skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Rural Smart Shrinkage and Perceptions of Quality of Life in the American Midwest
Rural communities in the American Midwest have experienced upheaval since the 1980s with shrinking populations, an exodus of younger people, job losses, and aging infrastructure. Evidence shows that these trends are unlikely to be reversed in most places. Despite this, high-cost and unproven economic growth strategies are still promoted as the most appropriate responses. This chapter presents findings from an interdisciplinary research project about quality of life (QoL) in rural Iowa that proposes changing the analytical paradigm in this context from growth to one that sees adaptation to population loss as a form of resiliency. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the research considers how some shrinking rural communities in Iowa have been better able to adapt than others. The research shows that negative trends in QoL perceptions in these towns were best mitigated by investing in community services and social capital, rather than in economic development. This process is described as rural smart shrinkage, a term borrowed from research on shrinking cities and applied here to rural communities for the first time. The framework shifts away from associating population loss with community decline and instead emphasizes intentional and low-cost strategies that may sustain shrinking rural communities into the future.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1736718
PAR ID:
10297917
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International handbooks of qualityoflife
Volume:
Handbook of Quality of Life and Sustainability
ISSN:
2468-7227
Page Range / eLocation ID:
395-415
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, ACSA Press)
    Quirindongo, Rico; Theodore, Georgeen (Ed.)
    Most small and rural communities in the United States are shrinking. This population loss is often accompanied by economic and social upheaval—job losses, out migration of young people, school closures, reductions in local services, and deteriorating physical infrastructure. Because design firms cluster in metropolitan areas and most rural commissions are for private clients, architects are largely absent from these places. The AIA Framework for Design Excellence calls for the professional community to enable more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive environments, yet rural places pose a challenge because they remain a strikingly underserved market for architectural services. How can this vision for Design Excellence extend its reach into places where new construction is rare, and architects are not present to learn from and develop relationships with potential clients?This paper presents an overview of an interdisciplinary research project at Iowa State University funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The research begins with this question: why do people in some rural towns perceive their quality of life to be increasing even when the population continues to shrink? Using twenty years of survey data about quality of life, the team identified small rural communities in Iowa where the typical association of population loss with community decline did not appear to hold true. Through interviews, site visits, spatial analysis, and data analysis using machine learning and other methods, the team is working to better understand what influences people’s perceptions of quality of life. Understanding more about these unexpectedly resilient communities requires conversations and building trust in places where few outsiders ever visit. Examples of projects in towns working with the research team include adaptive reuse of closed schools and other abandoned properties; improved recreational spaces and parks; and repurposing underused commercial properties. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, Journal of Data Science)
    Many small and rural places are shrinking. Interactive dashboards are the most common use cases for data visualization and context for exploratory data tools. In our paper, we will use Iowa data to explore the specific scope of how dashboards are used in small and rural area to empower novice analysts to make data-driven decisions. Our framework will suggest a number of research directions to better support small and rural places from shrinking using an interactive dashboard design, implementation and use for the every day analyst. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, Water Research)
    The sampling and analysis of sewage for pathogens and other biomarkers offers a powerful tool for monitoring and understanding community health trends and potentially predicting disease outbreaks. Since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of wastewater-based testing for public health surveillance has increased markedly. However, these efforts have focused on urban and peri-urban areas. In most rural regions of the world, healthcare service access is more limited than in urban areas, and rural public health agencies typically have less disease outcome surveillance data than their urban counterparts. The potential public health benefits of wastewater-based surveillance for rural communities are therefore substantial - though so too are the methodological and ethical challenges. For many rural communities, population dynamics and insufficient, aging, and inadequately maintained wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure present obstacles to the reliable and responsible implementation of wastewater-based surveillance. Practitioner observations and research findings indicate that for many rural systems, typical implementation approaches for wastewater-based surveillance will not yield sufficiently reliable or actionable results. We discuss key challenges and potential strategies to address them. However, to support and expand the implementation of responsible, reliable, and ethical wastewater-based surveillance for rural communities, best practice guidelines and standards are needed. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Population, Space and Place)
    Abstract Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left‐behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place‐based framework, we utilise sequence analysis to identify dominant trajectories of change for more than 8000 rural communities. Our analysis reveals highly diverse community trajectories that connect deindustrialisation and racial inequality to elevated and rising poverty rates in certain places, while also documenting more favourable poverty trends elsewhere. These diverging local outcomes shed new light on the conflicting narratives surrounding rural America. We then demonstrate that, among children from poorer households, exposure to community poverty is predictive of adult economic mobility, patterns which are partly mediated by family stability and child poverty. Our finding that poorchildrenface additional disadvantages when they also grow up in poorplacessuggests a potential role for place‐based policies and redistribution to help ameliorate these disparities. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, Stat)
    Estimates of resident satisfaction with public education have great utility in public administration, especially among decision makers in shrinking small communities. But such estimates are typically obtained via surveys, which are costly and often unreliable at high spatial resolutions given low response rates. Our study found that satisfaction with public schools among residents of small communities can be reasonably estimated at the community level using public data. Several models generalized adequately to unseen data—these models typically included the following covariates: state student assessment scores, school reorganizations, net open enrollment, and the cost of educational outcomes relative to neighboring districts. Our findings thus amount to a cost‐effective survey alternative for gauging satisfaction with public schools in small Iowa communities. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email