Trying to describe rural is notoriously difficult and there have many ways and means offered over the years. The current government in the main uses a numerical bench mark; however this can put a distinctly rural market town out of the category of rural.
One of the most prevalent models is that of a series of ripples in a pond or circles emanating from an urban centre travelling outwards with communities becoming increasing rural and isolated.
For many of us this is the most common and general default mode in our thinking when placing rural into an overall context in relationship to urban and inner city. We travel out from the centre to the countryside and travel into the city or town.
However this model is static and more importantly does suggest an old world model where the earth was seen as the centre of the universe with all the planets circling around. At least that was until the works of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) and Galileo (1564 – 1642) changed the way we looked at the planets and their movement and place.
It is this model that I suggest offers a better way of thinking about rural areas and in particular their relationship to urban areas and cities.
If we think that everything revolves around the urban centre we can easily allow that to suck in our thinking, our resources and our energies leaving rural and more isolated areas adrift out there somewhere.
However if we think of the urban as a large planet with a strong gravitational pull and with a tendency to suck in other smaller planets we then have a dynamic model. This can help us view urban areas not as the centre with rural communities further away from this focus, but rather as a dynamic inter-dependent and inter-related series of entities each with both common and yet distinct aspects.
This dynamic also informs the changing nature of both urban and rural as we consider how over a period of time the planets move in relationship to each other and as they change their shape and size
This planetary model may also help us when trying to look at rural areas. For example you will not do very well trying to see the planets from the centre of London because of light pollution. And you will have difficulty in seeing the reality of rural areas from the centre of London because of the surrounding environment. Cities can suck you in and become all consuming in their surrounding imagery. The centripetal gravitation pull of the urban and city is very strong.
Like all models this one will break down at some point if pushed too far. However I hope that it may be useful in helping us understand the dynamic of the relationship between the rural and the urban and why so much energy appears to get sucked into the larger planets. A trend we need to stand against because as we know there is life on Mars!
