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Just took a look around Sibley on Street View and, distance from major cities aside, it definitely has a pretty urban form in some places. The commercial strip
by ryukafalz 4y ago
Just took a look around Sibley on Street View and, distance from major cities aside, it definitely has a pretty urban form in some places. The commercial strip on 9th street would look right at home in the inner-ring suburbs near me, and I even spotted a concrete-protected paved bike path on 2nd (honestly impressed, we don't have any of those here).
Certainly it's no city, but it's closer to one than a lot of rural places I've seen.
- zokier 4y agoI'd concur, Sibley has significant grid-street system, one of the hallmarks of urbanity to me.
- tptacek 4y agoBy any conventional American definition, Sibley is rural bumfuck Iowa. All of rural (respectfully) bumfuck America is dotted with little hamlets like Sibley where people actually live, so if you're trying to deny that it's rural, you're really denying that rural America exists at all.
- ryukafalz 4y agoI mean I recognize that definitions are squishy and this thread started with a dispute of the official definitions in the first place. But when I think "rural" I think of the actual countryside (of which there is a lot in the US), not a population center with the density of some cities here in NJ. To pick a random example for contrast, something like Hudson, Iowa looks a lot more like what I think of as rural. Which is also a small place people live, but unlike Sibley it bears little resemblance to an urban core.
- tptacek 4y agoSibley is not a population center with the density of a NY or Philly Metro NJ city.
- ryukafalz 4y agoThe big ones no, but it's not that far off from small ones like Absecon. The first one that came to mind is Egg Harbor City as I have family there, but the numbers on that one are admittedly probably skewed because a sizeable portion of it is undeveloped pinelands.
- tptacek 4y agoAbsecon is a suburb of AC. Sibley is in the literal middle of nowhere. You can walk across Sibley in 20 minutes, and when you hit the end of it, there's nothing but soybeans in any direction. This is not a winnable argument for you. Sibley, IA is not urban America.
- rayiner 4y agoTown news updates my wife has gotten since moving out include a new pig farm, and a Subway sandwich shop opening up.
- wglb 4y agoI find this all pretty amusing. I grew up 6 miles outside of a town of 3000. Nobody there even remotely thought of us being anything other than rural. My off-the-cuff theory is that the folks that came up with this particular classification lived in some seriously large city such as Washington DC or New York. Let's try this classification. If you can walk from one end of the town to the other in less than an hour. Sibley Iowa spans almost two miles. Hudson, Iowa, mentioned by a comment below, is five miles. Folks who spent much of their life back east (as we used to say) often don't have a clear sense of the scale of geography west of the Hudson. For example. If you measure the end-to-end distance of Montana, that distance from Chicago will land you in Washington DC. Even more so--my professor at the university told of a European colleague who had a little extra time while visiting the US and thought they would take a trip down to Florida then out west. They gave up after Florida after gaining a new appreciation of the geography.