This book is about ups and downs in communities, about ways to manage them, to mitigate them, and first of all to survive them. We speak, with the economists, of boom and bust. It is about cycles of growth and shrink, and how to navigate them. We don’t assume as authors that local communities have complete control over their destiny, that they can completely steer or ignore the cycles, but we do think there are more options than just assuming cycles are part of nature. People can do something: local governments, their administrations, business organizations, citizen activists, advisors, academics. Long term perspectives are utterly useful as a frame of reference to understand and respond to up and down but they have to come out of the community itself.