There is a need for a multi tiered economic structure in order to provide tight knit local communities, which are inherently based on individual and personal relationships, which in turn require people to get out and interact with each other. The base of this economic structure is local services which are best provided by small local purveyors. Truly no one can provide a cheaper way to mow your back yard than a motivated teenager with little to no overhead and a great desire to have some money in their pocket to spend and be their own boss, even if it means that they will be making less than minimum wage. Equally true, to continue the same example, lawn care companies are generally best suited to being small locally owned operations even after they realize that paying insurance, taxes, and advertising can actually greatly increase their customer base and revenues. Similarly plumbers, locksmiths, bakeries and many local services thrive without the sapping of resources that can come with the development of a larger corporate structure. Local services with owners that are local citizens provide a quick turnaround to problem resolution with a checks and balances system that is often overlooked but inherently built into every community. When word gets back through a neighbors-friends-mother because an employee did a sloppy job it has a lot more weight and is more likely to be corrected than any amount of corporate infrastructure.
On the other end of the economic structure there are developments like the creation of the smart-phone that I am using to compose this essay that cannot be carried out by a small local business and requires a large amount of capital and people working together in a massive concerted effort to create a product that performs under a wide range of conditions and rarely fails at its purpose and is in my view nothing short of amazing.
Businesses do not need to fit in one extreme or the other of this economic structure, but it seems care needs to be exercised that businesses do not overgrow their bounds of reason.
Our small community art center has big dreams of massive influence on lives and the arts and the conservation of resources across all of the US and world, but that influence is dependent on local community members and local artists being individually involved in the personal lives of the people of their communities, and being able to assess the community needs and direct the resources to best address those needs. I feel that community spaces are crucial to forging relationships and those relationships are what community is.
