Growth Shift from Biggest to Mid-Sized and Smaller Cities

Pepperdine University's Joel Kotkin has been espousing a new growth model that will supposedly decentralize growth away the nation's largest cities in the next decade. He says the shift is good for the country and our economy because we have put most of our economic eggs in just a few baskets.

Kotkin says: "There is a dramatic shift afoot in urban fortunes, weakening the clout of the biggest cities while spreading power and influence to scores of smaller centers, nowhere more markedly than here in the United States."

He goes on to say: "blame 9/11, technology or geographic shifts in the national economy -- or a combination of all three -- but the nation's urban hierarchy is flattening out. A host of smaller players are chopping off chunks of what was once the big boys' exclusive domain. What used to take place almost entirely in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco -- whether in high finance, advertising or marketing -- is now happening more and more in unlikely locales such as Omaha, Des Moines, Fargo, N.D., and Columbus, Ohio."

"Technology now gives each town the same global footprint," says Rich Nespola, a native New Yorker and president of TMNG, a communications consulting firm headquartered in suburban Kansas City, Kan. "People can work where they are comfortable and where it's most profitable."

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