Providence, like the high tech centers of Seattle or San Francisco or Austin, Tex., has a shortage of skilled workers, and has seen a sudden spike in housing prices, said the city's mayor, Vincent A. Cianci Jr. "I've been a mayor in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and it used to be that being a big city mayor meant being a social worker," Mr. Cianci said.
He wants the core of his city to have "some culture," as he calls it, and a monorail, restaurants, apartments, grocery stores, bookstores, boutiques, a stadium, a high tech center, a museum, an art school -- in other words, the vital mix of ingredients that make up a healthy downtown.
It is, but Austin is also home to headquarters and branches of major corporations like Dell, Samsung, Google, Cisco, Apple, Xerox and more, has proven to be a monumental high tech center of the world and reached a GDP of $86 billion in 2010.
"You want the spinoff, new companies starting," said Douglas Henton, president of Collaborative Economics, a consulting firm that helped Austin, Tex., and Raleigh, N.C., develop high-tech centers.
High-tech centers like San Francisco, Boston and Austin, Tex., are also showing some weakness as individuals and corporations throttle back on their computer purchases, he said.
As for Internet access in cities known as high-tech centers, he said, "Mostly everyone who does want it has it".
Most of its population still lives in hundreds of thousands of small villages, while other Indians are developing software in high-tech centers for export to America.
As a result, American technology companies and venture capitalists are rushing to set up or expand their offices in the growing high-tech centers near Helsinki and Stockholm.
The lack of old industry -- iron, coal and steel -- was a kind of hidden benefit, forcing Bavaria to concentrate on what was modern, becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe, or at least one of the new high-tech centers.
Productivity is rising fast in the east, manufacturing industry is booming, pollution is receding rapidly, and several cities, including Dresden, have thriving high-tech centers of e-business on their outskirts.
"There were a number of small cities and towns across the country that were inspired by the technology boom that we had from 1996 through 1999," said Ross C. DeVol, director of regional and demographic studies at the Milken Institute, an economic research group in Santa Monica, Calif., which studied Kingston for a report on emerging high-tech centers.
