Bar the gates, we're surrounded

We are wasting our breath enlisting the suburbs to save our neighbourhoods

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Canada is today 80% urban, whereas prior to World War II, we were 80% rural. This fact is a well-known staple of many arguments and is routinely used to underscore just how dramatically Canada has changed in a short time. But I question this fact. It’s not the numbers I have a quibble with, it’s the terms “urban” and “rural” that seem wrong.

By urban, we have typically meant people who live in built-up areas of high density with many services as opposed to rural, by which we have meant people who live in wide-open, undeveloped areas outside of the constrictions of highly-ordered society. The distinction is usually made according to the work people do. Urban dwellers work in office buildings, retail shops, factories, and other large organizations in the manufacturing or services sectors of the economy, while rural dwellers usually work on farms.

The work people performed became the more important distinction in identifying urban versus rural populations because it went a long way to determining their outlook on life and their political attitudes. Farmers need to think in terms of cycles whose frequency repeats over several years, especially when they choose which field to leave fallow, or what seed to plant, and so on. They must persevere thorugh predictable routines over seasons or years into the future. They are as a result conditioned to behaving in rigidly conservative ways. They will save rather than spend in a boom year. They will do the same work in a lean year as a fat year, undeterred and undistracted by either. And they will vote for political leaders who reflect these conservation and perseverance values.

Workers in the city, by contrast, are conditioned by the weekly or at most bi-weekly schedule of paychecks they receive at work. A raise or a bonus is something to be spent for immediate gratification because the regular payments can usually be counted on to continue. In a lean year, factories close and the workers are laid off, and in a fat year, they are working double shifts in overtime. This conditions urban workers to work hard and play hard when times are good, and lay low and scrimp and save when they are poor. Urban dwellers therefore vote for political leaders who reflect these values: people who speak of building new art galleries for the public pleasure, even if borrowing is required, or new roads and bridges to create more frequent boom times in the local factories are suppported. Urban voters favour more liberal politicians.

So when people cite the figures that show Canada moving from 80% rural to 80% urban in the space of two or three generations, it is meant to draw attention to a change in the political stance of Canada, from a vast majority of essentially conservative people, to a vast majority of essentially liberal people. Yet, when we look around at the political landscape, in reality this apparently majority urban Canada is at least as conservative, if not more so, than when it was a majority rural country.

I offer the theory that the numbers are off. We may be mistaking as urban that vast swath of people who live in what appear to be cities, but who are in fact, to all intents and purposes, rural people. As such, they are essentially conservative, and the unchanged politics in Canada reflect it.

The mistake is made, I think, by too tightly associating the terms “rural” and “urban” with the work people do. Even a century ago, there were those who were undeniably rural people, but who worked at fixing farm equipment; that is, they were service sector workers, but rural nonetheless. Also, a century ago, there were those who were undeniably urban, but who spent most of their waking hours tending to plants and raising food, just like a farmer, only in small backyards. They worked in the agricultural sector, but were urban nonetheless.

Work does not precisely define one as urban or rural. A better distinction is the size of unit of social life that one concerns oneself with. The urban and rural distinction can be better determined by the most basic attribute we look for in all animals: how social they are. Perhaps the way to make the distinction is to see whether one is primarily concerned with social organizations up to, but not often exceeding, the immediate or the extended family, or whether one is primarily concerned with larger social units beyond the family or besides the family.

This seems a fair question to ask, and also one that isn’t too hard to answer. It also corresponds well to the nuance of meanings we associate with the terms “urban” and “rural.” Urban people are broadly entangled in many social situations of varying kinds; rural people are seldom involved with anyone beyond their family; and both are happy about these situations. This distinction also generates the familiar political outlooks that differentiate the urban types from the rural types. The person with concerns that extend only to his family would likely favour conservative-type political leadership; the person with social concerns extending broadly through a whole range of different types of people would naturally favour more liberal types of political leadership.

If this is a better way to distinguish a rural person from an urban person, what kind of numbers does it generate when we want to describe what kind of place Canada really is? It is my argument that most people who live in smaller cities and especially those who live in suburban cities, exurban cities, or satellite cities, are in fact rural types, in that they concern themselves with their family members most of all, or exclusively, and that those people who live in the larger, older urban centers are the only true urban types in Canada, in the sense that they more normally are concerned with social organizations that extend beyond the family or in substitution for the family.

Indeed, urban-like settings that are not the central cities themselves tend to host households that are comprised of traditional family units, while the central cities themselves are much more populated by households comprised of single people, childless couples, or various kinds of group formations.

Of course, just like a hundred years ago, when there were urban farmers and rural service workers upsetting any sweeping generalizations, so too today there are strong family types in the central cities and bohemian counter-culture types hanging out in the suburbs. But they are equally as rare. It remains more or less true that the proportion of Canadians who are urban has been vastly overestimated by simply looking at what work they do. The numbers are impossible for me to gather, but it is my rough estimate that the reason Canadian politics are today about as conservative as they were two generations ago is because the proportion of Canadians who are rural is roughly about the same as it was two generations ago, using these new definitions of rural and urban.

Take Vancouver for example. The population of the central city is about 500,000, while the total population of Greater Vancouver—what has been traditionally identified as an exclusively urban area, and wrongly so, I argue—numbers some 2.2 million. If my way of distinguishing urban from rural folks is better, these numbers would mean that throughout Greater Vancouver, we are a people who are roughly 77% rural and 23% urban. The other half of the province’s population is probably even more rural, proportionately, than the region around Vancouver, so that the breakout would even more closely approximate the 20-80 split seen across the province and across the country two generations ago.

They may not be farmers of the soil, but in many ways, those who inhabit all those city-like places that are not truly urban are farmers of a kind. They have invested in their homes to a degree far more prevalent than urban people do. And those houses need to be tended to over many years before they pay off in increased equity values. Talk to suburban people and you will quickly see that to the same degree that farmers sit around talking about the prospects for crops over several years, they talk about the prospects for their house values stretching out over the same periods of time. As a result, they adopt the same sort of long-term, saving, hard-working, delayed gratification outlook centered on improving prospects for the family unit that farmers adopt.

True urbanites are more often renters of their homes than true rural people. There is no long-term equity gain they can look forward to and so their spending and saving decisions are vastly different. As a result, true urbanites think in the short term, do not save (relative to their rural cousins), demand more immediate gratification, and concern themselves with social units beyond or in place of their families.

If this is all true, then Vancouver, as a true city, must be careful in its dealings with the municipalities that surround it in forums such as the GVRD. Vancouverites typically think that residents of Coquitlam, Langley, and Surrey, because they live in relatively high-density situations, work in the manufacturing or service sectors, and don’t wear straw hats, are therefore just as urban as Vancouverites are. But that might be a big mistake. Despite outward appearances, they are rural people, and their outlook and political preferences, including the range of their social concerns, reflect strongly as traditionally rural values. When Vancouver negotiates with these other cities through the GVRD, we are outnumbered nearly four to one by rural people who have always had nothing but disdain for urban habits of quick gratification, wide and varying social contacts, and our propensity to build extravagant or beautiful constructions.

To trust the utterly rural-dominated GVRD to make decisions that seriously affect the island of urbanity that is Vancouver on matters like regional transportation is to entrust the care of an art gallery to a possé of farmers. It might be very democratic of us to extend equal shares of power to all members of the GVRD, but we ought to beware that we are surrounded by folks who do not share our values, and they outnumber us, democratically speaking, four to one, as they do, and always have, throughout all of Canada.

Perhaps if we stop consulting with and trying to gain the approval of the rural folk who outnumber us so widely in the GVRD, Vancouver might more effectively express itself as a city in the truest sense of the word. On matters like the widening of Highway One, perhaps instead of trying to explain the vulnerabilities and fragilities of our neighbourhoods to what we assume are fellow urbanites who would appreciate our dilemma if only it were put clearly to them, it’s time to bar the gates against an invasion by marauding barbarians who surround and vastly outnumber us, and who are in fact hostile to concepts like inner-urban neighbourhoods.

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