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Intentional Communities
January 13th, 2009 by Mike Knutson
A friend and fellow blogger recently turned me on to a post at New Geography titled “A Local Graduation: How Small Towns Can Come Back.” Under the banner of “Localism“, the author, Sylvia L. Lovely, argues that towns need to turn their energies inward and make the best of the resources at hand.
I love that the author celebrates this inward focus. Engaging the local citizenry and the developing local assets are critical to future of our rural communities. But Lovely make an additional statement that I believe warrants further discussion:
What you need to build is an intentional city. The intentional city is the middle way — where both the need to attract creative people and the need to sustain traditional economic and social bases co-exist.
Jim Beddow, of the Rural Learning Center, has been calling on communities to “be intentional” for years. This effort derives from the observation that most rural communities in the Upper Midwest were born organically to support farmers in the countryside. Since the time of their founding, however, few communities have been intentional about their futures.
It’s this lack of intentionality that has prevented rural communities in the Upper Midwest from adapting to a new economy- one where farms don’t exist on every section of land.
Lovely apparently believes that being intentional means that communities need to balance the creative economy Richard Florida has identified with the traditional economy and society that currently exists in communities. Not bad advice, but I’ll let each community decide for itself what it wants for its future. What’s more important is that communities are intentional and develop the strategies that will enable them to achieve whatever future they envision.
Tags: creative economy, intentional city, Localism, Richard Florida, Rural Learning Center
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