Dan Lichter - Cornell
The Urbanization of Rural America: Shifting Rural-Urban Boundaries and the Places Left Behind
Date: 10/10/2019 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall 270
Organizer: Christina Gibson-Davis
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
8:30am - Breakfast- Giovanna Merli
10:00am - OPEN
10:30am - OPEN
11:00am - Fenaba Addo
11:30am - Claire Le Barbenchon, Adrienne Jones
12:00pm - Lunch- Molly Copeland, Allison Stolte, Jessie West
1:30pm - Christina Gibson-Davis
2:00pm - Warren Lowell
2:30pm - Angie O'Rand
3:00pm - Seminar Prep
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: The social and symbolic boundaries that define rural America are highly ambiguous. Paradoxically, the majority of rural Americans today live in metropolitan areas—at the periphery of big cities and suburbs. Since 1990, 746 or nearly 25 percent of all U.S. counties were redefined by OMB as metropolitan, shifting nearly 70 million residents from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan America. The paradox is that these nonmetropolitan “winners”—those experiencing population and economic growth—have over successive decades “left behind” those nonmetropolitan places with the most limited prospects for growth. This paper provides a cautionary note on the commonplace narrative of widespread rural decline and economic malaise, instead highlighting the interdependent demographic fates of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan people and places. It argues for a spatially-inclusive approach to studying America’s evolving settlement system.