I was fortunate to spend much of the week in Denver, working on a story (more on that in a few days.)

But I also got to spend some time exploring the Mile High City, and talking with people about how it’s grown. For someone who writes about economic development and urban planning, Denver’s a pretty fascinating city right now. And it offers some interesting contrasts with - and possibilities for - St. Louis.

The two regions have a fair bit in common.

They’re roughly the same size - the St. Louis metro area has about 2.8 million people, the Denver MSA clocks in at 2.7 (though neighboring Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and Boulder give it another million or so in the general vicinity). Both have a wide sphere of influence and large hinterlands (I was told that when the Rockies started playing, they had season ticket holders from 11 states. Sounds like Cardinals-style reach.) Both are regional centers for financial services and health care and have large aerospace industries. Both are distribution hubs and grew up as gateway cities for westward expansion.

But in recent years, when it comes to economic growth and vitality, Denver has jumped ahead of St. Louis in a number of ways. And ways that can’t be tied just to the city’s 300 days of sunshine a year, or those grand mountains that beckon from the west. Though that certainly doesn’t hurt.

Over the last decade, the Denver area’s population has grown roughly 2 percent a year, and its unemployment rate has remained below the national average. Median household income in 2008 was $60,000 (St. Louis’ was about $53,000). It’s a national leader in telecom and IT. And it is aggressively developing its “green” economy (just last week it won the first U.S. plant of a German solar converter manufacturer; 300 jobs, likely more to come). That green focus trickles down to regular local businesses, too. The city’s Office of Economic Development recently launched a program to help companies reduce their energy use.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s a sense of confidence there. Nearly everyone I talked with in the development arena seemed to think this recession is just a bump for Denver, that things are slow now, but will be back soon. There’s no “where do we go from here?” existential crisis. Denver seems know where it’s going.

I got a chance to sit down with Tom Clark, president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., their equivalent to our RCGA (in fact, RCGA boss Richard Fleming used to head the Denver EDC). He laid out to me his theory on why.

“In the ’90s, we stopped being an inward-looking city,” he said. “We started to look outward at what the rest of the world is doing, and asking ourselves how do we become more competitive?”

That effort was helped along by the fact that - as several people put it - “Denver’s a place people just move to.” Less than 40 percent of Denverites are natives, and I met people who came from Chicago, New York and Miami and said they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. The business community also prospered, Clark said, by “making the tent of leadership bigger.” They actively sought out opinions from newcomers, women, minorities, people from all over the city and region.

“The debate became much more informed,” Clark said. “It wasn’t just six 55-year-old white men deciding how the town was going to go.”

Then, they bet big on infrastructure.

In the last 15 years, Denver has built a world-class airport (the fifth-busiest in North America) and is using the 4,700-acre old one as a canvas for the biggest urban redevelopment project in the country. They’ve erected three new stadiums on the edges of their downtown and a huge performing arts center just south of it. And they’ve attracted a flock of national retailers to downtown’s core. While most pedestrian malls nationwide struggle, Denver’s 16th Street Mall is vibrant, helped along by free buses that flow along it constantly, hauling some 50,000 passengers a day.

Perhaps most impressively, Denver is right now building 122 miles of light rail, stretching out in all directions from downtown. It’s the biggest transit project underway in the country, funded largely by a 0.4 percent sales tax that voters passed in 2004. The $6.9 billion project is supposed to be done, pretty much all at once, in 2015, though cost overruns have some people worried. In the meantime, they’re working on transit-oriented development plans around each and every station.

All these sort of things build on each other, Clark said, and help knit the region together. The rail system will touch eight counties when it’s done. They’ve also built confidence, he said, a sense that Denver can do big things. And that makes it easier to do the next big thing.

“We want to be a world city,” Clark said. “That’s our dream.”

Certainly, Denver has its problems.

Locals say the high price of housing in central Denver is pushing middle-class families further and further out. And, indeed, the sprawl goes on forever in every direction. Traffic is epic. Air pollution is still a challenge, though the city’s infamous “brown cloud” seems to have dissipated. Water supply seems a constant source of concern. And the news this week was full of stories about state and city budget cuts and layoffs.

But most of the people I talked with seem to think those problems are surmountable, that Denver will bounce back from this Great Recession just fine. And maybe it’s just all the sunshine and those mountains, but walking around Denver’shopping downtown or driving through its pleasant residential neighborhoods, you get the sense that it will. Confidence is a squishy thing, but it can go a long way.

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