Strange Familiarity: Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide

• In Event: The Pursuit of Happiness

Abstract

Recent studies of the urban-rural divide do not question enough of our assumptions about essential features of urban and rural life and their respective visions of citizenship, happiness, and flourishing. One such assumption – a commonplace of our contemporary social imaginary – is that urban and rural life are inherently opposed and respectively embody the characteristics of what have been termed “strangeness” and “familiarity.” This paper calls for an alternative social imaginary that does not see the urban-rural divide as inevitable, but rather a violation of visions of civic life and flourishing that city and small-town life can and should share. These values are encapsulated in what this paper terms “strange familiarity.” After tracing our wrongheaded assumptions about urban and rural life in our contemporary social imaginary and classical social theory, this paper sketches an alternative social imaginary by drawing upon Georg Simmel, bell hooks, and Marshall Berman.

Author

• Elly Long, Princeton University