While proper urban planning is an absolute must in order to save our cities, can rural planning by itself and in isolation, however proper, save our villages? The question has been triggered by a recent report in the Korean media that, for the first time in more than half a century, South Korea's urban population showed a decline last year, perhaps indicating a growing desire among Koreans to leave the city and settle down in the countryside.
But that's imagining too much. South Korea is so urbanised already that to try and draw comfort from such reports only exposes the helplessness of the situation. According to official statistics, about half of all South Koreans lived in cities even as early as 1970. The spiral hasn't stopped since, rising to 81.9 per cent in 1990, 88.35 per cent in 2000, and 91.12 per cent in 2011. The reported decline last year, to 91.04 per cent, was only a measly 0.08 per cent that says nothing about the likelihood of reversing the urban onslaught, as some Korean observers have been hoping for.
What's happening in the case of South Korea is that many of the baby boomers born between 1955 and 1963 are now reaching their retirement age and many of them want to begin a second life in the countryside, perhaps returning to small-time farming or tending the home garden. But retirees alone can't rejuvenate villages or sustain the rural economy. For that, you need to attract younger, working people in large numbers and make them want to stay there. You need to create the right conditions and environment for them not to feel too jealous of cities.
First of all, you need well-developed roads connecting communities with towns and cities so people don't feel cut off and abandoned. Then you need to provide for good educational facilities, build modern hospitals and health clinics so people don't feel helpless when they fall sick or have to rush to the nearest cities that might be hours away. You need to ensure the conveniences of modern living, such as entertainment and recreation and shopping stores well above the standards of village shops. Above all, you need to create opportunities for jobs, much beyond farming, because aspirations are changing and families won't be happy tilling lands that are becoming increasingly marginalised in both size and productivity, just as they won't be happy living in a traditional village environment in traditional thatch-roofed homes. That means you need industries and offices in rural areas, and a wider spread of commercial activities that would attract the young rural opportunity-seekers, without whom we can never infuse dynamism into the rural economy.
The point is, in the changed context of rising economic expectations of nations and people, concepts of urban and rural divides no longer hold true. Any attempt to develop rural areas in isolation, revolving only around traditional ideas of farming, occupations, and living is bound to fail. In other words, what we should aim for is planned "urbanisation" of the countryside and "ruralisation" of cities, so that we can make them both equally liveable and communicable. That's the kind of complementarity we should be looking for, and the basic intention has to be a balanced distribution of the population across the country to take some edge off the urban onslaught.
What, then, happens to villages and village life as we have known them for centuries? Will they simply disappear from the face of the earth one day? It looks like that's the way it's going to be - sooner in the growth rim countries of Asia and over time in struggling regions like South Asia and Africa - unless we want to slow down economic growth and keep subsidising underdevelopment. Maybe some of the more traditional ones will be preserved as heritage spots and tourist attractions, just as we preserve our old temples, ruins, and cultural landmarks. South Korea has a few of them already, like Yangdong near the south-eastern coastal city of Gyeongju. Set amid beautiful natural surroundings, it's the country's largest traditional village, where tourists flock to look at 500-year-old thatched-roof cottages 200-year-old houses and discover what life was like in earlier times.
China, desperate to get at least 70 per cent of its population, or roughly 900 million people, into cities by 2025, has started listing its traditional villages that are largely untouched by modernisation and would be worthy claimants for the world heritage status. One such village is Dali, in the south-western province of Guizhou, a community of some 300 households dominated by a wooden pagoda and sprawled along a river criss-crossed by covered wooden bridges. According to a People's Daily report, there are no more than 3,000 Dali-like ancient villages still left in the country that could be developed as new tourist attractions, opening up an additional source of income for villagers who still choose to live there.
rbarun@gmail.com
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