Viva la Micropolitan Revolucion!

Two of my favorite commentators, Rod Dreher at the Crunchy Conservative and much-cited urbanist Joel Kotkin have connected this week via their respective blogs. The subject: Kotkin's recent article in the latest American Interest magazine, called "Little Start-Up on the Prairie."
Kotkin says what many of us already know about small-but-rapidly-growing cities (50,000 - 500,000) in the Great Plains and Inter-Mountain West:

...we have seen the emergence of a certain subset of smaller cities and towns, including in the Great Plains and the inter-Mountain West, that are absorbing much of the expansion. These represent Heartland “growth nodes”, places that have enjoyed rapid growth even while more remote communities continue to shrink. Some of these rural communities are high amenity areas—for example, the Rapid City/Black Hills region of South Dakota, Wenatchee, Washington, Bozeman, Montana, and St. George, Utah—that have grown largely due to their peculiar appeal to migrants from urban areas. Many of these communities are evolving well beyond tourism and developing more sophisticated, technology-based economies.

and

"In many other areas, smaller firms, often individuals working from home, are clustering in pockets of what researcher Amy Zuckerman has called “hidden tech.” These dispersed networks of knowledge workers, many of them refugees from large coastal cities, are particularly evident in places like Bellingham, Washington, the Rapid City area of South Dakota and the Pioneer Valley region of western Massachussetts.But perhaps no city epitomizes the dynamic Brain Belt more than Fargo."

and

Another type of Heartland growth could be described as re-emerging rural hubs. These are usually small and midsized cities that grew up during the period of agricultural expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then began to decline or plateau as early as the 1920s. Prominent examples include Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines and Boise. These communities are exploiting their lower costs, good public schools, universities and better quality of life for middle-class families to lure high-end professional service firms, information companies and diversified, often innovative small manufacturers.

Here are Dreher's comments on Kotkin's piece:

Micropolitans of the Heartland