Vol. 15, No. 4, December 1977 - "Rural Geography"
Today, preoccupation with urban problems is typical throughout most of the United States. Rarely do we read or hear much in the popular literature of news media concerning rural problems. In fact, most Americans become vaguely aware of rural problems by way of more dramatic and well publicized occurrences, such as the Arab oil embargo or the Russian grain deal. Even then the concern is not with the impact on rural areas, but on the pocketbook issues that affect urban people. Only when the prices of food and fiber products increase do the vast majority of urban dwellers acknowledge their rural counterpart.
Zoning is a popular legal technique through which a community is able to divide itself into districts and, within each district, have different land use regulations. Zoning helps a community to guide its future development in such a way that different areas will develop differently. It can encourage certain areas to remain agricultural , others to develop into residential areas, industrial districts, business districts, and other things that are desired. The first use of zoning in this country was by New York City in 1916. During the 1920's zoning spread to most other large cities, and it later diffused to smaller cities, towns, and rural municipalities. Well over 10,000 municipalities in the United States now have zoning ordinances, and this number includes many smaller communities.
In recent years the ideas of economic development have tended towards a common denominator, a common way of seeing the problem. Stemming from the insights of a Mexican economist Raoul Prebisch, the problems of development are today looked at from the perspective of his center-periphery model. In this model the center is the well developed areas and the periphery is less developed. On a world scale, regions of under and underdevelopment are much of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and the regions of development include North America, Western Europe, Japan, etc. However, the model can also be applied to even well developed nation-states such as the United States, as with Appalachia; Britain as with the Scottish highlands; Scandinavia and their Kjlen problems, to name a few examples. Additionally , the Prebisch periphery concept has tended to allow researchers to focus more holistically on the problems of development. The focus today is no longer merely economic development; the trend is to put emphasis on human development. As if the "not by bread alone" exhortation is a command to consider the sweep of the affairs of the human condition, the holistic approach to the problems of development treats not only the economic ills of marginal areas but also their socio-cultural malaise.
In the United States there is little preoccupation with food production and even food shortages are viewed with skepticism. The abundant and reliable food supplies in American supermarkets and the rise of a locational dichotomy between the urban and rural population has bred a lack of interest or concern for the development or well being of the rural area.