On a recent evening, Dan Rose, the 32-year-old co-owner of the newly opened Flying Squirrel restaurant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, sat at the packed bar, sketching ideas for his next project, with architect Thomas Palmer, a graduate of Auburn University and its Rural Studio program. Rose is quintessential new-Chattanooga, a walking symbol of what the city aspires to be: after graduating from Skidmore College in upstate New York, he came south to wait tables and climb some of the best vertical rock faces in the country, many within biking distance of downtown. Eight years later, he's still here, caught in the city's rising entrepreneurial tide.
Among once-struggling rust-belt cities now on the upswing, Chattanooga is breaking away from the pack. Increasingly identified with places that combine high-tech and big nature to attract people and jobs—such as Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon—it also flaunts the singularly alluring feather in its cap: some of the fastest Internet speeds in the western hemisphere. In 2010, the city-owned power utility, EPB, completed a fiber-optic network that allows it to offer up to 1 gigabit-per-second bandwidth to every home and business in the city. Chattanooga became “Gig City” and launched recruitment programs to lure businesses, from startups to multinationals. The network is emblematic of the city's many efforts to transform itself from having an all-but-deserted core to becoming an amenity-rich magnet for a young, enterprising population.
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