Joel Kotkin offers some interesting and compelling observations about the digital divide in this country, linking it tightly to the economic divide that exists as well. In his book, The New Geography, he offers the following observations:

“[A]s the economy has shifted from a manufacturing- and resource-based economy to one centered on service and information both society and community have been put under new strains. Once it was much easier for a modestly educated person to get a well-paying, often unionized job with good benefits at a factory….Wealth, or at least access to a decent life, could be found in a host of communities: often even the elites were forced to live in or near places with necessary workers, raw materials, waterways, or highways, even if they were also cold, or simply aesthetically unpleasant. And where the wealthy live, they tend to invest.

“As information and intelligence have become the prime drivers of the economy, many less-favored places have suffered grievously….Such a fate can be found to cut across regional, sectional, and ethnic lines….This disparity has distinct geographic repercussions. Even in the best of times, poverty has persisted, even worsened, in many working class and minority areas….

“Bridging these gaps and creating a more cohesive sense of community between those living in regions largely outside the digital economy and those within could well represent the greatest challenge of the new millennium. Today most business, professional, and political elites see the future of their cities as connected almost exclusively to the growth of a few coveted high-end information industries. Attracting capital, corporations, and talent, from the rest of the country or abroad, often becomes the primary focus of their economic development activities….

“Yet for future communities the most pressing challenge lies in building and cultivating the skills and energies of their own people, both as entrepreneurs and as workers. Successful cities in their prime—like Florence in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam in the sixteenth, London in the nineteenth, and New York for much of the twentieth—have been often driven by grasping ‘new men’ from the countryside, abroad, or even their own slums….Writing about New York in the 1950’s Jane Jacobs observed, ‘A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle class people…greenhorns into competent citizens….Cities don’t lure the middle class, they create it.’”

We were, as one noted economist puts it, the “Silicon Valley of the Nineteenth Century” at a time when London, according to Kotkin, represented an example of a successful city in its prime. I would argue the same could have been said for Cleveland then, though London clearly makes for a more visible and global example.

Both London and Cleveland have fallen from those peaks, though Cleveland has clearly fallen farther. In many respects, Cleveland—including all its surrounding neighbors in Northeast Ohio—bears a greater historical and economic resemblance to places like Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham, cities that have managed to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves.

There is much in particular we can learn from Glasgow, which seems to be about 10-20 years ahead of us on the curve. I don’t mean by that statement that they are better than we are, or even that they got their “act” together faster or better than we have. Time takes its toll and moves at its own pace in different places during different periods. Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow fell as London fell, with the Rise of New York. Cleveland and the rest of Northeast Ohio benefited—and then suffered—from New York’s rise as well.

The similarities in patterns would seem to indicate at least a similarity in possible lessons to be learned along the way. We are in the information age—of that there can be little doubt. But in bringing our region into this new age we must be mindful that along the way we remember both Kotkin’s observations and Jane Jacob’s words: “A metropolitan community, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle class people…greenhorns into competent citizens….Cities don’t lure the middle class, they create it.”