A significant amount of spatial and geodata related work is related to urban activity. This involves all kinds of geodata including cadastral, topographic, infrastructure, demographic, transport and many other types of information. At the same time we can find similar levels of activity related to rural environments. While modelling for each may take on different characteristics, there are connection points between urban and rural areas. Should Rural and Urban Spatial Models Link Together?
Picture yourself working on the floor of a Commodities Exchange. The display boards in the building are telling a story. They describe the prices people are willing to pay for specific types of commodities, about half of them being rural or agricultural and forest related. The others being metals and other types of non-biological products. For the rural based commodities the prices are determined by several factors, but the primary factors relate to the amount of avail able product as compared to the level of consumption — and consump tion is heavily weighted toward urban areas.
Many cities include rural areas as a matter of holding land for future development. Although these areas may not be managed like most other infrastructure and are often farmed, they nevertheless depend upon management structures and tools that meet their unique needs. We don’t simply draw a line between rural and urban areas, detaching GIS department responsibilities and engineering functions.
Transportation corridors do not stop at the city boundaries. In fact, many large cities draw their daily populations from surrounding communities and rely upon transportation systems that link the centre of the city to the locations of where people live and sleep after work.
Rivers run through agricultural lands and forests from distant places, and their impacts in terms of flooding and erosion can be felt depending upon management plans and strategies arising from distant locations. In some cases active real-time sensors monitor urban watersheds and calculate rates of flow and other phenomenon from sensors located large distances from cities.
The food we eat is mostly grown in rural areas. The metals and raw mineral resources are not often mined within cities, but are transported for consumption to urban areas. This can include rail, ship and even air transport in some cases. Clouds and rain do not stop at borders and pollution rises from urban areas (and agricultural ones too) to high altitudes before moving toward distant locations.
Disease, military operations, insects and birds often move between urban and rural areas. Cash flows through banks both locally and distant.
We like to think and discuss modelling in terms of local or individual processes, however, the reality based on the world around us is more about connecting individual models and processes together. This includes buildings to cities to food and forests, and distant lands to current activity nearby.
Imagine for a moment the design of a building or park that has no connection to the people or surrounding management planning and activity. Do we even have computing systems and administrative procedures within urban and rural areas today that would allow these individual and separated realities to exist? In a sense many of the connections between neighbourhoods already exist. But do they exist between urban and rural areas?
Where do those separations occur and why do they occur? What causes them? How can these divisions be remedied? What would it take? Culture? Money? GIS strategies?
Further reading on this subject: How Does a Digital City Model Compare to a Digital Rural Model?
