Rural responses to lost manufacturing

Last month I talked about how the outsourcing phenomenon was affecting rural communities in particular, and how this would affect the 2004 election. What I did not talk about was how rural communities could respond to the secular decline in manufacturing jobs. Last Sunday the Hartford Courant ran a story about how a rural area near and dear to my heart — the northwest corner of massachusetts — has dealt and is dealing with this phenomenon. The answer appears to be mass infusions of contemprary art:

Cities across the country that lost heavy manufacturing are discovering the arts as a tool for revival. In Connecticut, Hartford and Norwich, among others, have promoted artist housing; New Haven sponsors a major international arts festival. But few cities have made as big or as bold a bet on the arts as North Adams. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, opened four years ago in a complex of two dozen 19th-century factory buildings – not dissimilar to Hartford’s Coltsville – that occupy almost a third of the small city’s downtown. Part of the sell was that it would breathe life into the other two-thirds and drive local economic development. It’s still early. Progress has come in fits and starts and is still fragile. But, yes, the signs are good…. Arts tourism by itself isn’t the ultimate goal. The hope is that it will attract “knowledge industries” to replace some of the jobs that went elsewhere. And they’ve gotten a couple of these. Storey Publishing LLC, a division of Workman Publishing Co., and Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., which specializes in computer-generated animation and visual effects, are both tenants in the MASS MoCA complex…. Artists are small business operators, and Rudd figures each new mill building that’s renovated for artists brings about $1 million into the local economy. “If a few more buildings are done,” he said, “it will make this a very interesting town.

Read the whole thing — and thanks to Official Blogmom Esther Drezner for the link. From this story, it’s possible to carry Virginia Postrel‘s argument in The Substance of Style farther than she may intend for it to travel. It’s already been argued that the cities that have the cultural endowments to attract a “creative class” do the best in terms of economic vitality. It’s logical to believe that this could apply to rural communities as well. In the 21st century, aesthetics will play as crucial a role in determining national, regional or local competitiveness as proximity to raw materials played in the 19th century.