The Urban City’s Rural Face

When it comes to development most take sides. I am not talking about of one country over another, or good guys versus the not so good guys.  Theorists and practitioners, however, do like to specialise in either ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ development. However, the distinction between the two really isn’t quite so simple. National bench-marks of what is considered urban and what rural certainly don’t help either since, depending on which country’s definition you use, India can be more than 70% or less than 30% rural (1).

Take the city of Sololá, the capital of a municipality and a department of the same name in the highlands of Guatemala. Every municipal capital is considered ‘urban’ by the national statistics office and the city’s latest official population counted 68,120 people residing across four barrios (city sections) (2). Whilst this figure would ‘feel’ far too large to any visitor, warranting further investigation, the image of it built in the mind of a distant reader (and their subsequent analysis of it by students and policy makers alike) will vary greatly depending on which statistic is used by the author: the official city figure or the actual population residing within the ‘urban’ space, which, at 8,851 is barely 13% of that (3). And that isn’t the city’s only rural-urban misconception.

A walk around the town’s four barrios reveals the rural face of urban Sololá. Subtly peaking into the gardens of the gated houses and businesses lining the streets, it is easy to spot the tips of lanky green corn plants nearing maturity having been planted only a few months ago. Avocado, apple and peach trees tower fruitfully in backyards, whilst chickens, geese and turkeys perched on makeshift rooftops and the odd grazing cow make for what is occasionally a startling surprise. Some women use whatever outdoor space they have to rear backyard chicks for sale at the market, whilst others spread out large linoleum sheets on their concrete porch to dry the season’s maize harvest.

Two blocks South of the main plaza and market, the only natural limits of the city reveal themselves with a steep, sixty degree inclined cobbled street heading down towards Lago Atitlan. But the dense build up of low rise houses, offices and other buildings that is found along the way and groups of socialising locals and uniformed students from the Escuela Santa Teresita up the street does not continue to the shores of the lake. Instead, you are surprised to find the two or so hundred meter buffer between urban build up and the waterline to be the serene setting of small rectangular farming plots. At the blink of an eye instead of marvelling at the colourful spectrum of corporate and political party branded housing and shops, rows of tall corn, weaving beans, spritely onions, potato plants, carrot tops and several leafy greens throw themselves in your line of vision, back-dropped by the majestic San Pedro volcano. To the North, just as quickly, the dense concrete town becomes a green hilly terrain with cornrows adorning the steep, sometimes near vertical, mountainsides. The residents of the city maintain agricultural activities in the belly of the beast, whilst in all directions from the centre a few steps can at an instance transport you from ‘urban’ to ‘rural’, blurring all definitions and divisions in a complex hybrid space.

This is not limited to Sololá. It is a widely accepted statistic that at a rate of 75%, Latin America is the most urbanised region on the planet. Yet on closer inspection, 45% of the people in that category, just like the residents of Sololá, live in low density places within an hour of urban centres and many of even the most clearly ‘urban’ residents and their ‘urban’ locales are embedded in an agriculturally based countryside (4). So perhaps before designing rural, urban, agricultural, industrial, or any development policy, we should get the record straight on exactly what kind of space and what sort of livelihoods we are working with.

Do you have a real-life example that challenges traditional rural/urban dichotomies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Ioulia Fenton leads the food and agriculture research stream at the Center for Economic and Environmental Modeling and Analysis (CEEMA) at INESAD.

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Notes:

1. Tacoli C. (2003) “The links between urban and rural development”, Environment and Urbanization, Vol.15, No.3, pp.2-12

2. The latest census data for the city population of Sololá from 2001 estimates it to be 48,000 people (Sololá, 2001). Assuming the city has grown at the same rate as the entire department (which is likely to be under-estimation), at 42% as per the latest government estimates (INE), I estimate the current official city population to be roughly 68,120.

3. Own calculations based on INE estimations and Sololá rural-urban proportion estimates of

Macario Calgua M. D. L. A. (2008) “Costos y Rentabilidad de Unidades Industriales (Produccióm de Refrescos”, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, Working Paper Sololá Volumen 6.

4. Chomitz, K. M. & Thomas, T. S. (2005) “Quantifying the Rural-Urban Gradient in Latin America and the Caribbean”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3634, June 2005.