There has been a lot of talk over the years about big box retailers' effect on small towns and the businesses that support rural communities. Books like Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect and Michael H. Shuman's The Small-Mart Revolution detail the hollowing-out of small towns and how to avoid it.

There is a movement afoot to counteract this phenomenon and bring back the lifeblood to communities through small business growth, main street and heritage building revitalization and community organization.

This process is underway in Almonte. The beautiful old mill town with 5,000 residents is five minutes from the Ottawa border and has many buildings that date back to the mid-19th century.

Peter Egan, chair of the Mississippi Mills Chamber of Commerce, is also the president and CEO of s4Potential, an Almonte-based company which develops and builds media learning tools for behavioural self-improvement.

"Like many small towns, we had a chance to either excel in the current corporate climate or fade away. Downtown Almonte specifically had shown some signs of the latter over the years as big-box and highway development increased. That phenomenon is not only happening here in Mississippi Mills, but being 15 minutes from Kanata, we had a lot of big box to compete with," he said.

Almonte resident Stephen Brathwaite actually credits the proximity of Kanata and the devastation of the tech bust for kickstarting the revitalization process.

Mr. Brathwaite, a developer with heritage redevelopment group RedAlmonte and an artist, bought and restored Almonte's Victoria Woollen Mill in 1993 with Greg Smith, a senior partner with community development consultancy Consilium. This led to other people initiating other restoration projects. Mr. Brathwaite's studio is located in another revitalized heritage building, Thoburn Mill.

"Almonte has for a long time been a bedroom community for Ottawa and for the tech industry in Kanata. So you have all these well-paid, well educated people living here and driving into Ottawa. When the tech downturn hit, a lot of them who were living here decided to start a business close to home," he said. "As those home businesses started to grow, people got tired of being in their pyjamas all day long, or they just wanted the social interaction of bumping into other business people in the street."

One of the more notable companies operating in the area is Triacta Power Technologies, a developer and manufacturer of smart meters, which enables energy service companies and local distributors to individually bill residential and commercial tenants for electricity consumed. The Ontario Energy Board provided a boost to the industry last year when it called for 800,000 smart meters to be installed in Ontario homes and businesses by December 2007 and in all homes and businesses by 2010.

There are also numerous consulting, law and marketing businesses that are part of the chamber's 120 members. As the number of businesses grew, the community called for more to be done to improve the economic climate of the area. This led the chamber to form the Main Streets Associations of Almonte and Pakenham (MAAP) subcommittee to improve the downtown core.

MAAP was formed with the help of the Main Streets Association, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is already operating in 1,900 communities throughout North America.

"Almonte and Pakenham have been around for 150 years and were always the centre of the agriculture community. But of course that agri-community has changed and it became a bedroom community," said Mr. Egan. "Over the last year and a bit, the chamber of commerce took on the job to look at what was happening to our downtown and what could be done, so we reviewed some of the best practices of what had been done in other communities. We realised it was a western world phenomenon."

Elizabeth Swarbrick, who practices family law in Almonte, stepped up to be the chairperson of MAAP.

"The idea is to build on the partnerships that are already there and just need to be expanded, create a plan or vision for the downtown core and once you have that plan from the community, begin the implementation process," she said.

Meetings were held with all members of the community to get a sense of what residents wanted to see in their town. A main street expert running 11 such projects in southern Ontario came to Almonte to guide organizers in their process.

"We developed four main committees for organization, promotion, design and economic enhancement. The program philosophy is not about new construction. It's about improving what you already have to get to the longer-term goal," Ms. Swarbrick said.

It seems to be working. Almonte is now experiencing the strange phenomenon of having reverse commuting, in which workers come in from the city every day. Recently, 60,000 square feet of commercial space was redeveloped in the downtown core and is now occupied by 110 workers in green power, software, bio-medical devices, publishing, advertising, software and multimedia businesses. Another 40,000 square feet is set for redevelopment within the next six months, including plans for a condominium and seniors residence to increase the number of people living in the downtown.

"Coming with that kind of growth is a much more revitalized main street. It is changing and it is very exciting," said Mr. Egan.