Written by: Robert Brennan Hart
DRIVE NORTH FROM Winnipeg for eight hours and you’ll reach Garden Hill First Nation, a community of 4,500 people on the shores of Island Lake. Internet access, when available, costs $400 monthly for speeds that urban dwellers would consider unusable. The school has connectivity-sometimes. The nursing station maintains a connection for telehealth-usually. Individual households choose between groceries and gigabytes.
A teenager there with the same intellectual capacity as my son faces a different universe of possibility. Not because of inherent limitation, but because of geographic location. They cannot casually research interests, cannot access educational content that assumes unlimited bandwidth, cannot develop the unconscious digital fluency that comes from thousands of hours of practice. Their economic destiny is being determined by latitude and the corporate calculus that deems their community unworthy of infrastructure investment.
This is the geography of abandonment: where physical distance from urban centers translates into permanent exclusion from digital participation. Where entire regions get written off the economic map not through explicit policy but through infrastructure decisions that treat connectivity as commodity rather than necessity.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF exclusion follows market mathematics. Telecommunications companies map potential infrastructure investment against population density algorithms. Fiber optic cables follow highways between cities, occasionally branching into suburbs where customer concentration justifies expense. Rural communities watch the lines pass by, perpetually “five years away” from meaningful connectivity.
The calculation is purely economic: cost per potential subscriber, projected return on investment, shareholder value optimization. No variable in the equation accounts for the student who cannot complete homework, the entrepreneur who cannot launch a business, the patient who cannot access telehealth services. These human costs don’t appear in quarterly earnings reports.
Indigenous reserves experience this abandonment most acutely. Geographic isolation compounds with chronic underinvestment, creating communities where a single satellite connection might serve hundreds of households. During the pandemic, when education moved online, children in these communities didn’t transition to remote learning-they simply stopped learning. Not because they lacked commitment, but because they lacked infrastructure.
Consider Pauingassi First Nation in Manitoba, accessible only by air or winter road. The entire community shares bandwidth that a single urban household would find constraining. When the nursing station conducts a telehealth session, internet speeds for everyone else slow to unusable. Students attempting online courses must schedule their access around medical emergencies. The geography that isolates them physically becomes the geography that isolates them digitally, economically, educationally.
THE FORGOTTEN GEOGRAPHIES extend beyond remote reserves. Former industrial towns across the prairies watched factories close, then watched infrastructure investment cease. Populations aging and declining don’t trigger algorithms that deploy new connectivity. These communities exist in a kind of suspended animation-physically present but digitally absent from the economy that increasingly determines survival.
In Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, the coal mines closed decades ago. The town persists, its people remain, but infrastructure investment follows economic activity that no longer exists there. High-speed internet remains sporadic, unreliable, and expensive when available. Young people with ambition leave not because they hate their hometown but because they cannot participate in the modern economy from there. The town’s geographic location hasn’t changed, but its economic geography has shifted from peripheral to abandoned.
Even within cities, geography determines digital destiny. Jane and Finch in Toronto, the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, the North End in Winnipeg – these neighborhoods might have theoretical access to connectivity, but poverty concentrates where infrastructure underperforms. Aging buildings with failing wiring, households choosing between internet and food, public spaces where “free WiFi” means fifteen minutes of barely functional connection. A child in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside lives kilometers from tech company headquarters but might as well inhabit a different planet in terms of infrastructure access. Their family cannot afford home internet, their school’s chromebooks stay at school, the library limits computer time to thirty-minute sessions. They exist within the geography of a connected city while experiencing the abandonment of digital exclusion.
THE COMPOUND DISTANCE multiplies every disadvantage. A student in rural Saskatchewan doesn’t just lack home internet-they must travel forty kilometers to reach the library with broadband. That’s fuel costs, vehicle access, time that urban students spend practicing. The geographic distance becomes temporal distance becomes economic distance. Every kilometer from reliable connectivity represents exponentially diminishing opportunity.
During winter months, that forty-kilometer journey becomes impossible some days. Weather that mildly inconveniences urban dwellers completely isolates rural communities. The student falls further behind not through lack of effort but through geographic reality. They cannot practice coding daily when daily access requires an eighty-kilometer round trip. They cannot develop AI fluency when their only interaction with AI tools happens during weekly library visits.
The infrastructure maps tell the story clearly for those willing to look. Overlay broadband availability with economic opportunity, with educational outcomes, with health indicators. The correlation is perfect and damning. Geographic location determines digital access, determines economic participation, determines life trajectory. We’ve created a system where postal codes predict possibility more accurately than potential ever could.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY of abandonment operates through selective visibility. Politicians announce rural broadband initiatives before elections, then quietly defund them afterward. Infrastructure investment gets promised to forgotten geographies, then redirected to areas with more political leverage. Communities learn to stop believing promises about connection coming “next year” after decades of next years that never arrive.
The National Broadband Map in the United States claims coverage in areas where residents cannot get functional service. In Canada, the definition of “served” includes connections so slow they cannot support video calls, much less remote work or education. The official geography of connectivity bears little resemblance to the lived geography of abandonment. We maintain statistical fictions about universal access while entire regions exist outside meaningful participation.
Meanwhile, the economy reorganizes around assumptions of universal connectivity. Job applications happen online. Government services migrate to digital platforms. Banking becomes primarily electronic. Each digitized service becomes another exclusion for those in abandoned geographies. They’re told to participate in systems they cannot meaningfully access, then blamed for their failure to adapt.
THE PARADOX DEEPENS when we recognize that devices without connectivity are like instruments without air-technically functional but practically useless. A laptop in a community without broadband becomes an expensive typewriter. A tablet without reliable internet serves mainly as a mirror. We ship technology to abandoned geographies, then wonder why outcomes don’t improve, refusing to acknowledge that infrastructure requires more than hardware.
Community organizations attempt creative solutions-mesh networks linking households together, portable hotspots circulating like library books, parking lots becoming connectivity hubs where students sit in cars to submit homework. These innovations demonstrate remarkable resilience but cannot substitute for actual infrastructure investment. They’re bandages on systematic abandonment, temporary fixes for permanent exclusion.
MY CHILDREN WILL never experience geographic limitation on their possibilities. Urban dwelling, economically privileged, they inhabit geographies of connection where infrastructure investment concentrates. Their postal code enables rather than constrains. They’ll develop capabilities that appear individual but actually reflect geographic advantage accumulated across childhood.
But drive an hour from our city and you’ll find children with identical potential facing entirely different futures. Their exclusion isn’t a temporary inconvenience that hard work might overcome; it’s structural abandonment encoded in geography. They cannot move to opportunity when they’re twelve years old. They cannot relocate for better infrastructure when their families, communities, entire histories exist in places that algorithms deem unworthy of investment.
The geography of abandonment deepens daily. Every month that passes without meaningful infrastructure investment further entrenches the divide between connected and excluded geographies. Children in abandoned places fall further behind not in potential but in practiced capability. By the time they reach adolescence, the gap between their lived experience and the economy’s expectations becomes unbridgeable through individual effort.
INTERVENTION REQUIRES RECOGNIZING infrastructure as essential regardless of geography. Not as a commodity to be profitably distributed, but as a foundation for participation that every community deserves. The same way we ensure electrical grids reach rural communities despite lower profitability, we must ensure digital infrastructure reaches every geography where people live, work, learn.
The abandoned geographies aren’t empty. They’re full of people whose potential remains locked behind infrastructure barriers they didn’t create and cannot individually overcome. Children whose capabilities we’ll never discover because their postal code precluded possibility. Entrepreneurs whose innovations won’t emerge because their location lacks connectivity. Communities whose contributions remain unrealized because geography became destiny.
We can choose differently. We can recognize that in a digital economy, geographic abandonment constitutes economic violence against entire communities. We can demand infrastructure investment that reaches every geography where children need to learn, where people need to work, where communities need to thrive.
Or we can maintain the comfortable fiction that geography is destiny, that some places naturally deserve abandonment, that children born in the wrong postal codes should accept limitation as birthright.
The abandoned geographies are full of abandoned potential. Every day we maintain this arrangement, we abandon it further.