I’m from the US, and a rural area at that, so to me “rural” means “I can’t see any evidence of people no matter how hard I look and it’s a long drive to the nearest supermarket.”
As I discovered in the UK, areas classified as “rural” in the minds of the British are totally different than I expected or considered.
I was riding in a co-worker’s car and we were passing what looked to me like a pretty standard semi-suburban area – not that dense, but with a few dwellings and businesses around and off in the distance.
My co-worker commented something like, “It’s hard to find anything out in these rural areas.”
I looked around, but didn’t say anything. I could see a dozen houses, a pub, a restaurant and a hardware store. Where I am from, that’s a town!
But in the UK, it is “rural.”
Strange these differences that you’d never even begin to think about if you don’t experience them in person, even in two cultures similar in so many ways.
Not just in the UK. 🙂 To me that is rural, too. I suspect that we will be hard-pressed to find another culture that doesn’t see it as rural.
In much of the southern and western US, that wouldn’t be rural at all — many places in those areas called “towns” are less developed.
But I agree, in a lot of the rest of the world that would be rural.
I’m with you on rural.
When my cousin built a house it was a ten mile drive to the closest store (in three different directions) with a three mile drive on unpaved couny road before reaching the edge of my cousin’s property (and another mile on two dirt tire tracks with grass in between them). That is rural. If you can see two stores and three houses that’s urban congestion.
had a similar experience with ‘suburb’. My mental model of a suburb is outside the city limits of an urban area and is mostly inhabited by people who go to work in (or are otherwise dependent on) the urban area.
In a lot of Europe a suburb can be within the city limits, it’s just some kind of defined area away from the downtown area (or city center as they like to say in Europe).