Nearly 93,000 more people live in Maine now than did in 1998, a huge shift from the previous decade, during part of which Maine had a net loss of people, suggesting that Maine is doing at least a few things right. But it is also a phenomenon that should reinforce a couple of ideas to regional planners in this part of the state.

The population increase, for instance, shows that Maine’s tax situation is not fatal: People will still move here even if Maine does have the second-highest tax burden because many other factors, such as quality of life (which includes the services those taxes buy), also count. There are still powerful reasons for reducing the tax burden, but the positive news from an immigration perspective shows this can be done carefully rather than desperately, with the proposed property tax cap.

Many of the new Maine residents, according to Charles S. Colgan of the Muskie School of Public Service, continue to work in New Hampshire or northern Massachusetts. They will bring wealth to the state while using the infrastructure built out of state, but they will amplify the political shift to the state’s south and contribute to changing Maine’s identity from having an isolated, rural economy to one much more like most other places. They will contribute to Maine’s growing urban economy.

The idea that Maine has such a thing as an urban economy seems silly when compared with Boston, New York or Chicago. But Professor Colgan explains in a chapter on the topic in the new book, “Changing Maine 1960-2010,” that this means, first, a change in the kinds of work Mainers do. Jobs making nondurable manufacturing goods – textiles and shoes – have, of course, fallen way off but so have forestry and agriculture jobs, while the finance and services industries have grown significantly. As the composition of Maine’s work force has come to look more like the nation’s, so has its pay: Maine’s rank for wages has been stuck in the mid-30s (currently 34) for a decade, but its pay level compared with the national average has crept up to 92 percent.

Second, the definition of what makes for an urban economy is changing. Rather than a city being a single political jurisdiction, it has become a region, in which an employee may commute from a suburb into a Portland, Lewiston or Bangor, but just as likely would commute into South Portland, Auburn or Orono.

A survey in southern Maine a couple of years ago by Professor Colgan showed that only 10 percent of the respondents lived and worked in the same town – four-fifths commuted to jobs in a nearby town. The evidence of this kind of growth in Maine can be seen through the 2000 Census, where suburbs grew and Maine’s cities didn’t.

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This growth leads, inevitably, to sprawl, but Professor Colgan offers the unique argument that sprawl, at least certain kinds of it, isn’t the plague often described. It is, instead, a way the economy has evolved in the post-industrial age, reflecting not just the suburb-to-city-to-suburb commutes, but a network of regional, multi-centered places to live and work as services have followed homeowners to the suburbs. Maine, with plenty of affordable land just beyond city limits, may be well suited to these new urban areas, and it is not surprising that stretches of southern Maine are leading the way. But if the rest of the state is going to encourage this economic growth, planning for it is essential.

“We can do it ugly,” says Professor Colgan of sprawl, “or we can do it, if not pretty, at least acceptable.”

Currently, planners spend a lot of time thinking about the locations of certain types of development, but not what happens afterward. Inadequate transportation is sometimes the result – some roads clogged with cars, others underutilized. Another is design, how buildings look and function: “Mainers by and large are far more passionate about the natural environment that the built environment,” Mr. Colgan writes. “Nothing will more surely guarantee the failure of Maine’s urban growth than this attitude.”

Yet another consideration is land conservation – where, on a regional scale, to build and where not to build to maintain open space. Maine has grown accustomed to the second half of this question but not in terms of the first. If the jobs and the people are going to move around Maine’s traditional cities into broader regional urban areas, maintaining the qualities of Maine most cherished while also developing an economy here will require residents to rethink assumptions of what at least part of the Maine landscape should look like.

If policy-makers want the new residents who are moving to Maine to spread throughout the state, they should begin thinking about the kinds of development patterns most easily seen around Portland. Professor Colgan has provided a valuable introduction to the topic as well as a warning that unless this development is done right, Maine may end up “doing it ugly.”