None

This book addresses the economic history and future of small cities and towns across the country, as they have and will continue to see dramatic shifts in the roles they play in the extant larger economies. The book addresses the difficult questions asked by these communities as they face an uncertain future. Can the small cities and towns of this country survive and, if so, what economic roles can they play? Must they return to the days of being essentially self-sufficient? Or, is it possible that they will become epicenters of progress in the United States? -- Preface Since the early 1980s, I have had the extraordinary privilege of serving as the president and CEO of one of the nation's most progressive and Profilific economic development organizations: the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority in northern Virginia. That experience further enabled me to serve as a consultant to a number of communities of various descriptions across the United States and around the world. Over time, a number of adjunct faculty assignments in various universities caused me to consider those experiences and the lessons they taught me in an organized way. Curiously, those attempts to organize my conclusions so they could be communicated well only led to further questions. It also led, to an extent, to a somewhat growing inability to produce conclusive statements about what cities and regions had learned in regard to growing local economies and bringing communities back from often serious and even devastating economic decline, sometimes over the course of many years, even decades. I began a concerted effort to reach valid conclusions that, at least in a very general sense, could be extracted from previous experiences of community leaders and then be superimposed on similar future situations. Certainly, there are some givens that can enable quicker or enhanced success by others who might learn what to try and not to try; what has worked or not worked. I began to think in terms of a three-part series of published research that would first examine the lessons learned by communities in economic recovery mode, which would then be followed by research that would extract the lessons of the first publication and apply them to specific settings. The locations to be used as case studies would be large US cities and their suburban regions and--