Sagebrush: A Rural Smart Community
Year: 2019
Scope: Research paper; Illustrated “day-in-the-life” presentation; Adaptation of presentation into digital storytelling format
The following article is an adaptation of a presentation I gave at the University of Calgary in 2019, while completing my Master of Architecture degree. It explores the possibilities for emerging smart technologies to address some of the most pressing challenges facing rural Canada.
Discussions about intelligent communities and smart technologies often focus on cities, which is understandable. In a rapidly urbanizing world, most of us live in cities. And, as centres of culture, creativity, dense social networks, economic activity, and human-made environments, cities seem like the most fitting setting for innovative digital technologies. However, we shouldn’t overlook rural communities, the needs, desires, and capabilities of the people who live there, and the potential for them to become intelligent communities.
In fact, there are compelling reasons to believe that rural communities are especially fitting places to apply smart strategies and technologies. In an urban setting, a smart technology might have a positive effect on a large number of people, but that effect may be diluted or appear as only an incremental improvement for individuals: helping people find parking more quickly or receiving deliveries a day or two earlier than usual, for example. Technology solves minor inconveniences, improves efficiency by a few percentage points, or eliminates annoyances. Contrast this with rural applications, where fewer people may be affected, but the benefits are much more concentrated, dramatic, and impactful on individuals’ lives.
To illustrate this impact more vividly, I’ve invented a fictional community—the town of Sagebrush, Alberta—and a fictional family—the Sages—to illustrate these possibilities.
Sagebrush and its surrounding rural area have a population of roughly 2,500 people and it’s about 250 kilometres away from the nearest large city: Calgary.
Before it took steps toward becoming a smart community Sagebrush experienced many of the challenges common to rural communities in Canada outlined below:
1. A lack of digital connectivity
In the part of Alberta that Sagebrush is located in, even 5 megabits per second download and 1 megabit per second upload coverage is spotty. Compare that to Calgary where a baseline of 50 down and 10 up is the norm and you can see that the urban-rural digital divide is very real. Part of the problem is that, when the population density is low, there’s little financial incentive for internet service providers to invest in the infrastructure that would bring broadband to these areas.
“99% of Canadians in large urban areas have access to speeds of 50 megabits per second. In rural areas, only 29% of Canadians have access to these speeds.”
2. Difficulty accessing health care
Many factors contribute to this, including the difficulties rural communities face recruiting doctors, an ageing population with reduced mobility, and the fact that most specialists, surgical centres and medical labs are located in cities. It is simply harder to stay healthy in a rural community.
“People in rural areas have a higher burden of illness, reduced life expectancy, and are often older, poorer, and sicker than urban populations.”
3. No public transportation
Typical of most small towns in Alberta, Sagebrush does not have a public transportation system. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities are especially limited by this. Even moving a few miles between town and a nearby farm is virtually impossible without a driver’s license and car, let alone travelling hundreds of miles to a city.
“The assumption that social, economic and health needs can be met solely by private cars and volunteer programs is becoming increasingly untenable.”
4. Unequal access to education
While the public education system ensures that all students graduate with more or less the same core subject knowledge, the full range of elective options and opportunities for enriched learning experiences are much more abundant in urban and suburban schools, compared to rural ones. Additionally, because enrolment is lower, teachers often end up taking on multiple subjects outside of their areas of expertise.
“In the smallest schools, the curriculum may be the bare minimum required for students to graduate, with few if any specialized courses in the arts, foreign languages, or skilled trades.”
5. Fewer, less diverse employment opportunities
As students graduate and contemplate their careers options, they may find it difficult to imagine a future in their hometown. Job opportunities in rural areas like Sagebrush are typically not diverse nor in high supply. Sagebrush’s economy is based almost entirely on agriculture and it is difficult for people with different educations and backgrounds to find work there.
“When young people finish training at Canada’s colleges and universities, they are less likely to seek employment opportunities in rural communities.”
6. Businesses face disadvantages
E-commerce is both a threat and an opportunity for rural businesses. While it can pull local clients away, it also has a high potential to connect rural businesses to new customers, suppliers, and employees. However, it’s very difficult to operate a competitive online business without high-speed internet.
“In 2018 there were 19.8 million eCommerce users in Canada and there is expected to be an additional 5.21 million users shopping online by 2021.”
7. Loneliness and isolation
This is a rapidly growing concern, especially among Sagebrush’s elderly population. While this is a common trend across both rural and urban settings, there are some complicating factors unique to rural communities, such as physical remoteness and a lack of transportation, that need to be specifically addressed.
“There is evidence that isolation increases susceptibility to illness and depression, and may in fact lead to a shorter lifespan. Even when health is not adversely affected, quality of life is lowered in older adults who are isolated.”
Many of these challenges are interconnected. For example, seniors feel isolated because they lack a transit system that allows them to visit friends and family. Or employers aren’t creating new jobs because they’re struggling to keep their businesses competitive.
But the lack of digital connectivity is especially linked to all of the other challenges. So, for Sagebrush to become a smart community, broadband access is the natural starting point.
To bring broadband internet to their town and surrounding areas, the people of Sagebrush have formed a rural internet co-op, effectively becoming their own internet service providers. Through the federal government’s Universal Broadband Fund, the organization accesses affordable high-speed internet via a low-earth orbit satellite network. The co-op then takes care of the ground-level infrastructure necessary to connect businesses, institutions, and residences in town and the outlying countryside.
This broadband network is the fundamental structure that all of the other technologies and services can build off of. With that major challenge addressed, we can zoom in to a more human scale to examine other elements of this smart community.
Meet the Sage family.
Savita, Samson, Sunhil, and Selena live on an acreage 8 kilometres outside of town. It used to be an active grain farm before Samson’s dad retired. They now lease out the land to other farmers in the area but have kept some of the equipment for Savita’s work. That’s because Savita is a computer engineer who works in farm automation. She takes on projects as an independent consultant and is also a board member of the Sagebrush Regional Internet Co-op. Her husband, Samson, is a medical lab technologist at the Sagebrush Health Centre and his role has recently expanded to include coordinating the Centre’s telehealth program. Sunhil or “Sunny” is a grade 11 student at the Sagebrush K-12 school. He has a popular YouTube channel and wants to pursue a career in filmmaking after he graduates. His younger sister, Selena, also attends the Sagebrush K-12 school and is in grade seven. She plays several school sports and is an aspiring entrepreneur. Suzanna Sage is the matriarch of the family. She is a retired biology teacher and has lived in a senior housing complex in town since her husband passed away five years ago.
Let’s follow the family through a typical day, paying attention to the ways that access to broadband internet, coupled with smart technologies and systems, impacts their lives.
In the morning, Selena is at school. In her digital literacy course, she works with her partner, Francisca, who attends Sagebrush’s sister-school in Labrea, Brazil. They’re collaborating on a project comparing the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest and the Alberta badlands and can communicate by a video call system with AI-powered real-time speech translation.
Down the hall, Sunny is taking an elective class in animation and motion graphics that he hopes will help him punch up his YouTube videos. He’s the only student in his school taking the class, but every morning he joins a virtual classroom along with other rural students in Alberta and an instructor based in Red Deer. When he has trouble with some of the keyframing in his project, he’s able to let his instructor remotely control his laptop to demonstrate the solution.
Meanwhile, back on the acreage, Savita is busy at work on her latest project - an autonomous tractor and variable rate air seeder. She’s not happy with the row shut-off kit that’s currently installed on the seeder, so she orders a new one through the local ag part dealer’s website.
Back in town, Samson spends most of his morning at the teleheath centre. Sagebrush doesn’t have a hospital and there’s only one full-time family physician in town. However, the health centre acquired funding to set up two new teleheath exam rooms. This allows Sagebrush residents to speak to specialists without having to leave town. Samson helps get patients set up in these rooms, makes sure the communication technology is working, and follows up on any tests or lab work that the consulting doctors order. The program has been fairly successful and the health centre’s administration is considering hiring a full-time telehealth coordinator.
Also that morning, Suzanna is volunteering at a middle school in the neighbouring town of Cactus Bluff—but she also hasn’t left her home. She’s serving as a judge at the regional science fair but finds it hard to be on her feet for hours at a time. Instead, she uses a telepresence system to remotely visit the school, move from project to project, listen to student presentations, ask questions, and confer with other judges.
That afternoon, working in her home office, Savita writes up a job posting. She’s been experiencing more demand for her consulting services lately but is worried she’s spreading herself too thin. She’s looking for a junior computer engineer to assist her and hopes to recruit someone straight out of university.
At school, Selena joins her teacher and classmates in the school’s VR suite for a field trip to the Amazon rainforest. Next week they’re planning to visit the Large Hadron Collider.
When school is out, Sunny heads to his part-time job at the Sagebrush IT Ruralsourcing Centre. He spends most of his time testing code for a Toronto-based app developer. It’s the kind of work the developers might have outsourced overseas in the past, but keeping the work in Canada gives them better PR and the lower cost of living in rural areas makes the labour reasonably affordable.
After she has finished with the science fair, Suzanna, who has lived with Type 1 diabetes her whole life, checks her blood glucose stats. She wears a self-adjusting insulin system to keep her glucose levels within optimal range. She can access the data on her tablet and has it set up to automatically forward reports to her endocrinologist.
While she has her tablet out, she books transportation for a few upcoming trips. Sagebrush recently partnered with an autonomous electric vehicle company that wants to demonstrate their product in a rural setting before deploying them in denser population centres. The company supplied a small fleet of vehicles for free, the Town houses and charges them, and residents can book the vehicles for on-demand service. Students and seniors receive free ride credits every month so Suzanna books a long-range pod for her yearly endocrinologist appointment in Calgary and a short-range pod to go visit her family that evening.
As Samson is leaving work, he stops at the health centre’s drone landing pad to send off a package of sensitive medical samples that need to be processed at a lab in Calgary.
He also stops at Sagebrush Grocers on the way home. It’s a small store that doesn’t have the wide variety of foods of an urban supermarket, but Samson keeps up with their e-flyers to know what specialty items will be in stock from week-to-week and plans family meals around these novelties.
That evening, Selena stays late after school for volleyball practice and, when she’s done, walks to her grandma’s building. They hop into the pod vehicle Suzanna had booked earlier and ride out to the Sage homestead.
The family share a meal and enjoy some time visiting without screens or digital devices.
In the evening, Savita attends a board meeting of the Sagebrush Regional Internet Co-op. Tonight they’re voting on several resolutions, including a motion to expand their coverage by building a new tower.
Meanwhile, Sunny heads to the Sagebrush dark sky park to “hang out” with “a friend”. Sagebrush recently qualified as a designated Dark Sky Community. This involved replacing existing street lights and yard lights in the area with shielded auto-dimming LED lights. The project is meant to increase astro-tourism, so they also made upgrades to their regional campsite, including a public park and a free public wifi network, so stargazers can use smart telescopes, share their images in real-time, and use digital guides or augmented reality apps for an enhanced experience.
Back at home Samson, Selena, and Suzanna work together on their pet project: Sage Soaps. They collect wild sage and other native plants that grow on their property, and incorporate them into soap, using techniques Suzanna learned from her homesteader mother. They have an e-commerce platform up and running and this evening they’re fine-tuning their search engine optimization to bring more traffic to their site.
That’s the end of a day in Sagebrush.
Through this illustration, I hope I’ve shown that many of the challenges that rural communities like Sagebrush face—the things that make life there different from life in a city—don’t have to be solved by making those communities more like cities.
In the process of becoming a smart community, Sagebrush has arguably captured the best of both worlds, retaining the aspects of rural life that many people appreciate: close-knit social structures, a sense of belonging, open spaces and a connection to nature. At the same time, the community has been able to overcome their physical remoteness and forge new digital connections - to other communities, other people, services, products, skills, and ideas that can enrich life even further.
It is not necessarily a blueprint that every small community can or should try to replicate. Each rural community is unique and this shouldn’t change as each one implements smart technologies and systems. In fact, focusing on and designing strategies around the specific characteristics that make a rural community distinct from its neighbours is part of what distinguishes an “intelligent” rural community from one that is merely “smart.”
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