Wizard and I were chatting offline about this thread and came up with a question I wanted to ask the class: Do you think people in this region are less likely to really embrace city life because so many people are from rural areas? Here's where I'm going with this: Look at a map. You can go for hundreds of miles in any direction....esp. north and west...and not find another big city. Teenagers who want to leave their small towns in northern Minnesota, or Iowa, or South Dakota or even Montana end up coming to the Twin Cities. (It's not like, say, Milwaukee: A kid growing up in smalltown Wisconsin picks between Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison or Milwaukee...so they really don't get as many people from small towns. We're the main draw for hundreds of miles.) We're kind of like a lake with a massive watershed, draining people from a huge range of rural areas. When you talk to urban geographers about this they talk about this pattern of rural kids moving to the Twin Cities, settling down in the suburbs and creating this region with a city surrounded by burbs made up of a huge percentage of people who have never lived in an urban area. It's not like New York, or Chicago or a lot of other cities where there are generations of people. We are really only now raising our first couple generations of city people....(My dad's from New Prague, I was raised in the city, my kids are raised in the city and each generation you get more and more city and less and less rural.) I never really paid too much attention to this until I got on the rubber chicken circuit for the Downtown Council. I'd speak at all these Kiwanis and Rotary lunches in the suburbs and in the end was really amazed how little so many people really knew about the city. There was a lot of crime talk, and some veiled talk about race, but it was really mostly just generally not being very comfortable with being in a city. So I do think that when we get into our reverse urban snobbism...I'm an offender...it's important to remember that part of this comes from who we are. R.T. Rybak
