Muncie, Indiana, is an interesting place, for both historical and modern reasons. It became famous in the 1920s as the subject of Middletown, a classic sociological study of a typical American industrial city. Today, it's too often held up as the example of a typical industrial city when the industry goes away.
Now, Muncie is trying to face the future and change its luck. I was there recently to take part in programs centered on the Muncie Action Plan, a long (51 pages) and detailed (47 proposed actions) drawn up over the past two years by many (2,000 people) of Muncie's citizens, all aimed at revitalizing their town.
This is important, for symbolic and other reasons. Muncie really is typical of tattered old Midwestern industrial cities. It has 70,000 people. It's home to a big university, Ball State, that like too many Midwestern colleges and universities, has never played the role in town that it should. It gave birth to some major corporations -- Ball Glass and Borg-Warner, among others. It has lost these corporations, plus the civic leadership they provided, plus the jobs they supported, plus the prosperity they generated and, especially, plus a whole generation of young people who would have worked there and are either unemployed now or long gone to other places with jobs.
In other words, if Muncie can fight back from its post-industrial doldrums, this gives more hope to many other Midwestern cities that are trying to do the same.