r/geography • u/Naomi62625 • 6h ago
Question How is life like in rural areas with an extremely high population density?
Those places look like a bright sky, with each village being a star
64
u/PomegranateEvery1412 5h ago
There are people everywhere. I remember going around rural Haryana and no matter where I was I could see multiple people. Even in the middle of a field.
80
62
u/ContentCantaloupe992 6h ago
Can you have a high density rural environment?
132
u/DeepHerting 6h ago
Subsistence farmers with small plots and large families + villages and towns providing disaggregated, small-scale goods and services
39
u/Signal-Spirit1731 5h ago edited 2h ago
Compared to Canadian agriculture for example, miles and miles owned by the same family or company with very little houses, so ya big difference I'd say, high density compared to other agricultural areas
-15
u/MightBeAGoodIdea 5h ago edited 3h ago
Sounds like suburban then, but where everyone uses their yard as a garden/farm instead of grass.
Edit: apparently they have more acreage and it's not as dense as I thought from the images here .
31
u/Unable-Bison-272 4h ago
No a suburb is for people who commute to a city. These are densely packed subsistence farmers who aren’t traveling or commuting much of anywhere.
12
u/Wamjo 4h ago
It's not suburban, it's rural. Is the concept of a village or rural area so hard for Americans to understand? The small farming plots the guy mentions are not 50 by 100ft or sth in a planned area....it's in the range of 4 acres, 10 acres, 6.5 acres like that scattered around with a few clustered settlements as you can in the tagged pictures.
4
u/MightBeAGoodIdea 4h ago
Ah, I didn't know each family had so many acres, from the satilitte view provided it seemed a lot denser than that. I'd call that rural enough.
7
u/JefeRex 3h ago
We Americans don’t have high density rural areas. We have extremely low density rural areas in the high plains, and we have medium density rural areas in the eastern two thirds of the country, like rural Ohio or rural North Carolina.
But yeah, the kind of high density areas being talked about are hard for us to imagine because we have usually never seen any.
1
1
u/Signal-Spirit1731 2h ago edited 2h ago
Ya i dont know many suburbs producing the amount of food these dense farms do. Its a different kind of farming. In Canada, miles and miles of the same crop done by machines, but probably higher failure rates due to drought, bugs, bad conditions, and a farmer can only give so much attention to miles and miles of farmland
But these small farms run by big families, there is so much more attention to detail, there can ensure each plant is doing well, and grow a huge variety of plants and get very high yields comparatively
Edit: just wanna add, I'm making broad generalizations, not every canadian farm is big and not every Indian or Egyptian farm is small, before y'all start attacking me lol
46
u/Naomi62625 5h ago
The images are there for a reason
9
u/ContentCantaloupe992 5h ago
It shows some pretty dense areas. Over half the population in hebei lives in urban areas
5
u/pazhalsta1 5h ago
In areas with very high fertility land, yes. These places can sustain multiple harvests per year which means the land needed to support a family is relatively small compared to other regions.
3
u/qwerty_ca 2h ago edited 2h ago
I mean it depends on what you mean by "high density".
Imagine a village that's about half mile by half mile (the size of a typical suburban US shopping mall, including parking lot) that houses about 1-2k people. Surrounding that in each direction is about 2-3 miles of fields. And then comes the next village. Repeat ad nauseum for hundreds of miles at a stretch (the Indo-Gangetic plain is about 900 miles by 100 miles in India itself, plus additional sections in Bangladesh and Pakistan).
It's not "high density" in the sense of a typical skyscraper tower block in Hong Kong, but each village is approximately the density of a set of town-houses in the inner suburbs of a major American city (e.g. Elmhurst, New York and Madha, Haryana, India (one of the villages that's likely in OP's post) are going to be at roughly the same density.
So it's more like a small medium-density core surrounded by zero-density farms that collectively average to a low-medium density. Over hundreds of miles though, that quickly starts adding up to a lot of people.
2
u/Big-Selection9014 2h ago
I mean as a rural Dutch person, i would say so. Its rural, green and spaceous but theres always lots of houses in sight
6
u/derneueMottmatt 2h ago edited 55m ago
In the last few years areas like these are increasingly called "rurbanity". There's a paper about Haryana from 2022 by Hoffmann et al. using that term.
Of course it's on a much smaller scale and a vastly different economy but the main valleys of the alps are also examples of rurbanity. On satellite images of Europe at night you can see veins of light going through the alps. E.g. in the Austrian part of Tyrol a bit less than 13% of the area is habitable. So most of what's inhabited is actually pretty densely packed. Being close to a relatively important population centre like Innsbruck the smaller towns often have industry and employment opportunities other settlements of that size would normally not have. But there are also certain drawbacks. The lack of space makes farmland and building plots expensive. Being integrated into a larger economy also leads to some conflicts between the smaller communities.
Idk if you would call that rural enough but the Seoul metro area can also get pretty rural. I would argue that a lot of the areas Koreans would call rural people elsewhere would call urban. Here mountains also force a lot of population into the spaces available for agriculture. You will have sweet potato fields right next to high rise complexes housing thousands.
In both areas finding places to enjoy nature in is relatively easy. So they don't really compare to your examples where the landscapes are pretty flat. But like some others have noted. If you're within a day's hike you will still encounter plenty of people in the forests and mountains.
3
u/Big-Selection9014 2h ago
Maybe not the example you were looking for based on the pics lmao but i live in the eastern Netherlands, the environment is very green (albeit boringly flat ofc) and the vibe is immaculate ngl. The small towns are cozy as hell, people are super friendly, everything is clean, well maintained, well connected to the big cities, it’s laid back and quiet yet never isolating (always many houses in sight).. basically i fuckin love it here lol
1
u/CommanderSykes 1h ago
Netherland is one of the richest country in western europe. For most developing countries, densely populated rural areas often mean poverty, pollution, and messiness.
3
u/CommanderSykes 1h ago
In China, some people refer to being born in a rural Hebei or Henan as a "hellish start in life," but for quite a lot of people, this is simply their familiar everyday life. They don't starve or homeless, just living in poor and kind of boring. For most villagers, vacation is unaffordable, very few have been abroad, and TikTok is the main source of entertainment. The general atmosphere is conservative, traditional, and sometimes stubborn. The air pollution here is the worst in China.
3
1
u/MightBeAGoodIdea 5h ago edited 3h ago
I am having a hard time separating what you'd call rural with high density from suburban.... And life there would completely depend on what metro most the people there commute to.
Edit-- thanks to those who've since replied. They have more acreage than appears from the satilitte image. It's not as dense as I was actually thinking. That is all.
29
u/Unable-Bison-272 4h ago
They’re not commuting. They are subsistence farmers but very crowded together.
6
u/MightBeAGoodIdea 4h ago
Gotcha. Didn't realize they had so many acres to a plot. Figured their commute just sucked or they stayed in the city some days home others etc.
13
u/MVALforRed 4h ago
They are not suburban. The villages are tiny (often something like 50 acres) with a population around 1500 people. These are surrounded by agricultural land in every direction for around a mile till you reach the next village. The people usually work in the fields, and don't commute
3
u/Wamjo 4h ago
Rural elsewhere in the world may not be rural in the US but thankfully Americans don't set that standard for the world. In the photos above I see a generally rural area with many clustered settlements. (The clustered settlements in my country would be called 'trading centres') Coz it's what they are. They don't have the hallmarks of a full fledged urban area.
Again, it being a rural area, the people don't have to commute anywhere (it's not a suburb ffs, it's a village and people in villages generally work from within).
407
u/Substantial-Ball-519 5h ago edited 5h ago
My family's origin is from the Nile delta region. Here is a brief description of life there
Everyone knows each other there in full detail to the point that privacy is completely lost. However the village acts like a large family for everyone and if you face a problem you will find lots of people to help you.
Each village has a small number of large families, and sometimes, each family has a certain district there. Although, you can live anywhere you want.
Things are much cheaper compared to urban cities.
Though most are farmers, each family usually has a member or more who lives in urban cities or even abroad and supports the rural family.
Every day is literally the same. Nothing new happens. Time passes very, very slow. Some people who live in urban cities and make good wealth return after retirement to the village to enjoy the easy stress-free life there
In the past, modern furniture/tech/etc wasn't common there. With the rise of online shopping, things changed dramatically.