the country and somebody goes to the city, you might say, oh, you're going to get cultured. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Like, oh, so there's no culture here. Like, we're we're a devoid area of culture, but if you go to a city, there's actually culture there. And there are things that will add to your intelligence as a simpleton. Yes. Yeah.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Build on the blank slate of you as a world person. You know?
Ellen Wolter:Absolutely. I've had many an argument about just that.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So it's a real deficit view of rural places. One thing we like to do is talk about the historical relevance of a lot of the rural towns around us where there were like revolutionary war battles and other kinds of things like that. Just kind of elevates... Every place is important, not just cities. There's a historical place and meaning and background to each of these places.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Maybe they provided needed resources. Who knows? I mean... But to just dismiss a place because it's rural is just part of this broader hegemonic narrative, then we think that the other part of urban normativity I wanna say is the ideological function of it. So when we were talking about colonialism, maybe there wasn't this urban normative ideology.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:You had to kind of just subjugate people forcefully at the end of a gun. But now, under global capitalism, we have this well developed ideology of urban normativity where everybody just knows that rural areas are backwards and cities are where everybody wants to live. Sadly, you read a lot of literature written by scholars who reinforce that, including many of the sustainability scholars who I otherwise respect, but essentially, view is if you're in the countryside, you need to move because cities are where you're gonna have a sustainable lifestyle. And I just kind of roll back in my chair when I read stuff like that.
Ellen Wolter:Greg, can you can you help explain for listeners the the theory behind that and assumptions behind behind that idea of moving to an urban place is more sustainable?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:I recently did an independent study with a student teaching class on urban planning. The entire textbook was about all the benefits of living in cities because you have density of settlement, you don't have all the sprawl of suburbs. Hey, no argument there, that sounds great. We have vertical farms. We can grow our own food here.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Okay, that sounds interesting. That sounds good. We might even have things like seawater conversion plants where we can just take ocean water and turn it into tap water. Wow, that sounds like an unlimited water supply like all the world's oceans. Nevermind the byproducts of that.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:That's another issue altogether. But there's this whole kind of utopianistic view of cities that have solar panels providing all the electric power you need or maybe windmills and that sort of thing. But something that's missing is the math. This gets back in urban dependency, away from urban normativity for a moment, but we wrote a book called Urban Dependency to really explore the math, like how much energy and how much food cities actually require, and how much can you actually produce within the city limits. What we've discovered is it's nowhere near enough.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:The amount that's produced is just a fraction of what cities consume. We've come away from that really just math exercise with the view that urban self sufficiency is an utter myth, and that we're working on another book. It's gonna have a title something along the lines of the Great Potato Tower, which would be like, what would it look like if cities were to try to feed themselves? And what we came up with was basically an Empire State Building vertical farm full of potatoes that can be harvested multiple times a year, and at best, that might feed 50,000 people for a year. So how many of those would you need to feed 8,000,000 people in New York City?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And how heavy would these buildings be? They would probably subside into the ground. I mean, just when you start playing it through, even your best effort, why do we perpetuate this kind of myth of this utopianistic self sufficient city? And in the process, deny the importance of rural places. That's the part that's not spoken.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And there's also sort of a cultural corollary to that, that not only is this rural area unimportant because we can support ourselves, but they really have nothing to contribute from a cultural standpoint or historical meaning or anything like that, which is all blatantly false as well. So this ideological control is what we think stands in for brute force. This is the way in which you convince people culturally to participate in urban rural systems that are completely unfair is by manipulating them with these kind of ideas. And if you're not capable of moving up through social mobility into living in the city, then it's your own shortcomings as a incompetent rural person. I mean, how brutal is that?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:But that's essentially the hidden message that people get and internalize, and is reinforced through all the shows and movies and things that they see growing up and all the kind of images that we're bombarded with through literature and even through newspapers, which are almost all written through an urban centric voice. Rural areas exist in relation to the urban centered newspaper. When you really start digging into this, you start to really see it in multiple places, and it's really quite omnipresent.
Ellen Wolter:You know, one of the things that has struck me is how in academia, rural and urban places and people are really studied separately. They're not really integrated for the most part in terms of how they're studied. You and Alex are in the modern world system, the elaborate structure of urban rural systems is poorly understood. And it seems like one of the reasons for this is that urban and rural people and places are studied so separately. There's often not a study of the integration of the two, which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to find your wonderful book.
Ellen Wolter:In your book, Community and Urban Rural Systems, you talked about the origins of community sociology and how at one point in the nineteen thirties, there was this integrated study of urban rural systems, and then there's a little bit of a bifurcation. Just maybe talk a little bit about that history and what happened in that field.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Yeah. Yeah. That was actually in the Midwest, University of Minnesota in the nineteen twenties even. Zimmerman for Galpin at Wisconsin started exploring rural urban sociology, which unfortunately didn't last, but was at least an attempt to bring together the study of rural and urban places under one kind of umbrella. And they did so mainly through a comparative lens where they would kind of do these typological analyses of cities are fast paced, rural areas are slow paced, lifestyle differences, how do people dress.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So it's more of a descriptive exercise, but they never really came up with this urban rural system idea. And I think that is the crucial point. Like, if you don't understand the urban rural system, you're not gonna understand anything of what we're trying to convey through our books because that's what unifies the two together. I just got back from the Rural Sociological Society, I can tell you hardly anybody talks about urban anything. And there's a lot of resistance, believe it or not, within that body to some of our ideas.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They love the idea of urban normativity. And they get on board with some of the urban dependency stuff. But trying to convince rural sociologists that urban and rural should equally be studied hard is sell because there's a historical basis to that. The Rural Sociological Society formed by splitting off of the American Sociological Association or Society in 1937 because they got tired of being treated like they were unimportant. And I heard from Julie Zimmerman, who's the historian of the World Sociological Society, that they were the biggest of all the sections of the ASA at the time.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:So they weren't just some small, negligible group. They were the largest contingency in the ASA. So when they split off, that was a major break. And when they did that though, they left all the people studying urban, and they stayed behind. Now there's this community in urban section that remains intact in ASA, and they don't talk at all about rural stuff.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:They don't wanna hear about rural. It's all about looking inward at cities. But when you're looking inward in rural areas or inward at cities, you're not looking at the relations between them and how those relationships are tied together and what the implications of those relationships are for both of those places in the end. That's what gets missed, and that's the real loss of keeping the silos up and going. We started this whole book series called Studies in Urban Rural Dynamics based on that simple principle that the silos were missing a lot of what was happening in between and a lot of the important story was there and nobody was telling it.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And they attempted to tell that story in the 1920s and 30s, but it lost traction Mhmm. And here we are today.
Ellen Wolter:When you think about the future of urban rural systems, particularly in The US over the next twenty years, what what gives you hope and what opportunities exist? But then also, what what concerns you the most?
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Well, I mean, globalization, that's concerned people for a long time. Although I feel like oddly there's been a focus taken off of it. Like, it's just taken as a given now. Seems like in the nineties and two thousands, there was still robust conversation from a political economy standpoint about all the dangers of globalization and global trade relations, and a large call to go back to buy local, but didn't really have a logic behind it other than that's just the right thing to do. It's moral.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It's ethical. Don't you want to know your farmer in a vague way? Sure. But then you feel like you're checking that box at the farmer's market. But the reality is we need to rebuild actual regional systems where large scale production can be accomplished within a regional setting to feed urban populations.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And if urban populations have grown so large that they've outgrown the regional resource base, maybe they need to draw down. Maybe the population should be brought into balance with the resource foundation. In other words, you need to relocate where that carrying capacity is to find that sustainable balance between population and environment. And hopefully, it works out in a way that the rural producers are being compensated fairly and adequately, not only for their food, but for their energy sources. I mean, right now, big threat is farmland converting over to solar farms, and that appeals to urban consumers.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:To everybody on some level, we want sustainable energy, but it's very dangerous. Once you lose that farmland and convert it to something else, you may not be able to get it back and you're losing important capacity when that happens. So what hope do I have? I have hope because there are loads of NGOs and people who are concentrated on forging and building more localized production systems. Usually, is around food, like the global movement, La Via Campesina, which is like a peasant farming movement, is trying to pull farmers in less developed parts of the world out of these exploitative global trade relations and re refining that self sufficiency and sustainability.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And then maybe they'll have enough that they can sell to a city down the road instead of across the sea. Then maybe that'll be coffee and maybe that'll find its way into markets in The US. It doesn't have to be at one eighty, but we we need to do a lot more to reestablish local production. And actually, my book, Community and Urban Rural Systems, provides a twist on the... What we call the community capitals framework.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:In the pyramid, it's like the Maslow hierarchy of needs. We're at the bottom or the basic need. And that's where you've got the environmental capital, and on top of that, the built capital. On top of that, the political and economic, and at the tip, the social, human, and cultural capitals. And that's that's really the model, I think, of how you wanna rebuild regional systems.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:It all starts with the environments and looking at how we're using our our environmental resources in a sustainable, regionally appropriate way. And then how that translates into the appropriate kinds of political organizations and economic organization. And hopefully, that's more democratic. And out of that, the ability to form relationships, social capital, to have identity and cultural capital, and to grow and learn from each other in our human capital and to be healthy, right? Another artifact of global food systems that are just something that get eliminated if you have a more resilient, multi sourced world of regional urban rural systems.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:And we don't always think about resiliency. We think about efficiency and there's a trade off a lot of times between efficiency and resiliency. And the global system that we're in right now has a low level of resiliency and a high level of efficiency designed around profit. I took a lot of inspiration and hope from Charles Tolbert who developed an idea called civic capitalism and Tom Lyson who developed a corollary idea of civic agriculture, and they kind of work hand in hand. But to me, that is a picture of what economics looks like on a local level.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:This is stuff that's been implemented and has been supported by case study evidence at least that basically, can redesign our economy to have value from the ground up instead of from the top down. And in our global economy, it's quite top down. Every town like Ann Arbor, Michigan, depending on factories nearby to keep us all employed. And if they go away, we all starve. But if we're getting our value from the ground up by producing things locally of our own ownership and getting food from farmers who are neighbors from their own ownership, we're not at the whims of these global corporations anymore.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Right? We we now get to decide our own futures, and we're not gonna see another destroyed, de industrialized downtown. And we're gonna rebuild that with locally produced goods.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks, Greg. Appreciate it.
Ellen Wolter:And thanks
Ellen Wolter:so much for your time and your expertise today. It's been a great conversation.
Dr. Greg Fulkerson:Absolutely. Thank you so much.
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. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, 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:Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is Side by Side.