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"Urban renewal Pennsylvania Pittsburgh."
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Before Renaissance
Before Renaissanceexamines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh.
Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh.
Over the years a mélange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh's Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh's prior planning experience.
John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city's long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth.Before Renaissanceprovides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh's key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.
eBook
Remaking the Rust Belt
Cities in the North Atlantic coal and steel belt embodied industrial power in the early twentieth century, but by the 1970s, their economic and political might had been significantly diminished by newly industrializing regions in the Global South. This was not simply a North American phenomenon-the precipitous decline of mature steel centers like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Hamilton, Ontario, was a bellwether for similar cities around the world.
Contemporary narratives of the decline of basic industry on both sides of the Atlantic make the postindustrial transformation of old manufacturing centers seem inevitable, the product of natural business cycles and neutral market forces. InRemaking the Rust Belt, Tracy Neumann tells a different story, one in which local political and business elites, drawing on a limited set of internationally circulating redevelopment models, pursued postindustrial urban visions. They hired the same consulting firms; shared ideas about urban revitalization on study tours, at conferences, and in the pages of professional journals; and began to plan cities oriented around services rather than manufacturing-all well in advance of the economic malaise of the 1970s.
While postindustrialism remade cities, it came with high costs. In following this strategy, public officials sacrificed the well-being of large portions of their populations.Remaking the Rust Beltrecounts how local leaders throughout the Rust Belt created the jobs, services, leisure activities, and cultural institutions that they believed would attract younger, educated, middle-class professionals. In the process, they abandoned social democratic goals and widened and deepened economic inequality among urban residents.
eBook
Beyond Rust
Beyond Rustchronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas.
Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the \"Pittsburgh Renaissance,\" as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth.
Beyond Rustis among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.
eBook
The Politics of Place
In urban America, large-scale redevelopment is a frequent news item. Many proposals for such redevelopment are challenged-sometimes successfully, and other times to no avail. The Politics of Place considers the reasons for these outcomes by examining five cases of contentious redevelopment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, between 1949 and 2000.
In four of these cases, the challengers to redevelopment failed to create the conditions necessary for strong democratic participation. In the fifth case-the proposed reconstruction of Pittsburgh's downtown retail district (1997-2000)-challengers succeeded, and Crowley describes the crucial role of independent nonprofit organizations in bringing about this result.
At the heart of Crowley's discussion are questions central to any urban redevelopment debate: Who participates in urban redevelopment, what motivates them to do so, and what structures in the political process open or close a democratic dialogue among the stakeholders? Through his astute analysis, Crowley answers these questions and posits a framework through which to view future contention in urban redevelopment.
eBook
Devastation and Renewal
Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources-three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal-the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as \"the Smoky City,\" or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, \"hell with the lid taken off.\"
Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history.
In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment post questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces-economic, political, and cultural-were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such \"progress\"? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future?
In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's \"environmental culture,\" the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future.
A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.
eBook
From mill towns to “burbs of the burgh”: Suburban strategies in the postindustrial metropolis
Governor Robert F. Casey made his first state visit to Homestead, Pennsylvania the day after his inauguration in January 1987 to announce a package of plans for restoring economic vitality to metropolitan Pittsburgh in the wake of steel's collapse. Earlier urban renewal had involved large-scale demolition of older downtowns for conversion to commercial and industrial use, but state and local officials now emphasized a two-pronged redevelopment approach largely modeled on the success of the postwar suburbs. The closure of the Monongahela River (Mon) Valley's mammoth steel mills opened large swaths of land and prompted calls for planned riverfront manufacturing and retail districts similar to those sites sprouting up at suburban interchanges. A second and related effort involved schemes to build new highways tying aging communities in the river valleys to both Pittsburgh and new suburban growth areas, such as the sprawling “edge city” of Monroeville less than 10miles away. Indeed, Casey had a special project in mind for revitalizing the iconic Homestead – construction of the long-delayed Mon/Fayette Expressway that would parallel the river south of Pittsburgh. “This is another big step [to] help bring businesses and jobs into the region,” the governor later declared. “No longer is this valley a forgotten valley” (as cited in Basescu, 1989, p. 1).
Book Chapter
Value -conscious growth: A case study of Pittsburgh's first Community Benefits Agreement
This dissertation is a case study of Pittsburgh’s first Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), surrounding the construction of a new hockey arena in the Hill District neighborhood, which borders the city’s central business district. CBAs are legally-binding agreements through which communities ensure developer reinvestment in return for public support of a project. Using the Hill District case to explore the phenomenon of CBAs, I address a three-fold research inquiry: (1) Why are communities choosing to negotiate with developers and pursue benefits through CBAs?; (2) How are communities engaging in and securing CBAs?; and (3) What implications do the Hill District CBA, in particular, and CBAs, in general, hold for pro-growth dynamics? Data was generated through interviews with 32 stakeholders, as well as a year-long ethnography. Informed by a grounded theory analysis, my research contributes to the small, but growing body of work on CBAs by presenting a descriptive account of the Hill District campaign and the CBA Coalition’s organizational process, structure, and strategies. I consider the perspectives of multiple community- and non-community-based actors, and offer insight into what makes a CBA campaign successful. Additionally, I argue that the Hill District community’s history of failed urban renewal greatly influenced their decision to pursue benefits. To a lesser extent, local impacts and a large public subsidy for the Penguins hockey franchise also served as driving forces. While these motivations are specific to the Hill District case, they also speak to larger phenomena facing many urban communities within the current era of value-free growth. Connecting the literature on CBAs to that of urban political economy, my study further investigates the ways in which these Agreements have impacted pro-growth dynamics. To the larger body of urban political-economic scholarship, then, I offer a practical and theoretical assessment of CBAs. My research extends prior work suggesting that residents’ positions on growth are complex and demonstrates that while CBAs achieve value-conscious growth, they do not fundamentally alter dominant standards of growth or growth machine processes. I conclude by proposing a larger deconstruction of growth that utilizes new standards for city success and raises expectations for private and public sectors.
Dissertation
The post industrial revitalization of Pittsburgh: myths and evidence
ABSTRACT Industrial regions have faced many challenges in restructuring their economies in the 1990s. In this article, I analyze the turns taken in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, region. The area forged a collaborative model of redevelopment through public-private partnerships over the post World War II era. As the region lost its economic base in steel in the 1980s, partnership in Pittsburgh evolved along consensual lines to incorporate new nonprofit and community-based organizations into its planning and revitalization efforts. Its success in revitalizing the region became a model for other regions in transition. In the 1990s, however, the strength of the region's economy and the partnership model has weakened. The article highlights the limits of consensual partnerships when economic regeneration slows.
Journal Article