COVID-19 and the reversal of the urban-rural antagonism
Case Study: All cities
As governments started announcing lockdowns and others measures to flatten the curve, many urbanites started moving to less densely populated areas. The inherent uncertainty of the situation makes it hard to decipher whether this migration is temporary or permanent.
As Le Monde highlights, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered one of the largest human movements in recent history, especially in developing countries. There were different rationales for this move. Some people moved because they came from those rural areas or towns, and either wanted to reunite with their families or could not afford to stay in a city when the vast majority of informal income-generating activities were banned. Others (particularly more affluent ones) moved because spending the crisis at their secondary residences in the countryside seemed like an ideal solution to escape from a seemingly oppressive life under urban lockdown.
Although urban-rural migrations are not new and have been expanding in recent decades in the developed world, the phenomenon is still limited to a certain extent by the imperative of being physically present every day at an office, which held true for the majority of the workforce until a few months ago. As larger and larger sections of society actively look to improve their quality of life by moving to less polluted and less densely populated zones, pressure on some parts of the countryside, as receiving areas, will rise. Until now, the phenomenon is fairly marginal outside of industrialized nations with reliable transport infrastructure, where cities still host the vast majority of quality public services.
So here are the questions we must confront:
Can COVID-19 catalyze the de-urbanization of elites in the developing world? And how will tensions between urbanites and rural dwellers evolve if the trend towards de-urbanization is confirmed?
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The virus of the rich
Claudia López, Bogotá’s mayor, recently explained the trend of virus spread using a city map, where she draw a red circle around the city’s most affluent neighbors. “This is where the epidemic started,” she explained, “where people who can afford flying abroad live.”
In Mexico, people on social media even dubbed COVID-19 “Lord Virus,” mocking the fact that most of the initial cases where detected among wealthy people who travel abroad often. In fact, one of the first clusters of COVID-19 cases was a group of 400 travelers who chartered flights to Vail, Colorado, one of Mexico’s elite favorite ski areas. These two examples help illustrate why urbanites moving to their secondary residences haven’t been warmly greeted.
Rebuild the city walls
In France, for instance, the influx of wealthy Parisians into many beach towns on the Atlantic Coast, sparsely populated outside of the holiday season, did not please some locals who saw this situation as “an invasion”. Acts of xenophobia, like puncturing the tires of cars with plates from Paris, were reported. The main argument revolves around small towns’ lack of sanitary infrastructure to face a pandemic.
A very similar situation took place in Colombia, where rural dwellers saw incoming urbanites as virus vectors. This created a divide between urbanites, seen as tourists who frame country land as a commodity they use to enjoy a higher quality of life, and country people, who are rooted there and have deeper ties to the land. Mayors of towns and smaller cities insisted in telling their constituents that no one from Bogotá, the capital, will be allowed, as well as instructing people not to host any tourist.
These were pegged as main policies to tackle the spread of the virus. Some have gone so far as blocking the roads leading to large urban centers, the disease’s hotspots.
Rural/urban gap and income inequalities
In Latin America, the urban/rural gap tends to overlap with social inequalities, as still very few wealthy households - at least economically active ones - permanently live in rural areas. The COVID-19 outbreak has been different from the usual pattern of infectious diseases associated with low-income urban and rural areas, where health and sanitation facilities are scarce or unaffordable. In a region where land conflicts are still latent, the permanent presence of elites in rural areas would be a first since the beginning of the 20th century. This will largely depend, of course, on the provision of key public services like health care and 5G connectivity, most likely by private providers, in these areas.
It’s evident that the current pandemic is flipping around previous social dichotomies like these. Discrimination against those who are usually the ones who discriminate (wealthy urbanites) is on the rise. Poor rural migrants in cities often have to fight for their “right to the city,” now wealthy urbanites have to advocate for their “right to the country.”
When this is all over, COVID-19 might ultimately change the territorialisation of social inequalities and social conflicts around the world.
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Andrés Melendro Blanco currently serves as a sustainability consultant at ALLCOT Group, where he is dedicated to aligning climate change mitigation projects with the UN's 17 SDG. He previously worked as a consultant for UN-Habitat and as an urban development analyst at ProBogotá, a think-tank dedicated to fostering Bogotá’s sustainability. He holds a bachelor’s degree cum laude in Political Science and a master’s degree in Urban Policy, both from Sciences Po Paris.