The paper discusses why well educated urban dwellers choose to move to rural areas and start micro businesses, the problems they face, how they try to solve these problems and the implications for rural development. With a dwelling far from the city, the welleducated in-migrants start businesses which seek to combine a less stressful everyday life with a continued career. In the start-up phase, the majority of businesses is in the knowledge sectors, within media and business services, and is oriented towards the metropolitan market. Few businesses seek to private services for the local market. After some years in the countryside, however, the businesses evolve into 'regional lifestyle businesses'. They remain within the urban sector but have now adapted themselves to the regional market in order to minimise time spent on meeting customers in the city. These rural entrepreneurs combine a small number of well-established customers in the city with a broader array of services directed toward the regional market. Although their impact on the local rural area is minimal, they operate over a larger regional area, extending networks and providing 'organisational energy'.

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The risk of flooding in urban areas could be better approached by complementing conventional sewer systems with sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) for storm-water management. This may be the case for developing world cities like Dar es Salaam with incomplete sewer services, as well as cities like Copenhagen with fully developed sewer systems. This paper explores some theories relevant to understanding how the implementation of SUDS may be one option for supporting a transition towards sustainable urban water management (SUWM). Using interviews, document analysis and observation, a comparison of the opportunities and barriers to the implementation of SUDS in Dar es Salaam and Copenhagen is presented. The results indicate that a bottom-up approach in Dar es Salaam is important, with the community level taking the lead, while in Copenhagen the top-down approach currently employed is promising. The ability of the institutional frameworks of both cities to support the implementation of SUDS is also discussed.

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