(FORTUNE Magazine) – CHARLOTTE, North Carolina, is now the third most important commercial-banking center in the U.S., surpassed only by New York and San Francisco. Orlando ranks just behind Los Angeles and New York in TV and film production -- and is also a world-class center for electro-optics and laser research. You may be surprised to learn that Provo, Utah, boasts the second-largest concentration of computer software jobs in the U.S. after California's Silicon Valley. In a major shift away from old-line power centers of the Northeast and Midwest, industries that form the backbone of the emerging U.S. economy -- computers, telecommunications, entertainment, medical research, financial services -- are taking firm root in the red clay of the South and along the rocky slopes of the mountainous West. These knowledge-driven businesses are locating throughout the South and West for several reasons -- low costs (for everything from payroll to renting an office and buying a house), the able work force available there, and a pro- business culture. But perhaps the key factor is the easier style of life both regions offer. If you are the type who still thinks a little suffering is good for the soul, you belong to an increasingly small minority. More and more bright, well-educated Americans have had it up to here with bitter-cold winters, high prices, crowded highways, booming crime rates -- the whole set of 1990s nightmares that afflicts the older cities of the Northeast and Midwest, as well as the megalopolis of Southern California. Hordes of the stressed out -- or opportunity seeking -- are voting with their feet, touching off a mass migration to the crystalline new cities of the Southeast and the mountain states of the West. Last year alone about 540,000 people moved to the Southeast and the mountain states from elsewhere in the U.S. Says David Birch, president of the Massachusetts consulting firm Cognetics Inc.: ''The impulse is not difficult to understand. People want to live where the air is clear, where you can ride a bike or play golf all year round.'' The result has been an impressive boom. Seven of the 11 states in the West reported double-digit increases in new-business incorporations last year. The Southern states, arcing from Virginia to Texas, added about 788,500 new jobs, or one of every three in the U.S., during 1993. And many of these new jobs are of the high-pay variety in the computer and financial-services industries. Thanks to fax machines, modems, and other technological wonders, the location of a business enterprise has become far more a matter of choice than necessity. You no longer need to be nestled on the tip of Manhattan to be in touch with world financial markets or planted in the middle of Silicon Valley to be on the razor's edge of the software business. ''We really have reached a point of economic transition,'' says Karen Gerard, a partner in New York corporate-relocation firm Kelly Olsen & Gerard. ''Business activities are gathering force in new places, from a different momentum.'' While most job creation is occurring in cities like Orlando and Charlotte in the South and others in the West, feverish growth is also taking place all over the country in so-called edge cities. Typically, an edge city is an overgrown suburb with a population between 100,000 and 200,000 located near a large metro area. Places such as King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and the Rosslyn-Ballston area of Virginia outside Washington, D.C., are prime examples. These places, with rents lower and ambiance slightly more laid-back than big-city downtowns, have become particularly conducive to entrepreneurial enterprise. A study done for American Demographics magazine earlier this year ranked the population centers with the highest proportion of companies with 50 or fewer employees. The top 20 were all edge cities, with Walnut Creek, California, a San Francisco suburb, leading the list. The study found as well that some of these edge cities have actually outstripped certain major metro centers in the total number of businesses they support. Irvine, California, which borders Los Angeles, and Schaumburg, Illinois, outside Chicago, each have more businesses in total than downtown Seattle. Several edge cities that are home to major research universities have become booming high-tech hubs. Provo, a satellite of Salt Lake City and home to Brigham Young University, is a prototypical example. So are Boulder, Colorado, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, both state university towns that have flourished as computer-software centers. For some stalwarts of the new economy, even edge cities may be too urban. Increasing numbers of big-city dropouts are heading for the deep woods or high plains, armed with computers and fax machines and determined to make a living amid rural splendor. Small-town population had been dwindling for decades, but Kenneth Johnson of Loyola University at Chicago and Calvin Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, both experts on demographics, recently completed a study demonstrating that the trend has suddenly and dramatically reversed. According to their work, the population of nonurban counties in the U.S. actually increased by nearly 880,000 people between April 1990 and July 1992. At least part of that increase represented retirees, but working-age people by the thousands have joined the hunt for a more bucolic life as well. Business-relocation expert Gerard says rural New England is becoming a popular choice for consultants and freelancers who peddle their expertise, via fax and modem, to urban centers like Boston and New York. Suzanne Trazoff, 53, is one such refugee. She quit her post as a public-information specialist with the New York City police department last year and moved up to Round Pond, Maine (pop. 150), to pursue a freelance writing career and stare at the boat basin outside her window. ''I've always dreamed of living on the water,'' says Trazoff, who has managed to get by so far without taking a full-time job. ''I haven't regretted this move for a single instant.'' These trends add up to a seismic shift in the way many of us work and live. The central cities of the Northeast and Midwest have lost 10% of their population since 1970. Overall, 60% of Americans now live in suburbs, up from just 30% or so in the 1950s. The majority of U.S. jobs have relocated outside the central city as well, so that most people have no pressing economic reason to join the downtown hurly-burly. INCREASINGLY, what we have come to view as the traditional urban core is a less vital crossroads for all aspects of American life -- commercial, social, and artistic. There are exceptions to the rule: Opera and ballet tickets are still hard to come by in cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, and Broadway producers can charge $60 or more for a hot show. But ever more Americans spend their free time in look-alike shopping malls and seek their entertainment in front of an electronic hearth at home. Cultural homogenization, an all-encompassing, mid-American sameness, is becoming more pervasive.

What's worse, many of the poor have been left behind as the old cities empty out. According to the 1990 U.S. census, the 31 largest concentrations of poverty can be found in our inner cities. As the middle class takes its tax dollars and flees to the suburbs, more and more downtowns become ghost towns. Inevitably and sadly, fewer of us now experience the excitement and diversity of big-city life, the feeling theologian Harvey Cox describes as ''a glorious liberation, a deliverance from the saddling traditions and burdensome expectations of town life.'' All this is not to say that the final death knell has sounded for the nation's older, more traditional urban centers -- not for all of them at least. Several megacities of the North and Midwest remain powerhouse hubs for the industries crucial to the new economy (see map). New York City will likely remain one of the two or three most important financial centers on the planet. Boston, with its world-class hospitals, and Philadelphia, with its core of pharmaceutical companies, will burn brightly as hot spots for biomedical research. Chicago still has potent assets in telecommunications, electronics, and financial services. Despite the proliferation of computer businesses and related startups all across the Sunbelt, the Silicon Valley area is still far and away the single most important high-tech center in the U.S. But the odds have clearly tilted in favor of the warm-weather South and new West, and a profound shift of economic and political power seems inevitable as the U.S. economy changes fundamentally. Case in point: Charlotte, North Carolina. What once was a sleepy manufacturing town is now a metro area with a population of about 1.2 million; the city has been transformed into a dynamic banking center over the past decade -- an example of the sort of swift, sweeping change now under way. The crucial element in Charlotte's rise has been the city's aggressively pro-business stance. Local government leaders have been ruthless cost watchdogs -- the owner of a $100,000 home in Charlotte currently pays just $1,196 in property taxes -- and they wave the welcome banners hard when an attractive enterprise contemplates moving to town. ''When we get a shot, we just swarm on them,'' cackles city manager Wendell White. The attitude of the business community itself is equally go-getting. Edward Crutchfield, chairman of the frantically growing First Union banking empire, maintains as his business motto: ''If you can't run with the big dogs, then just stay up on the porch.'' First Union and crosstown rival Nationsbank now control around $230 billion in assets, up from little more than $20 billion a decade ago, and both are now among the top ten banks on FORTUNE's Service 500 list. Crutchfield says the long leash granted by state and local regulators is largely responsible for this phenomenal growth. Unlike most other states, North Carolina has always permitted banks to open branches far from their home base, a move that allowed Charlotte's go-go bank managers to gather valuable experience running extended intrastate networks. In 1985 new banking laws opened up 13 Southern states to acquisitions. Charlotte's bankers were well prepared for a takeover binge. Says Crutchfield: ''When the gong rang, we had been through the drill before.'' While First Union and Nationsbank were gobbling up dozens of banks throughout the South, they were also beginning to woo Wall Street talent to handle their mounting assets. Just a few years ago not too many financial wizards were willing to move down to the piney woods, but now the trading floors at both institutions are brimming over with New York transplants. Many of them are rising stars in their 30s who want to raise their families in a safe, low-cost, hassle-free environment. ''Recruiting top people -- I mean the very best young talent -- is no longer a hard sell,'' says First Union chief economist Mark Vitner. NOWHERE have low costs, a crucial force in overall Sunbelt and Mountain State growth, been more important than in Orlando. This central Florida town was a quiet citrus-growing center until it was Disneyfied in the early 1970s. The local tourism industry is now the largest single source of jobs. But motion picture production, laser technology, and other new economy industries, attracted by competitive wage scales (average annual wage for service jobs: a little over $25,000), have been setting up shop helter-skelter. Workers have followed in waves. About one-half the 1.3 million souls in the metro region have been there less than a decade. Since the late 1980s, Orlando has become a kind of bargain-hunter's paradise for film types. Douglas Schwartz, a veteran Hollywood producer now shooting a syndicated TV series called Thunder in Paradise on Disney World premises, estimates that the 22 episodes he has been filming for about $1 million each in Orlando would have cost $1.8 million apiece to do in Los Angeles. Nickelodeon, the wildly popular children's cable channel, operates out of two sound stages at Universal. Producers looking to make commercials and music videos are fighting for space and crews. The local film industry, growing at about a 33% annual clip, pumped nearly $350 million into Orlando's economy last year. Low costs aren't the only lure: Longtime Hollywoodians have been also attracted by eagerly cooperative local officials. As in other fast-growing Sunbelt cities, government is fervently pro-business and will pull out all stops to attract new investment. When it comes to the film business, that means everything from scouting out locations to helping line up financing for new productions. ''We were really knocked out by how helpful everyone was,'' says Schwartz. ''They even gave us a bridge to blow up.'' ANOTHER strong leg to the Orlando economy is provided by a rapidly growing high-tech sector, to which government officials from the state level on down have provided invaluable aid. More than a decade ago civic leaders, along with deans at the nearby University of Central Florida, focused on making the city a world center for electro-optics and laser research. Lenses and other devices resulting from such research are used in advanced weaponry for the military, in medical and scientific instruments, and in an array of industrial equipment. City and university leaders eventually persuaded state officials and local bankers to make seed money available, to found a laser research center in conjunction with UCF, and to assist startups in everything from how to rent space to how to market their products. The result: Hundreds of thriving small companies and more than 11,000 employees are now engaged in the laser business. The key to this bit of high-tech success: ensuring that enough trained workers would be available for rapid growth. Attracting workers from elsewhere has hardly been a problem for tropical Orlando. When financial-services giant Charles Schwab decided to move a 350-person customer-support office to Orlando from New Jersey last year, 90% of the employees jumped at the chance. But scientists and technicians versed in the techniques of high-level optical research are not terribly plentiful, so local government and academic leaders worked together to hire new faculty from afar and beef up the optics departments at local colleges. In just a few years the University of Central Florida has moved to prominence as one of the two or three top schools in the country in this emerging field. Says Dr. M.J. Soileau, director of the university's laser-research center: ''We're now batting about .500 in recruiting the very best graduate students.'' More and more, only those metro areas that can offer employers an educated, knowledgeable work force will prosper. That's just one reason why an oversize college town like Provo (pop. 85,000) has experienced such a growth spurt of late. A peaceful, pleasant place located some 40 miles south of Salt Lake City and nestled in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountain Range, Provo and its surrounding suburbs are regularly cited in surveys as among the best places to live in America. Costs are low, a huge freshwater lake is right outside town, and top ski resorts are less than an hour away. Crime and crowding and air pollution and all the woes most city dwellers face are simply not an issue. But for business, particularly the sort of high-tech business central to the new U.S. economy, the real attraction is the thousands of well-educated, highly motivated workers who spill out of Brigham Young University and local community colleges each year. Bright, entrepreneurial types who land in Provo to attend Brigham Young often don't want to leave after graduation, and more are staying around and starting up companies. Spinoffs from the university's strong engineering and computer sciences departments predominate, with software giants Novell and WordPerfect the biggest and best known of the bunch. Many of the other 230 or so high-tech outfits scattered around the nearby Utah Valley are still small, but some have carved out a specific niche and then grown superfast. For example, Dynix, which produces custom hardware and software for libraries, was started on a shoestring a decade ago by three BYU grads. It's now the world leader in its field, with revenues of well over $100 million a year. With this sort of action welling up all around them, Provo's city fathers can afford to be choosy. They discourage businesses that only offer low-paying jobs or that are likely to be major sources of pollution from coming into town. Officials in some of the other new boom towns are similarly wary of untamed growth. Charlotte's city planners have made use of their state's liberal annexation laws to prevent the pattern, so prevalent in the Northeast and Midwest, of more affluent citizens fleeing to the suburbs and thereby seriously eroding the inner-city tax base. The city has been annexing about five square miles of outlying territory each year. In Orlando, planners have been trying to ensure the viability of the city's urban core by providing loans to rehabilitate inner-city housing and by locating major public buildings -- including a $170 million county courthouse -- right in the middle of downtown. Says Orange County chairman Linda Chapin, who oversees urban planning for the Orlando metro area: ''We are determined to avoid the mistakes so many other cities have made.'' SOUNDS GOOD, but you don't need too much imagination to conjure up a scene of Los Angeles' city fathers mouthing similar sentiments just ten or 20 years ago. There they were, merrily presiding over a powerful economic mix of aerospace, light manufacturing, and financial services, with a healthy dose of Hollywood glamour tossed in. Willing workers were pouring in from all over the country, and the valleys to the west were filling up with new housing. The sun seemed to shine every day, and the surf was up. For many, it still seemed a place of unlimited promise. Los Angeles has become a victim of its own prosperity. So many Americans were lured by the dream of endless summer in L.A. that they turned it into just the sort of place they had hoped to escape, and now paradise appears all but lost. Since 1990 some 340 large employers have fled Southern California's crime, pollution, crowded freeways, and assorted natural disasters. Leaders of the new economic hot spots around the country should enjoy their current good fortune. But they would do well to look hard at L.A. and learn from it: The key to enduring success may well be to preserve carefully what draws people there in the first place.

BOX: INSIGHTS

More Americans than ever are willing to move to find a hassle-free lifestyle.

The majority of U.S. jobs are now located in the suburbs, rendering traditional downtowns increasingly irrelevant.

Leading-edge businesses are flourishing in college towns because of the educated labor force available there.