Research Proposal

Human Lifestyle in Rural and Urban Areas

The world can be divided to ways in which humans live: rural and urban. Whether it be in huts, a university, a small village in the mountains, large cities, people’s lifestyles can fall into these two subcategories. There is obviously more rural areas than others or more urban areas than others but there is essentially a spectrum existing that coincides with people’s way of living. If we look across the globe all the interesting places that exist, no matter how flawless or how ugly the conditions may be, there is still a clear discrepancy that exists between urban and rural or suburban areas. This discrepancy largely stems from the fact that human behavior is directly affected by surroundings. Essentially, a human living in an urban area will live differently than one that lives in a rural area. My essay will be centered on the discrepancy in social behavior of humans between rural and urban areas.

            Primarily, I will start off my essay with an explanation on how to decipher between rural and urban areas.  Rural areas in this case, are more open and allow for more space between humans living in the area in which humans are less inclined to interact with each other. On the other hand, urban areas have tighter living spaces and allow for humans to interact on a daily basis. The difference between the two in terms of social behavior results from the difference in social pattern.

            After this, I will introduce Johnson and Davidson as examples of urban and rural examples, respectively. I will explain how the social behavior in the Manchester example in Johnson’s essay differs from that in the Duke University example in Davidson’s essay. I will explain how people in Johnson’s essay were more inclined to have local interactions with each other on a daily basis, whereas the students at Duke have these local interactions to a lesser extent in which they mainly connected through an iPod (Davidson 52). Manchester also could be a prime example of social patterns in society and how in urban areas social patterns naturally develop as a result of the tighter space between humans (Johnson 199). Humans are more obliged to follow social patterns in urban areas as a result of the tighter space since people would just obstruct each other if their social movements changed. In rural areas, people have more leeway in which they could walk; they have a greater radius of space surrounding them when they walk, unlike in urban areas.

            Furthermore, I will introduce the source “The Condition of the Working Class in England” as another example to explain the social life of urban areas. This can directly stem off from the Manchester example from earlier and in this case, I could correlate the two to solidify my argument. I will further introduce another source known as “Biographies of Hegemony” by Karen Ho, an essay on the way Wall Street works and how people live when they work on Wall Street. This could also be another prime example of an urban environment.  From there I could go into further detail on how blue collar workers live in urban areas. I could compare this lifestyle to the kids in the article about the Marshall Scholarship; the kids in this article live in a rural environment and I could explain how they work differently than those who live in the city. These kids in the city play sports and are able to practice sports because of the amount of space in grass in a rural environment, whereas the students studying in NYC, per say, are less inclined to be athletes since there are less fields around them due to the tighter space. This is just introducing another discrepancy between rural and urban lifestyles in terms of social behavior.

            Finally I will close the essay off with the idea that understanding the discrepancy between social behavior in rural and urban environments allows us to better understand how society works. Rural and urban environments are essentially necessary to understand since they are part of the reason people act the way they do in different areas.