and postindustrial planning tactics—sometimes ideological, sometimes pragmatic—traveled together through the North Atlantic, their implementation was contingent on the historical and geographical particularities of cities and regions and on the political, institutional, and cultural differences between nations. In the United States, public incentives to the private sector moved beyond direct federal subsidies. Entrepreneurial mayors combined programs like Richard Nixon’s Community Development Block Grants and Jimmy Carter’s Urban Development Action Grants with federal, state, and local tax incentives, bond issues, and loan guarantees.26 In Britain, changes to the national Town and Country Planning Act in 1968 authorized local public authorities to partner directly with private developers on commercial projects. Under the new regulations, Birmingham subsidized a shopping center and hotel by securing a loan for the developer at public sector loan rates, and subsequently secured government grants to expand the project.27 The mayor of Rennes formalized a decade-old ad hoc partnership in 1984 when he formed CODESPAR, a consortium of unions, business representatives, and public officials, to develop a regional strategic plan for the French city. CODESPAR reoriented economic development around advanced technology and health services and eventually built a high-tech office park.28 Similarly, Hamburg’s Chamber of Commerce and major banks established the Hamburg Business Development Corporation in 1985, a semi-public corporation that used public and private funds to channel investment into the city.29
Canadian municipalities were a bit slower to adopt U.S.-style growth partnerships. Historically, Canadian urban policy emphasized collective over individual good, while a stronger culture of privatism in the United States meant that urban policy was more commonly designed to encourage private consumption and corporate gain. This was due in part to different constitutional understandings of property rights: in the United States, property rights lay with the individual, while in Canada, property rights were vested in the Crown. One result was that Canadian cities were comparatively more public than U.S. cities.30 The nature of federalism in the United States and Canada also shaped the range of tactics available to municipal officials who sought to adopt postindustrialism as an urban development model. Among the North Atlantic nations with declining basic industry, only the United States, Canada, and Germany had federal systems, a decentralized form of government in which the national government shared power with regional governments (states in the United States and Germany and provinces in Canada). Under the U.S. and Canadian constitutions, states and provinces held the exclusive power to establish local governments—municipal, county, regional, or otherwise—and local governments could only exercise powers delegated to them by state constitutions or provincial legislation.
In the United States, national and state governments shared a broad range of powers that affected the social, spatial, and economic development of cities. These included the powers to tax, borrow money, build highways, charter banks and corporations, take private property, and spend public money for the general welfare. After World War II, U.S. cities were highly dependent on federal funding for urban and economic development. With the exception of highway construction, U.S. states typically delegated powers that allowed municipal officials to direct urban and economic development, often with significant financial support but little oversight from state agencies. In the 1950s and 1960s, big city mayors formed close relationships with federal officials and agencies such as the Federal Housing Authority; after 1964, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had substantial influence over urban development.
Canadian municipalities shared fewer direct relationships with the federal government than did U.S. cities in the postwar period. The national and provincial governments only shared authority over immigration, agriculture, and pensions. Provinces held sole authority over direct taxation, anything local or private in nature, business, transportation, banking, health, education, and welfare. Typically, provincial governments devised, funded, and administered urban and economic development programs and delegated fire protection, street maintenance, sewage systems, taxation of land and buildings, and land use regulation to municipalities. Canada’s substantially different system of intergovernmental relations meant that its federal government provided far fewer cost-sharing, grants-in-aid, or conditional programs for urban development than did the United States. When Canadian municipalities did receive federal money, it was subject to provincial oversight. As a result, the Canadian federal government had far less influence over urban social and physical development than the U.S. federal government, where relationships between federal agencies and mayors often bypassed state houses altogether. The very different relationships between the U.S. and Canadian federal governments and their cities created very different sets of political possibilities for growth coalitions in Pittsburgh and Hamilton.
The Urban Renewal Era
As policy discourses and tactics crossed national borders and postindustrial solutions to the social and economic problems in declining manufacturing centers became commonsense in North Atlantic nations, national politics and institutions framed the options available to local growth coalitions. So did metropolitan history and geography. The activities of steel mills and steel-related industries substantially shaped Pittsburgh’s and Hamilton’s social and economic geographies, but neither place had ever truly been a single-industry town. Both had more diverse industrial bases than Great Lakes auto centers like Detroit, Flint, or Oshawa, or smaller steel towns like Youngstown and Weirton.
Pittsburgh had the dubious distinction of being Pennsylvania’s only “second-class city.” A gateway to the Midwest, Pittsburgh was located more than 250 miles west of Philadelphia, the state’s largest metropolis and most important commercial and banking center. Pittsburgh functioned as the administrative center of a sprawling industrial agglomeration, as well as an important regional financial center, home to the headquarters of several Fortune 500 corporations. Historically, it was the urban core of an industrial region, surrounded by mill towns, mining villages, scattered rural development, and the administrative centers of rural hinterlands. Mesta Machine in West Homestead, Dravo Shipyards on Neville Island, Union Switch and Signal in Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Air Brake Company in Wilmerding all provided inputs to the steel industry as part of their production processes. Westinghouse’s electrical and, after World War II, nuclear facilities operated in Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs, and coke production took place in Westmoreland and Fayette Counties.
While Pittsburgh was the commercial and financial center of a heavily industrialized region, Hamilton was a heavily industrialized city in the middle of a predominantly agricultural region. The self-proclaimed “Ambitious City,” the heart of Canada’s Golden Horseshoe, was located a mere forty miles south of Toronto, the provincial capital and the commercial, financial, and cultural hub of Anglophone Canada. Most of Hamilton’s manufacturing industries, including Canada’s two largest steel companies, Stelco and Dofasco, were concentrated in four square miles along Hamilton Harbor. Other local manufacturing generally reflected national ownership patterns of U.S. branch plants and wholly owned subsidiaries of U.S. corporations. Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse, long the Hamilton region’s second-largest employer after Stelco, established its first of several plants in Hamilton in 1896. International Harvester, Otis Elevator, Proctor and Gamble, Hoover, Firestone, and the Beech-Nut Packing Company followed suit in the first half of the twentieth century.31
Figure 2. Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Figure 3. Hamilton and the Golden Horseshoe.
Pittsburgh, Hamilton, and their metropolitan regions were, at the end of World War II, at a moment of transition. Suburbanization was underway but had not yet drained urban tax bases.32 In 1950, 31 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s residents still lived in the city; forty years later, only 16 percent did.33 Hamilton, with its less densely populated region, did not experience such a dramatic change: nearly three-quarters of the region’s residents lived in Hamilton in 1951, down
