Op-ed: Rural America doesn't need to be saved

Jean Hardy

A wave of commentators and researchers have asked whether rural America can be "saved" from problems with everything from employment levels to broadband reach, but such publications often seem to fixate on outsiders' role in fixing rural areas and ignore what rural areas are doing to save themselves. So says a thoughtful CityLab op-ed from Jean Hardy, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Hardy, who has spent the past four years researching how rural communities in Michigan and Wisconsin use modern technology to help earn a living, writes that rural businesses and economic developers have access to many tools to help their communities grow. "The insistence that no one out there knows how to solve problems of the rural economy is a false and misleading one. There are decades of research that have identified paths forward that rural communities are already following and flourishing on," Hardy writes. 

Rural areas might not have much money, but local pride and tight-knit communities go a long way toward helping rural youth succeed, Hardy writes. "We treat rural communities as if they are just behind the times and waiting to catch up. When we turn to emerging American supercities as bastions of the future, we lose what we can learn from rural communities."