Empowering the Vision is Rock Hill, South Carolina's award-winning strategic planning process, which was implemented from 1990 to 2000. Rock Hill is a city of nearly 50,000 people located within the Charlotte, North Carolina (NC) Metropolitan Area. The city's experiences help the reader understand how many southern cities in the United States have tried to adjust to the social, political, and economic changes affecting their region since the 1960s.

The city achieved significant results because of the competent use of Empowering the Vision as a planning tool, the practice of visionary leadership by public officials, and because public officials used community-wide strategic planning to expand the purposes of the city's urban regime and to construct the coalition capable of implementing the plan that transformed Rock Hill from a textile city in decline into a desirable suburb of Charlotte. The lessons learned from Rock Hill's experience will guide other communities by contributing to the development and testing of theories of community building, regime formation, and governance.