Even a cursory visit to Europe's older industrial cities - Bilbao, Spain; Torino, Italy; Manchester or Sheffield, England - reveals the market-shaping, investment-generating impact of restoring the core. These cities endured the same economic shocks as American cities. But they responded not by distending their regions with sprawl-inducing subsidies, but by targeting their resources toward the reclamation of industrial land and historic buildings in the center. They prepared their places, in short, for the innovative economy of the future.