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If you\u2019re looking for an example of the Strong Towns mindset applied to local economic development, you couldn\u2019t do much better than Economic Gardening. It\u2019s an approach to growing a city\u2019s job base and economic prosperity that doesn\u2019t involve a dollar of subsidy to a large, outside corporation\u2014and produces better results than those subsidy programs, too.\nEconomic 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\u2019s existing assets and latent potential.\nThe approach has its origins in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Colorado, in 1988. Martin Marietta, a predecessor of Lockheed Martin, was Littleton\u2019s dominant employer in the 1980s. The company was in the war business\u2014it\u2019s 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.\nLittleton\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019re going to grow our own jobs locally, instead of trying to import them from outside.\nGibbons\u2019s 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.\nIn 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\u2019s one of our most popular podcast episodes of all time, and so we\u2019re featuring it as the final entry in our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series.\nYes, we said \u201cfinal.\u201d Next week\u2014Monday, April 22nd\u2014Charles Marohn will be back from hiatus with a brand new episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. And we\u2019ll 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.