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Urbanophile and People Attraction
July 9th, 2010 by Mike Knutson
Attracting and retaining people is a hot topic in the community and economic development fields today. I first started thinking about it years ago after reading a study titled “Natural Amenities Drive Rural Population Change” by David McGranahan (1999). That interest was kicked up a notch when Richard Florida released The Rise of the Creative Class, identifying a clear connection between the ability of a community to attract knowledge workers and economic growth.
Although I have a love-hate relationship with the ideas put forward by Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class and in subsequent work, I do wholeheartedly embrace its basic tenant that the economies of our communities today are being driven by talented, creative people. In his light, communities would do well to make themselves places where talented people want to live.
Recognizing that talent attraction matters to economic growth is pretty easy and benign. But a closer look reveals more complexity. First, most of the creative class theories are dedicated to urban areas. Do the principles of talent, technology, and tolerance serve as important attractor roles in rural areas like they do in urban areas? Second, people attraction strategies consume financial resources that could come at the expense of traditional economic activities like business recruitment. Doesn’t it make more sense to invest in creating jobs than community amenities?
Those and others are pretty big questions that I hope to spend more time addressing in the near future. Today, I want to share a post that helped clarify some matters related to the jobs vs. amenities debate.
Introducing the Urbanophile
If you are interested in community development, rural or urban, you need to check out Aaron M. Renn and his Urbanophile blog. Although his outlook for rural communities is not as rosy as I would like, he offers incredible insights into what makes cities tick. Elements of this are very relevant to rural communities, even when it’s stuff we don’t want to hear.
Recently I found one of his posts titled “Does Anyone Really Believe Human Capital Is Important” to be very helpful because it clarified some ideas about people attraction strategies. I think they are worth sharing.
Does Marketing Matter?
The first issue Renn tackles is the notion that marketing your community for people attraction is a waste of money because “what really attracts people is a good economy, quality public services, and efficient government.”
In laying out a defense for marketing, Renn offers two comparisons. First, he describes the value of marketing for businesses selling to customers. He writes:
In real life, as we know, corporations spend gigantic sums on sales and marketing. Clearly they wouldn’t do this if it didn’t work. That’s not to say that every dollar spent on these activities is effective…. But it is also critical to build awareness of your product in the marketplace, to effectively communicate its brand promise and value proposition, and to induce someone to make a buying decision.” (source: Aaron M. Renn, “Does Anyone Really Believe Human Capital Is Important”, Urbanophile, June 13, 2010)
Second, he argues that if communities are willing to market for business attraction, why wouldn’t they market for people attraction?
I agree. Especially about the importance of brand awareness. In fact, I’d wager that brand awareness is a bigger issue for rural communities than urban.
That said, I hope communities don’t look at this as a carte blanche endorsement to rush out and spend large sums of money on advertising. I think there are a lot of steps to complete before a community is ready to advertise. And there’s a lot more to marketing than advertising. (If I had limited resources, I’d invest a lot more in building relationships.)
Do jobs follow people or people follow jobs?
The second and more important topic that Renn addresses is the “chicken or egg” issue of whether jobs follow people (as the creative class theory advocates) or the vice-versa. This is an issue that has constantly tripped me up. Although I accept the premise that talented individual are both more likely to choose location over job and create new job growth, I’ve never been able to say definitively that one is more important than the other.
The real value in the argument Renn presents is that he calls on communities to think more deeply about “specific niches or segments of population” with their recruiting efforts. In this regard, people attraction efforts are no different than any other marketing exercise.
Renn goes on to say that communities should match labor and employment needs as they determine specific population niches to recruit and the civic investments they make.
This is all good advice, and it should cause those of us in rural communities to think more deeply about how we build communities that are attractive to talented people. It also suggests we have a great deal more to learn about the people we hope to recruit.
We can start this learning process by going back and looking at the research by McGranahan and others about the role natural amenities in rural population movements. We should also use the Appreciative Inquiry method to understand what has attracted new residents to our communities in the past.
There’s bound to be a lot of differences in what communities learn from this type of exercise. After all, “if you’ve been one rural community, you’ve only been in one rural community.“ But it’s an important step if we hope to be effective at recruiting new residents.
If your community has already started a process like this, I hope you’ll share it with us.
Photo credit: Derek Purdy – Flickr
Tags: Aaron M. Renn, creative economy, human capital, people attraction, Richard Florida
Posted in Economic Development, Rural | Comments (
2 )
July 12th, 2010 at 11:06 am
Great Article!!
July 12th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Thanks Dr. Rhodes. I’m hoping that it’s the start of a deeper conversation about talent attraction in rural places, whether that’s South Dakota or New Mexico. I hope you’ll help us connect with any communities engaged in this type of work down in NM.