"We try to do home-style welcoming," said David Cohen, the mayor of Berkeley Heights, a rustic community in the contours of the Watchung Mountains that also has attracted Microsoft and Novell.
Milan, now a quiet, rustic community, is the birthplace of the inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847); the redbrick house on Edison Drive where he spent the first seven years of his life is preserved as a museum.
Near Manitou Springs, a rustic community of about 5,000 people in the foothills around Colorado Springs, the Waldo Canyon Fire, which began on Saturday, has forced thousands to flee their homes, tearing through about 3,500 acres by Monday morning, fire officials said.
Part of the reason seems to have been the seductive effect of a resonance that exists between (a) Heidegger's understanding of traditional German rural life as realizing values and meanings that may counteract the insidious effects of contemporary technology, and (b) the Nazi image of rustic German communities, rooted in German soil, providing a bulwark against foreign contamination.
But Ms. Caldwell said she is beginning to see a split in the rustic-retreat community -- between those like the Kellys, who are determined to stay true to their home's heritage, and those who feel there's nothing wrong with not completely leaving the 21st century behind.
In 1876, when she decides to abandon her acting career in Europe and start a utopian community in America -- a community devoted to the purifying simplicities of a communal, rustic life -- her husband, Bogdan, her suitor, Ryszard, and a group of friends obediently pack up and follow her across the Atlantic.
It was likely for that reason that Wang Qishan, who became the city's mayor after Meng Xuenong and another top official were fired a week ago for covering up the SARS epidemic, gave the city's major construction companies five days and five nights to erect a new medical complex in the Xiaotangshan resort community, a rustic summer retreat for top government officials about an hour north of here.
In the 1930s, it was fairly common for there to be a lack of public services and for houses to be built with rustic materials, both in rural communities and in cities.
Standing in the small kitchen of her rustic house in this remote community of Mazahua Indians, Celia Isidoro is singing the praises of her new, efficient wood-burning stove.
Vacationers and residents alike have long been drawn to this hamlet, which retains the rustic atmosphere of the old summer communities that before air-conditioning dotted the landscape.
