Before you start thinking that small-town rural Canada is out of the way of the global network economy, you owe it to yourself to read SohoDojo researchers Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky's latest essay on the implications of the rise of the Creative Class in the Network Ecology ...

Contrary to the nay-sayers predicting the death of rural small towns and rural small business, there is an indomitable spirit among rural citizens that will shape a new role in the national economy for rural areas and their extended networks of entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Adapting lessons from Richard Florida's landmark work in micropolitan economics, SohoDojo finds evidence of a new kind of economic metric that isn't detectable through bean-counting benchmarks, but in values more tuned to creative people, clusterd on three core values of Talent, Technology and Tolerance -- their studies show the prosperity path for rural regions is in appealing to these people who care more about where they live than where they work, and how this natural bias to talent-based economies is already attracting creative people out into the micropolitan areas, especial to those areas where broadband, the critical Technology component, is also abundant and affordable.

When the mix of Florida's "Three T's" is right, we find healthy, vibrant local economies. When the mix is out of balance, we find stagnation or deterioration

Jim and Timlynn warn about the dangers of trying to apply urban rules to an entirely different economic ecology in the rural micropolitan regions: Regions like SBP are not just scaled-down versions of Toronto or London, there are very real and fundamental differences as we move from City Life to Country Life. They argue for educating our regional planners to understand and extend Florida's thesis and to bring the insights of Creative Class theory into their paln projections.

[ Source: Nanocorps in Micropolis at NARFI and Sohodojo ]