Term coined by
Pepperdine University Davenport Institute for
Public Policy Senior Fellow Dr.
Joel Kotkin, to describe an upscale urban locality characterised by
high-tech industries clustering in
office parks, with the workers living nearby in self-contained villages. The word is derived from
nerd and the suffix for '
country' in
Hindi and
Farsi.
The community element of a Nerdistan encourages synergy between its inhabitants.
They may have been spontaneously created like Palo Alto, or designed though some kind of government or private sector idea to encourage employment and endogenous growth, like Malaysia's Cyberjaya.
Joel Kotkin used the term to describe parts of the United States which had been transformed by the expansion of the IT industry (or, by starry-eyed property developers and hick mayors who think you only need to build garages to get a garage industry):
South Orange County is a classic nerdistan — largely newly built, almost entirely upscale office parks, connected by a network of toll roads and superhighways to planned, often gated communities inhabited almost entirely by college educated professionals and technicians.
"Avoiding Excesses Has Buoyed L.A.'s Tech Sector,"
Los Angeles Business Journal,
August 20 2001.