After years and years of reading Soapbox, the excellent online magazine from Issue Media Group, I was delighted to be invited to write a feature article about how the lessons of The Local Economy Revolution can be applied to Cincinnati.  The timing couldn’t be better, either — Cincinnati is on the verge of hiring a new city manager and a new economic development director.  And at the same time, a string of great urban revitalization successes means that enthusiasm around Cincinnati’s assets and potential has never been higher.

My charge in this essay was to outline a high-level directive for where the city’s economic development should focus, and I built most of the piece around the concept of resilience — and the role that Cincinnati’s dozens of neighborhood “downtowns” and hundreds of small businesses can play in building the city’s ability to bounce back.  It’s a strategy that emphasizes the city’s incredible existing assets assets and the power of massively broad-spread mini-revolutions.  But as I noted at the end, it takes the willpower of a city’s leaders and its residents to allow a sea change like this to happen.

Take a look, and check out other Soapbox and Issue Media work while you’re at it.  They do good stuff.

http://www.soapboxmedia.com/features/011414-why-resilience-should-be-cincinnatis-new-mantra.aspx