Rochester is one of the most important cities in Minnesota. It’s the home of the Mayo Clinic and, with the intellectual resources that institution attracts, the most important cultural hub of the state outside of the Twin Cities. If I put on my nativist hat, it’s what keeps Southern Minnesota from just being Iowa.

I’m teasing on that, of course, but the central point stands: Rochester is an important city. I’ve had an opportunity to speak there and they have an active Strong Towns conversation happening. There are a lot of good things going on in Rochester.

One of the catalysts is the Destination Medical Center, a massive (billions of dollars) public/private collaboration to transform Rochester, particularly the downtown, to better serve Mayo’s patients and employees while also improving the quality of life for the city’s residents. At its core, it’s not a Strong Towns approach—it is a series of large-scale, transformational investments, what we would call “big bets”—but it’s happening.

The last time I spoke in Rochester, I said that the central challenge they face is finding a way to learn from their mistakes as they go, to work iteratively with a mind towards adaptation, so that they transform Rochester for real and not just add a veneer of prosperity for a generation. Jane Jacobs called the challenge Rochester faces “cataclysmic money” for its tendency to transform large swaths of our cities, without the attention to fine-grained detail necessary to make a place work.

We have called this the difference between an “orderly but dumb” approach and one that is “chaotic but smart.” As a Minnesotan vested in the success of Rochester, I’ve kept an eye out to see whether I could detect some chaos amid the grand visions and bold action, some sense that the process in place would not just be one of institutional order with its predictable results. Thus far, I’m disappointed.