Migration, Places, and Nonmetropolitan Development

This report considers nonmetropolitan areas are compacted by changes taking place within the larger system with which they are bound and beyond being passive recipients nonmetropolitan areas can initiate change that moves up rather than down the hierarchy. This review is restricted to the US. Migration patterns vividly demonstrate the interconnectivity between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Until the late 1960s the migration process was largely uni-directional: people moved from rural to metropolitan areas and a major focus of rural development policy was how to keep them down on the farm. One interpretation of the growth of nonmetropolitan areas was that it was spillover from metropolitan areas. Noneconomic factors such including amenities have become recognized as important factors in both migration and the shaping of regional growth and decline. Change in nonmetropolitan patterns needs to be put into a regional context because the migration reversal did not occur everywhere simultaneously. A good case can be made that there will not be a long-run return to a non-metropolitan-to-metropolitan migration pattern. The conventional wisdom is that the future of rural areas depends on their ability to adapt to the changes in their primary function from agricultural services to manufacturing. Nonmetropolitan manufacturing growth ended by 1980. Employment decline had a larger impact on total economic activity in nonmetropolitan areas because the goods-producing sector accounts for a larger proportion of total employment in nonmetropolitan than in metropolitan areas. According to the product-life-cycle model the newer innovative industries locate in metropolitan areas and trickle down to rural areas only after they are producing standardized products that require low-skilled labor but there are no guarantees that the future will be like the past. The decentralization of manufacturing into nonmetropolitan areas has been attributed in part to corporate restructuring. Nonmetropolitan communities increasingly undertake various types of promotional activities to foster economic development. The presence of active industrial development groups in nonmetropolitan areas has not been shown to be an effective means of generating jobs. Most of the research related to nonmetropolitan development emphasizes the economic dimension of life or the role of specific processes such as labor/capital relationships but wages are what people trade off for a life style or stress level.