The Importance Of Place

With the advent of new information technologies, many experts thought that place would no longer matter. As it turns out, the exact opposite is true -- place matters more than ever. David Bayless asks, what qualities make a particular city or region a good place for starting companies, and can you develop those qualities in your area if it doesn't have them to begin with? "A growth of a given region now depends increasingly on the decisons of specific groups of individual entrepreneurs or workers to locate there," he writes. Journalist Michael Malone anticipated that trend in his 1994 article in Upside magazine titled "Is Silicon Valley Over the Hill?" In it he wrote, "The new cities, like the entrepreneurial companies they hold, will remain vital only as long as they continue to attract that small fraction of the population who are the innovators, the leaders and the trendsetters." Today the people who "matter" can work from any place that has Internet access and regional jet service, and those elites are going to migrate to places that tickel their (varied) fancies."

Thanks to Planner's Network