Image: NSW Government.
After years of seeing the rural health sector getting less funding and support than their metro counterparts, researcher Tim Baker heard about a new concept that came out of the Scandinavian countries, which he thought went a long way to explain why the problem just kept persisting.
“When big cities are seen as the center of everything,” Baker says, “It gives rise to a narcissistic view in city dwellers that their urbanised view of the world is definitive.”
Therein lies the concept of “geographic narcissism”: the notion that metropolitan experience is more valuable than rural experience and that people only practice in rural areas because they are unable to “make it” in the city…