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| 130 countries with mostly or entirely rural populations are located in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. Click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version. (Daily Yonder map) |
How do you define 'rural'? It's a question that devils researchers, journalists, government and non-profit organizations, and even colleges (who gets a rural scholarship?), Amanda Kool writes for The Daily Yonder.
Kool, a lawyer and author, first noticed the weird disconnect in legal definitions of rurality when she moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to a rural area near Cincinnati a few years ago. "Bracken County, Kentucky is a long way from Boston in more ways than one," Kool writes. "And yet according to one of the most frequently-used systems for defining what is rural and what is urban, both places are counted in the very same column of data, along with our nation’s other most urban locales."
That's because of differences in how different federal bodies define rurality. The U.S. Department of Agriculture splits counties into nine categories along a rural-urban spectrum by total population, market area and commuting time; three categories are metropolitan and six are non-metropolitan. Overall, the USDA recognizes nine definitions of rurality: "three of them are based on census places, three others on census urban areas, one on designations of Office of Management and Budget Metropolitan Statistical Areas, one on USDA ERS Rural-Urban Commuting Area Codes, and yet another based on the USDA Business and Industry Loan Program definition," Kool writes.
The U.S. Census Bureau, however, says that "nonmetro" isn't the same as "rural", and says more than half the people living in USDA-recognized rural areas really live in a metro area, Kool writes.
"The problem here is much bigger than a cultural crisis of identity. Conflating notions of urban and rural with notions of metro and non-metro and mixing usage of USDA ERS definitions with Census Bureau definitions creates a muddy mess of what we think we know about broadband access, healthcare, employment, education, poverty, and so much else, both here and there," Kool writes. "It means that the lines we use to separate the haves and the haves-not on any given topic appear less stark than human experience suggests, since under-counting the issues only serves to soften the statistics on either side of the line. From a programmatic perspective, it means that streams of funding for services intended to level the playing field do not reach some communities that might most need it, or that might best utilize it."
from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2LNd78W Warring federal definitions of rurality muddy the waters - Entrepreneur Generations
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