Innovations without a city

Civilization has always been practiced in cities.  It's right there in the word itself.  But a city might not be fundamentally necessary for the practice of civilization anymore, what with the web and all.

The model of civilization has been city-centric for few millennia now.   As in, the produce of the countryside is sucked into the city, to fuel the business of civilization, in all its self-involved glory.  The cities have justified this by citing the innovations they produce: political, economic, scientific, technical innovations that raise the whole system up.  

But what if we've taken that pattern to its logistical and logical limit?  What if all of the innovations of the cities have run their course, and no longer produce any marginal returns for the whole?  What if the pattern of city-centrism has done everything it can do and now the places where the essential innovations need to happen are out in the country or even in the wilderness? Or in the urban gardens and other eruptions of the country within the city?  What if the essential innovations that we need to make as a civilization have nothing to do with concentrations of humans, but in a fundamental re-thinking of the relationship between human civilization and nature?

This kind of innovation doesn't even have a name yet.  It would be fundamental, as in changing the foundational pattern of civilization, from a strongly centripetal pattern to something more balanced.  Changing the economic relationship between the city and the country, and between civilization and nature has profound implications for the health of eco-systems, for the psychological and physical health of humans.

And there are a bunch of people already working on it, feeling their way towards innovations they can't even name, and might not work out. Innovations that build on the best that the cities produce but that question the assumption that only cities and its citizens can do civilization and innovation.