Opinion | Interest in democratic values is high outside urban cores – By Samuel J. Abrams (Washington Examiner) / June 5, 2023
With the COVID-19 pandemic declared over, a significant question for politicians, planners, and pundits alike is what to do with city centers and old urban cores after the pandemic pushed many Americans to move away from dense urban areas. For many, the central city remains an idealized version of spatial organization , serving as an engine of creativity, innovation, opportunity, upward mobility, and the height of civilization itself. But most Americans feel differently , preferring to live in environs well outside urban cores and not just within suburbs but in small towns and rural areas as well. Even younger generations of Americans—who traditionally flocked to big cities for careers, social lives, and cultural amenities—show greater interest in suburban living than dense city living.
A frequent concern amongst theorists involves community cohesion and spatial organization. One real question now is how population diffusion away from urban areas is impacting democratic vitality; as individuals move to less dense areas with more privacy, it is widely believed that they will naturally start to isolate themselves from the wider public, impoverishing the public sphere. Fortunately, these concerns are deeply overblown. Data from PACE’s 2021 Civic Language Perceptions Project , which sampled 5,000 voters in 2021, shows that attitudes toward democracy and community participation vary minimally when one moves from urban to suburban and rural areas.
When presented with a list of activities and behaviors that voters think are important to ensure democracy works, responses change little depending on the respondent’s environment. For example, 71% of urban respondents believe that voting is critical behavior for a democracy to be successful, while 74% of rural and 80% of suburban residents feel the same way. While non-urban residents may be less likely to share residential spaces with their neighbors and they may directly interact a bit less often with their immediate neighbors than their city dweller counterparts, the residents of the often mischaracterized “ lonely and desolate suburbs ” are anything but electorally disengaged.
