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City, Suburbs, or the Countryside?
March 19, 2009 | 51 Comments
Chicago
Let me make it perfectly clear that I have no pretension to neutrality. I’m an urbanite at heart, will always be. I grew up in a huge metro (Mumbai) and prefer a shoe-box sized apartment to a big mansion with acreage. I prefer to walk to buy my groceries than drive. I like noise, lots of bustle, cultural diversity and talking to strangers on public transport.
I currently live in a place that has all the amenities of a city (technically, it is a city), but one of my neighbours is a corn farmer who has tractors in his driveway. Where my house stands used to be a cornfield not so long ago. My neighbour owned the land which he sold to a builder. The rest of my neighbour’s cornfield is across the road and he still makes a living tending to it.
So you can say I have the best of both worlds. Actually not. There’s no public transport to speak of here, and not too many high-rise apartments either. It’s more like suburbia and that’s not what I mean by ‘city-life’.
So, growing up in a big city, I was often subjected to this romantic vision of life in the countryside and heard of how the quality of life in the city is so much worse. How city folk are meaner, more predatory and have less time for their neighbours, how the air is polluted, and people don’t really have a “life”. My mom grew up in a huge rural homestead in south India where they bathed in ponds and snacked on bananas and mangoes straight from the tree with the odd wild elephant roaming through the land. She missed it, but she also told me about how women didn’t have as much freedom as men and how everybody had their noses in other people’s business. Now, we know that life in a rural area is not all ponies and primroses, but when one hears all the eulogies to “country life”, one wonders why so many of them aspire to move to the city.
As part of the “voluntary simplicity” movement in the West, there’s now a kind of reverse migration to the countryside. Young families attempt to give up material possessions and rebuild their lives more sustainably away from the hustle and bustle.
So is country life better for you? “Country life” means vastly different things to different people. To some it means racing across the pristine Alaskan wilderness on ATVs, creating more noise and pollution that you’d find on a crowded intersection in Los Angeles. In the absence of a complete, consensual definition, it broadly denotes living in a area with a lower population density and more “natural” surroundings.
This guy lives in the “country”. Stellar Jay.
And this rat snake.
Let’s look at the evidence.
City life is bad for your brain.
After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control… While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting – that’s why Picasso left Paris – this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so …
One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
So if someone lives in the desert (like we do) or in areas without too much greenery and no manicured green lawn, I guess it cancels out some of the advantages of country living. I’ve lived in or very close to big metros (those with public transport) as well as away from them and the only real advantage I can cite about “country life” is the lower crime rate. And sights like these.
“I could go to New York if I wanted to, but what’s the point? So I can learn how to order a capuccino? So I can get mugged by some crackhead? So I can see homeless people up close and personal?” – from the movie SubUrbia
That’s the typical suburban and rural response to life in the big city. Now, get this. Big bad New York City is the greenest city in America and perhaps the world. Way greener than many smaller towns in the mid-west, or in the high-plains deserts of Colorado, Utah, Idaho or Arizona. Or Texas. Or New Mexico.
Plus, New Yorkers, on an average, live longer than other Americans.
A New Yorker born in 2004 can now expect to live 78.6 years, nine months longer than the average American will. What’s more, our life expectancy is increasing at a rate faster than that of most of the rest of the country. Since 1990, the average American has added only about two and a half years to his life, while we in New York have added 6.2 years to ours.
Check out Greening the Ghetto: a TED talk by Majora Carter on transforming an inner-city neighbourhood in NY City from a waste dump to a green oasis.
Also check out Noiseways – a cool photo site that gives you an insight into public places in New York City and Portland, Oregon. Today’s pictorial is of places affected by government budget cuts in Portland.
Seattle
So, the average American home is 2,500 sq. ft. – double the size of the average American home in the 1950s.
Suburbia is that cluster of residential communities on the outskirts of cities where families have picket fences, lawns, 2.5 kids, a dog a cat or two, an SUV or two to cart everyone around, and maybe a boat or a recreational vehicle tucked aside.
Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser points out that those who live in cities have a smaller ecological footprint than their rural counterparts. Suburbia is the worst of them all.
If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete. Americans who settle in leafy, low-density suburbs will leave a significantly deeper carbon footprint, it turns out, than Americans who live cheek by jowl in urban towers. And a second paradox follows from the first. When environmentalists resist new construction in their dense but environmentally friendly cities, they inadvertently ensure that it will take place somewhere else—somewhere with higher carbon emissions. Much local environmentalism, in short, is bad for the environment. ~ Green Cities, Brown Suburbs
I live in such a neighbourhood in a small city that straddles urban and rural. So I took this test to check my ecological footprint. Being vegetarian, as someone who reycles, I thought I’d fare better. It tells me it would need 4.6 Planet Earths to sustain my lifestyle and 20.6 acres of the Earth’s productive area.
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” ~ Bill Vaughn
Can’t wait to get back to a shoe-box sized apartment in a big metro. I know for sure that this is the last “house” I’ll ever live in. Not my style. If this guy can make it work, moving from a 4,000 sq. ft. home to one with just 100 sq ft., it should not be that big a deal.
My ideal home would be in a high-rise apartment in the heart of a big city where everything is within walking distance. What’s yours?
bee
Filed Under: city, country, MUSINGS, New-York-City, rural, suburbia
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51 Comments
Hi,
Very interesting post ..
I come from Kerala too ( the southern part) and was lucky enough to enjoy the “plucking mangoes from the tree” that you mentioned in the post. Not just that, there was also a swing on the mango tree, and also quite a bit of open land around me to run around and fly kites and all that.
Now I am in CA, in the EastBay..and I would say it is the best of both the worlds. Of course I cant make up for all he time my son misses with his grandparents back home. But we live in a community with lots of kids and some open space .. So he also gets to run after the kites, there is a huge park in the vicinity where he can play in the sand, chase the ducks and swing to his heart’s content.
I certainly do agree with your liking for a smaller dwelling. The space gets used more efficiently and you spend less time cleaning and tidying up…in short I guess one would save a lot of time!