Thankyou for such an interesting and insightful comment. Having spent about half of my life living in villages bordering the New Forest and half living in Birmingham, I hope I can appreciate a little of both environments, and the interactions between them .

I really do think that investment is a challenge – it’s proving hard enough to fund the deployment of broadband across the less prosperous areas of cities, let alone across the less densely populated areas of the country.

And I do agree that the interrelationships need to be understood; on the one hand, Jean Clos of UN Habitat has asserted that for a growing world population to be supported sustainably, it needs to be housed and provided with employment primarily in dense urban environments. On the other hand Kate Cooper of New Optimist has collected some interesting evidence to demonstrate that the food to feed such populations will never be grown in such densely populated environments – she has a great TEDx talk: http://www.tedxwarwick.com/2013/speaker.php?id=9

Another challenge in addressing this is that of political boundaries. Investments in infrastructure are often politically coordinated, and between cities and regions are an explosion of boundaries between (in the UK’s case) City, District, Borough, Town and County Councils; Local Enterprise Partnerships; regional transport authorities etc.

I don’t believe there’s a simple way to address that complexity; I think that some parts of the answer will be provided by the University-led research efforts into building an evidence base for the value created by new technology infrastructures in domains such as economic and social development; and some by the collaborations that have formed between institutions that serve the same area driven by trends such as shared services in public sector. The Dublinked information partnership in Ireland is perhaps a good example of both those ideas combined – http://www.dublinked.ie/ .

Certainly your comments have given me food for thought so perhaps it’s a topic I’ll return to soon in another article.

Cheers,

Rick