If you’re looking for an example of the Strong Towns mindset applied to local economic development, you couldn’t do much better than Economic Gardening. It’s an approach to growing a city’s job base and economic prosperity that doesn’t involve a dollar of subsidy to a large, outside corporation—and produces better results than those subsidy programs, too.
Economic Gardening predates the Strong Towns movement by 20 years, but you can think of it as the economic-development analogue to our Neighborhoods First approach to public infrastructure: a program that seeks to make small, high-returning investments instead of big silver-bullet gambles, by capitalizing on a community’s existing assets and latent potential.
The approach has its origins in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Colorado, in 1988. Martin Marietta, a predecessor of Lockheed Martin, was Littleton’s dominant employer in the 1980s. The company was in the war business—it’s a major military contractor. As the Cold War wound to an end, the U.S. found itself, as a country, divesting from the war business, and in 1988, Martin Marietta laid off thousands of its Colorado employees.
Littleton’s City Council tasked economic developer Chris Gibbons with a challenge: find local businesses that already exist that want to grow. Figure out what these startups’ needs are and how we can help them. Provide them with technical support, access to databases and analytical tools that can help them find customers, resources to help them manage the challenges of rapid growth. We’re going to grow our own jobs locally, instead of trying to import them from outside.
Gibbons’s efforts were phenomenally successful, and sparked a whole alternative movement in economic development: Economic Gardening. Numerous cities and states now have Economic Gardening programs, and Gibbons and the Edward Lowe Foundation continue to develop and promote the concept through the National Center for Economic Gardening.
In 2013, we had Chris Gibbons on the Strong Towns Podcast as a guest to explain what economic gardening is, what kinds of companies it can benefit, and the many successes the approach has enjoyed. It’s one of our most popular podcast episodes of all time, and so we’re featuring it as the final entry in our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series.
Yes, we said “final.” Next week—Monday, April 22nd—Charles Marohn will be back from hiatus with a brand new episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. And we’ll keep rolling out new episodes on Mondays after that, so keep us in your iTunes feed or wherever you get your podcasts, and keep doing what you can to build strong towns.
Another Tragedy at Springfield
The Hidden Values Behind Our Unsafe Streets
Chuck Marohn Answers Your Questions
Rick Harnish: Stronger Transit for Stronger Cities
Bad Benches (and Other Park Problems)
Fighting an Urban Highway Expansion in Shreveport
Johnny Sanphillippo: The Trajectory of Suburbia
Pete Davis: The Case for Commitment in an Age of “Infinite Browsing”
Here's How Cities Undermine Their Own Competitiveness
Expertise Is Not Absolute
Jason Slaughter: The Goal Isn't to Build a Cycling City
Listen to the Briefing About the Strong Towns Lawsuit
Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure in Federal District Court
Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander: Architecture and the Unconscious Mind
Alex Alsup: Keeping People in Their Homes in Detroit
Dr. Samuel Hughes: A Proposal for Strong Suburbs
Michael Odiari: Putting a Check on Deadly Traffic Stops
Strongest Town Webcast: Lockport, IL vs. Oxford, MS (Audio Version)
Eric Jacobsen: How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier
Beth Osborne: America's Roads are "Dangerous by Design"
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