The Case for Small Towns

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · November 12, 2016

As urbanisation steadily increases, so too does man’s dislocation from an important source of life’s meaning

In the Hunger Games trilogy (2012), the Capitol is a metropolis that is a seat of economic and political power.

It perpetuates its existence by keeping “the Districts” — the large administrative areas under its control — poor, submissive, and afraid so that the Capitol can continue to take the hard work of their hands to cater to the lavish lifestyles of the big city.

The only recognition the Districts receive is the annual gladiatorial competition where the youngest and best citizens are picked to compete to the death for the coveted prize of a few extra scraps of food for their District.

The main protagonist, Katniss, defies the time-held belief that anyone from the Districts can ever be anything more than the competitor who displays the worst of human nature to survive. By acting with dignity and compassion, Katniss is able to fool the game master and give hope to the people of the Districts, launching a revolution that seeks to displace the Capitol and create a new social order. We can relate this to South Africa. Millions of small-town and village people flock to the cities in search of opportunities and a better life. The countryside seems parochial and distant from the buzz of “civilisation”.

Yet, in South Africa, unless you have resources and education, the city will spit you out and force you to live on its fringes. And so the squatter camps increase, desperation abounds, and what is left is a deep-seated resentment towards those who have it all in the suburbs. The dreams of the big city have failed them.

Unfortunately, this is not unique to South Africa. Angola, for example, has a land mass that is slightly larger than South Africa’s, but a quarter of its 25 million population live in the capital Luanda on a cesspit of uncollected garbage and flooded streets in the rainy season.

Urbanisation is global. In Ireland, as I saw a few months ago, the countryside is dotted with the ruined skeletons of forgotten cathedrals, manors and simple houses, populated by a handful of elderly people.

Of course, our society is not as dystopian as that of the fictional Hunger Games, but it is a reflection of the world we live in. Economic and political power are concentrated in the cities, and the mass production of global corporations make it impossible for small businesses to compete.

As arable land is transformed into commercial farmland, bled of its natural resources or simply abandoned, the citizens of small towns feel they have no other alternative than to join the throngs in the cities fighting for limited resources. What work they can find is soul-less, transforming them into anonymous cogs in a wheel, never seeing what their hands have produced. What quality of life is that?

In fact, Pope Francis says that “work is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment” (Laudate Si’). He criticises the over-emphasis on technology to replace human work, where the “orientation of the economy has favoured a kind of technological progress in which the costs of production are reduced by laying off workers and replacing them with machines”.

In light of this world reality, the Holy Father argues that the antidote to “the progressive erosion of social capital” is to “promote an economy which favours productive diversity and business creativity”.

Let us envision a different world. What if each town had its own ecosystem, so to speak? What if small towns could once again become self-sustaining, providing adequate employment for all its citizens, where each person could feel that they are an integral and necessary member that contributes meaningfully to the successful development of their “common home”?

What if small towns could trade with one another, selling their excess and buying the goods and services they lack from others, bypassing the capital?

If we could make our small towns work again, perhaps the poverty that clings to the ever-growing fringes of the metropolis would dissipate and we could restore dignity to the labour of the countless millions who now work dispassionately (if they are lucky to work at all) simply to survive.

Perhaps this is the practical implementation of Pope Francis’ vision which he calls for an “integral ecology” that seeks to find “comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions within natural systems themselves and with social systems”.

If we were to solve the social crisis, we might find that we could also find solutions to many environmental concerns, which draw on the unity of God’s plan of love for all his creation.

Laudate Si’ sums it up well: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”