Agropolitan Approaches to Regional Economic Development
If you take an agricultural area and group it in with a metropolitan area and deal with the region as a whole, endeavoring to maintain the overall culture of the area you are talking about agropolitan development. It arose in the "3rd World", and spread to the 1st. In the third world it is sometimes used to frame a smaller subset of centers, like towns with surrounding villages, but the concept is the same.There is a strong emphasis on internal development within a region which has a more or less homogeneous culture, and thereby harness the energy of he cultural imperatives extant in that area. Import substitution, local re-investment, capacity building and social networking are all part of the initiative.
The problems that arise, do so because it agropolitan development works. It is like the senior official in the Credit Union System commented one time:" The trouble with Credit Unions is that they work. They raise people up in their economic status, and when they get there, those people demand that the Credit Unions act like banks, or they will pull their money and get better interest rates elsewhere. So, either the movement stays small or the movement changes and no longer serves the interests it initially set out to serve."
This approach is well worth considering for regional development in highly ethnic areas, and may well succeed if it is regarded as a "feeder system" and is conducted by people who wish to continue on in the arrangements, allowing others to move along if they wish to.
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