Anti-urbanism

[11] England, the first country to industrialize, saw the birth of the first anti-urban newspaper, based on sentiment arising from deplorable sanitary conditions.

[2] In fact, positive and negative visions of the city may coexist; agrarianism may critique the bad conditions while acknowledging the role of progress and innovation.

With an anti-urban ideology, negative ideas about the city are contrasted with positive values of the country such as tradition, community, and stability,[3] which appear in the European context in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along with the Romantic movement advocating a return to nature.

The Democratic-Republican Party of the United States, independent in 1776 constructed their identity on rural, environmental values, with nature and agrarian self-sufficiency seen as beneficial for humanity, and urban life necessarily hierarchical and aristocratic.

The Democratic Party (United States) used such agrarian sentiments to dominate the country's politics in the first half of the 19th century, though they did not prevent the coming of the Industrial Revolution.

In the United States this spread is currently interpreted as a simple diffusion of the American model of urbanism, carrying an anti-urban discourse, adapted politically, contractually, and architecturally to the needs of local tradition.

It recommends harsh methods to decentralize the French state, to reduce the influence of Paris its macrocephalous capital, and to redistribute work and people throughout the territory.

The country and the rural civilization are perceived as holding and conserving "authentic" values—notably, with regard to tradition, family, respect for authority, connection with land, and sense of responsibility.

This anti-urbanist program would compel the city-dwellers to return to a culture of the earth, working alongside peasants for the greatness of the Cambodian nation.

The poor Oliver Twist must survive in a hostile urban world rife with banditry, violence, prostitution, and delinquency.

[27] The works of the French writer Jean Giono contain anti-urban themes, most explicitly in the 1937 book Les Vraies Richesses.