General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: state by state speak your mind about...illinois [View all]hfojvt
(37,573 posts)A city doesn't become a rural area just because it is surrounded by farmland.
Richland county, Illinois, population 15,532 is a rural county. Sangamon is not, no matter how many farms it contains. It contains the large city of Springfield.
There are plenty of urban areas in the south and rural areas in the north, such as around Galena.
According to the 1990 census, 84.6% of Illini lived in urban areas.
I think they use a bad definition for 'urban' but even with that bad definition, rural states like South Dakota and Montana come in at 50% and 52.5%.
The Chicago metro area is about 8 million people of Illinois total population of 12.9 million. That's 62% of the state population. Of the remaining 38%, 22.5% live in Urban areas and 15.4% in rural. So even the non-Chicago portion of Illinois is 59% urban. Most of the space in Illinois is rural, but most of the population, even in southern Illinois, is urban.