This was the "State of Downtown 2015" event that featured several of the figures we've mentioned before or will introduce soon, including Fresno mayor Ashley Swearengin; the president of Fresno State, Joseph Castro; and the CEO of the Downtown Fresno Partnership Aaron Blair. It was held in the downtown's historic, then run-down, now being-renovated Pacific Southwest building and drew a sold-out, standing-room-only crowd of many hundreds.

The event, which the Fresno Bee reported on here (and which is now available on YouTube here) included several formal announcements of developments we'd been hearing about. Including the formation of a new Downtown Fresno Foundation to support civic projects; the inauguration of new downtown programs by Fresno State, in partnership with the Bitwise tech organization we've described before; prize competitions for refurbished stores and restaurants; and some more.

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Why should this matter to anyone outside Fresno? For one thing, the city is large enough, and beset enough, to be a useful case study for coping with most modern urban problems.

Beyond that, the video below, produced for last night's event, very concisely conveys the themes we have found interesting and compelling in learning about the town, which have applications in other parts of the country.

If you watch even 30 seconds into the clip, you will see "WE ARE UNAPOLOGETICALLY FRESNO" followed by "We are changing minds one visitor at the time." "Unapologetically" is of course the key word. It's not one you'd hear in Cambridge or Brooklyn or Santa Monica — but it's one that would be part of internal awareness, even if not actually said, in some other parts of the country and among some unfavored groups. Its use in the video is connected to a lot of what I respect in the rebuild-Fresno campaign.

In everything the city does is a consciousness, like what we've seen and heard in Mississippi, West Virginia, and elsewhere, of laboring under a negative external image—and often a much more destructive negative self-image. The rebuild-Fresno movement has unapologetically recognized of that problem and determined to blast right through it.

The next few installments will give details on the plans and programs some Fresnans (that's the term) have designed to move their city forward. For today, in response to the video and last night's announcements, here are a few samples of the views we heard on the self-image question.

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Ashely Swearengin, mayor:

"As mayor I've run across this self-image question all the time. There are people who know every past failure of Fresno, and they can recite them routinely whenever we discussing something new.

"But the generation now in their 20s and 30s in do not reflect a defeatist attitude, like some of their parents. And the grandparents also don't have a defeatist outlook. They remember the city when it was on the cutting edge [and the younger ones assume they can get there again]." To illustrate the generational split, the mayor mentioned that during a recent debate on Fresno redevelopment plans, a man in his 20s had Tweeted out a proposal for a new drinking game: Every time a middle-aged Fresnan responded to new proposals with a lamentation about crushed dreams in the past, the younger Fresnans would take a drink.