Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.
Bio: Paul Goldberger is an American architectural critic and educator, and a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair magazine. From 1997 to 2011 he was the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker where he wrote the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column.