Multiculturalizing Rural Towns — Insights for Inclusive Planning

Abstract

Many regions of the United States, including the Midwest, have recently undergone significant demographic change. Much of this Midwestern demographic change, particularly in rural areas, has been due to the recruitment of low-paid workers for food processing industries. Though immigrants remain concentrated in their traditional urban destinations, many are choosing other locales as well, including rural destinations in states that historically have not drawn immigrants. Such shifts have increased the racial and ethnic diversity of many small communities whose formal structures of decision making and planning are ill-equipped to deal with the resulting social heterogeneity. The paper points out that much of the inclusive planning perspective is based on the experience of metropolitan areas and large cities. To look at multiculturalism and planning rather through the lens of rural communities' rapid diversification achieves insights useful to the ongoing dialogue in planning scholarship. Through the case study of a demographically rapidly changing small community in the Midwest, the paper highlights the planning challenges and opportunities there and recommends agendas for future research.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support this project has received from the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We are also grateful to the invaluable research assistance by Andrew Jensen, who was at the time student in Master of Urban Planning at UIUC. We appreciate the cooperation we received by many new and old residents of Riverbend. The responsibility for the content of this paper however remains solely with the authors.

Notes

The growth rate of African immigrants by region is calculated from the SF3 file of the 2000 census and the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS).

This is not to ignore the critical importance of understanding the transnational and global context of this demographic change. This paper, however, focuses on the national and regional context of this population in small Midwestern communities.

Memoir audio taped in 1972 and transcribed by state university staff.

Memoir audio taped in 1975 and transcribed by state university staff.

We do not have empirical evidence to speculate on the connection between non-Hispanic White decreases and Latino increases, though it is possible that a ‘tipping point’ has been reached as noted in Lichter and Johnson (2006).

The most recent quantitative data available about a small town such as Riverbend are from Census 2000. Data sources collected more recently, such as the 2006 ACS, do not calculate population estimates for areas with populations smaller than 65,000.

To arrive at the 2006 figure for the community, we assumed that approximately the same proportion of Latinos in the county lived in Riverbend as in 2000 (89%), and extrapolated from the 2006 county-level estimates.

The state had a larger Latino population base in 2000; therefore, the percent change is not as high as in Riverbend, a place with a relatively small Latino population base.

Qualitative sources suggest that this is occurring, but post-2000 quantitative data about Riverbend are not yet available from the Census Bureau. In the future, it will be possible to use this data to evaluate the numbers of Africans in Riverbend since 2000.

Although beyond the scope of this paper, the larger study of the process of change in this community suggests a concern for inter-racial labour relations as a factor involved in steering African newcomers to live outside of Riverbend.

Block groups are statistical aggregations of a lower geographic unit categorized by the Census Bureau, the census block. Nearly 400 census blocks cover Riverbend's place boundaries in 2000.