rise to dominance. The region continued for decades as an important supplier of coal, plate glass, metals and other basic goods, but its population maxed out in the early 1960s—well before the cataclysmic collapse of the steel industry beginning in the late 1970s. This early decline in overall population stood in marked contrast to other large urban districts where postwar losses in the central city were more than offset by suburban growth, a fact that made the Steel Valley an important bellwether for other North American industrial regions.10
As a result, the story of Pittsburgh and its hinterland provides a model for a more nuanced analysis of “deindustrialization” and its geographical auxiliary, the Rust Belt. Political and civic leaders increasingly saw gains in the service sector, including education and health care, as a way to offset stagnating employment in the area’s traditional heavy industrial base. By the 1970s, a new set of regional bonds had gradually emerged connecting the Golden Triangle’s skyscrapers and Pittsburgh’s universities to highway-oriented research and industrial parks that looked a lot like the high-tech growth areas associated with Boston’s Route 128 Corridor as well as the so-called “Sun Belt” that stretched from the Research Triangle of North Carolina to the aerospace complexes of Texas to California’s Silicon Valley. However, these processes never fully compensated for the continuing loss of industrial jobs, nor were employment gains distributed equally throughout the region. Consequently, older cities and towns, especially in the river valleys and on the rural periphery, became increasingly isolated from areas of suburban growth. This was especially the case for the Ohio and West Virginia communities on the western edge of the Steel Valley, where a lack of postwar highway construction resulted in the partial severing of transportation links with the metropolitan core.11
Reframing economic development at the scale of the metropolitan region reveals a great deal of agency at the local level that simply cannot be explained away by a simplistic Rust Belt/Sun Belt divide. The obvious economic distress of blue-collar mill towns in the Monongahela, Allegheny, Beaver, and Ohio River Valleys hastened calls in the 1980s for connecting areas of high unemployment to suburban growth centers through worker retraining and the construction of new roads. This suburban strategy, which also included the transformation of abandoned riverfront mill sites into highway-oriented industrial parks, required a shift that was as much about identity as it was about infrastructure. During the 1990s, highway improvements and the completion of a new bridge across the Ohio River, for example, allowed Steubenville to re-imagine itself as a “Burb of the ’Burgh” in much the same way local boosters had branded themselves in the industrial era—a small town with easy access to big city amenities—even as the community remained a junior partner in the process and residents largely abandoned its original downtown. Exploring post-steel development strategies in the nation’s most iconic industrial region thus provides an essential case study for interpreting larger trends whereby struggling communities throughout North America sought places for themselves within a new economic and spatial order.12
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The Pittsburgh Renaissance was the prototype for a public-private partnership transforming a city from a manufacturing to a service base; understanding its successes and failures is essential for explaining the broader narrative of postwar urban renewal as well as the evolving constellation of market-oriented public policies scholars have dubbed “neoliberal urbanism.”13 “The Pittsburgh Story,” as boosters described it, began with an exposition of the Steel Valley’s political incapacity, physical degradation, and economic decline in the 1930s. Following World War II, David Lawrence, the local boss of the Democratic Party, partnered with the Allegheny Conference, backed by financier Richard King Mellon, in implementing an ambitious renewal program. While business leaders touted the Golden Triangle as a privately financed venture, beginning in the mid-1950s the Keynesian expansion of federal funding underwrote both urban revitalization and suburban growth. Eventually opposition grew from neighborhood residents threatened by the advance of the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, especially in the largely African American Hill District, and the political coalition behind the Renaissance unraveled in the late 1960s. As in other cities that copied Pittsburgh’s model, postwar revitalization left an ambiguous legacy of demolished neighborhoods, modernist superblocks incompatible with inner-city densities, and a general distrust of the power of eminent domain wielded by aggressive municipal officials.14
Narratives of urban renewal, like this one, can be oddly placeless—set in a spatial vacuum where the archetypal battles between neighborhood groups and city hall seem disconnected from the fate of the metropolitan areas in which they took place. This scholarly myopia is troubling, because, as in Oakland, St. Louis, Detroit, and other North American cities, the public-private partnership behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance always understood its mission as improving the overall economic competitiveness of the region. Business executives and political leaders at local, state, and federal levels pursued costly smoke and flood control efforts, highway construction, a system of rural parks, and urban renewal projects, including the corporate skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle, within an overall framework of attracting and maintaining population and business investment. However, to an extent unmatched among American cities, efforts to encourage economic transformation took place against a backdrop of extreme political fragmentation, with Allegheny County alone containing nearly 130 independent municipalities. Even when the Renaissance partnership managed to coordinate among the handful of Pennsylvania counties surrounding Pittsburgh, such as in the promotion of highway construction and regional park creation, the political and cultural barriers to including the communities of Ohio and West Virginia in a shared regional vision proved virtually impossible to surmount.15
Turning our attention to Pittsburgh’s regional hinterland underscores the fact that, as in the rest of the nation, the residents of the Steel Valley’s smaller cities were not merely passive victims of Rust Belt deindustrialization. During the early 1950s, organizations modeled on the Renaissance partnership began cropping up throughout the region, including the Wheeling Area Conference on Community Development, which launched local infrastructure development programs with varying degrees of success. However, Pittsburgh had advantages in terms of administrative capacity, political connections to state and federal agencies, and economic power that the smaller cities in the region could not duplicate. Time and again, hinterland communities developed ambitious proposals for their own little Renaissances, only to fail either from lack of political will or from the inability to attract new employers downtown. From Steubenville, Ohio, to Monessen, Pennsylvania, all the Steel Valley’s older cities ended the 1970s with deteriorating downtowns, continued dependence on a handful of large industrial employers, and increasingly elderly and poor populations. In turn, impoverishment in and outmigration from peripheral areas placed structural limitations on the overall economic transformation envisioned by the Allegheny Conference even as residents in neighborhoods slated for clearance questioned the benefits of urban renewal in Pittsburgh itself.16
This expanded view of the Renaissance also provides an avenue for exploring the public policy decisions that laid the foundations for the nation’s “technoburbs” emerging most famously in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128 Corridor, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Initially, Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership conceived of the suburbs in primarily residential terms complementing jobs-oriented urban renewal projects. However, beginning with the 1949 opening of the Bettis Atomic Research Laboratory, run jointly by the federal government and Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and the Pittsburgh International Airport in 1952, the development of a series of corporate research campuses and publicly subsidized industrial parks over the next two decades provided a springboard for the growth of high-tech and service sector employment in the suburbs. Back in the city, the Lawrence administration’s support for urban renewal allowed several major campus expansions at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt); affiliation with the state in 1966 led to a massive expansion of its size and the scope of its research activities. Over the next three decades, the connection between and among the city’s high-tech suburbs, Pitt, and Carnegie Mellon University became an increasingly important component of the public policy response to industrial decline, culminating in the creation of high profile, publicly funded research and development
