http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/eleven-signs-a-city-will-succeed/426885/

Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed

• James Fallows
• March 2016 Issue

This article appears in the March print edition alongside the cover story, “Can America Put Itself Back Together?”—a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane. More dispatches from their ongoing reporting trip can be found here.

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By the time we had been to half a dozen cities, we had developed an informal checklist of the traits that distinguished a place where things seemed to work. These items are obviously different in nature, most of them are subjective, and some of them overlap. But if you tell us how a town measures up based on these standards, we can guess a lot of other things about it. In our experiences, these things were true of the cities, large or small, that were working best: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/eleven-signs-a-city-will-succeed/426885/