The plan sounds simple, but Mayor Jay Williams says it's actually pretty radical. "I know for mayors, there are these magical round numbers," he says, "100,000 sounds great and somehow puts you in a different category, but why not be a city of 80 or 85,000 that offers a quality of life that allows you to compete?"
Outsourcing has brought greater efficiency to many companies by allowing them to concentrate on core capabilities. Similarly, there is mass migration underway among large corporations toward service-oriented architecture, a concept that deconstructs monolithic enterprise applications into smaller, stand-alone chunks of functionality. These chunks can be easily shared and reused across the enterprise to create "mash-up" applications.
The common theme here is the recognition that going smaller made more sense -- and ultimately more money -- in a networked, globalized marketplace. Mayor Williams' plans, as reported in Saito's article, reflect an understanding of the kind of evolution that large entities must undergo in order to survive the economic realities of a world that bears little resemblance to world that existed when the Rust Belt thrived
In a globalized, information-driven economy, where geographic location is irrelevant, quality of life is the only issue that really matters. When information workers can do their jobs anywhere, the decision about where to live will be based entirely on the livability of cities and individual communities. In that decision, size is little more than an aesthetic consideration.
Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on Brewed Fresh Daily for the pointer to the NewsVOA.com article.
