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Is the urban oversized?

2021-01-05T16:59:06.115Z


Prejudices and stereotypes rooted in the rural-urban cultural divide overshadow the importance of cities in the fight against poverty or inequality


Some voices criticize journalists and researchers who are dedicated to disseminating or studying the development in the global South of overemphasizing the urban factor.

It is true that, especially in the field of development, rural environments suffer disproportionately from the consequences, for example, of climate change.

That the levels of literacy and access to higher education are usually lower than in cities, especially among girls.

That health systems tend to be much more saturated, if not precarious.

That electricity, Internet penetration or the existence of infrastructures and services is much lower in more disconnected or remote areas.

However, it is also a fact that in the last century, the world population has undergone a series of dramatic transformations that have caused that, while in 1950 less than a third of the world population lived in densely populated environments, it is expected that by 2050 less than a third of the planet's inhabitants are rural.

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These data particularly affect low-income countries in Africa and Asia, where 90% of global urban growth will be concentrated in the next three decades.

These are regions in which urbanization occurs, contrary to what happened in Europe during the industrial revolution, in an adverse economic context that leads a large part of the population to live in shanty towns.

In the case of Africa, for example, to that is added a weakened institutional and state framework that makes it difficult for citizen protection laws or justice to be applied in favor of civil society itself, not even in the cities that host the headquarters of the responsible institutions.

Is it any wonder then that cities are one of the focuses of attention when talking about poverty, inequalities or climate change in these regions?

Is it unfair to stop to look, as a priority, for ways to improve urban mobility, food sovereignty or maternal and child health in metropolitan areas?

Where does the prejudice come from that looking towards the city is exclusive of the rural, especially in an interconnected world where the countryside and the city are intrinsically united?

Why does "rural" perceive "urban" as a threat?

Trying to understand the cultural division, exoticization and marginalization of the rural by some cosmopolitan residents, the Swedish clinical psychologist Malin Fors came up with the perfect term to define such prejudices.

Fors, explained that, being the home city of most academics, they have tended to put the urban as the axis of their own world with ruinous psychological consequences.

This phenomenon, Fors - who lives in Hammerfest, a small town in Norway with 10,000 inhabitants located 8 hours drive north of the Arctic Circle - has dubbed "geographic narcissism."

And under this concept that criticizes the way in which the rural is perceived as something inferior, it analyzes how professionals from cities who move to the provinces are often perceived as colonizers and conceited before equals who seek to justify their worth and "equality" to base of academic degrees and experiences that link them to urban centers. 

Professionals from cities who move to the provinces are often perceived as colonizers and conceited

Without any pretense of doing exercises in normative hedonism, focusing on the urban is no longer looking into the navel of academic circles or the media environment itself.

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, poverty, hunger and malnutrition have become chronic.

Extreme inequality reaches scandalous heights.

And although there has been a "ruralization" of poverty in Eastern Europe or Central Asia;

Of the 112 million inhabitants of the European Union at risk of poverty or social exclusion, 42% live in cities.

Not to mention the situation in Latin America or Africa, which accumulate unsustainable levels of urban poverty, touching 90% in countries like Sudan.

Turning one's back on those realities would be nonsense and, at the very least, another form of "geographic narcissism."

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-05

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