 “Perfectly Positionedâ€: The Blurring of Urban, Suburban, and Rural Boundaries in a Southern CommunityBetsie Garner The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2017, vol. 672, issue 1, 46-63 Abstract: In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and formal interviews from a community study in Rockdale County, Georgia, to illustrate the social construction of place-based identity within the rural-urban interface. Given decades of growth and expansion in metro Atlanta, Rockdale has become an object lesson of the boundary shifting and crossing typical of places located along the rural-urban fringe. A sustained pattern of demographic and ecological change in Rockdale has resulted in a lack of consensus about how to imagine the community’s location on the rural-urban continuum. I show how symbolic and social boundaries between urbanity and rurality are blurred within the community as residents draw on local resources to construct alternatively urban, suburban, and rural identities. Additionally, I illustrate how local boosters take advantage of this blurriness to portray Rockdale County as a “perfectly positioned†community and how community members disregard the official rural-urban boundaries of governments or scholars and instead invest their own imagined boundaries with significant meaning. Keywords: urban; suburban; rural; community; culture; identity; place (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:672:y:2017:i:1:p:46-63 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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