FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 1:3 - Spring 2001

Rural

In English this adjective is far more than merely descriptive; it has strongly moral connotations. While nineteenth century European novelists, addicted to the sophistications of cities, were painting unflattering portraits of "rural idiocy," their American and English counterparts tended to celebrate the dignity and simplicity of life in the countryside, contrasting it with the moral and physical decadence of urbanites. The belief–not always unfounded–that physical and spiritual health could be found in the countryside has been one of the prime causes of American migration to the urban periphery.

You can hear all this in the jargon of real estate. New suburban subdivisions are sold on the basis of their "rural character." The word "farm" might even appear in their names, perhaps as a memory of the actual farmlands they replaced. Then, of course, there’s the whole apparatus–magazines, antiques, Martha Stewart–of "country living." This fantasy of rural life also means that privately owned land, in quantity, is a sign of rural character and social prestige. The result is huge tracts of land given over to multiple-acre lots of suburban monoculture, with a limited range of grasses and ornamental plants interspersed with whatever pre-existing trees may have survived the construction process.

Interestingly, much of the imagery we associate with the resulting sprawlscape doesn’t come from producing rural land or from pristine natural land. In his book Borderlands, landscape historian John Stilgoe suggests that much of the landscape vocabulary of early suburban development was derived from 19th century impressions of the Connecticut and Hudson Valley landscape north of New York. This was already dis-used agricultural land, the farmers having moved farther west to places like Ohio, and it had begun to develop a picturesque second growth as the native forests returned. The clumps of vegetation, grassy expanses and "rolling" berms of typical sprawl developments (both residential and commercial) are partly an attempt to reproduce that particular landscape circumstance, usually without regard for local conditions, an ideal recipe for placelessness and ecological mischief.