Beyond Rust - Allen Dieterich-Ward Politics and Culture in Modern America

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as his staff sought ways to encourage the expansion of university-related employment and cautiously advocated the selective use of eminent domain to assemble land for commercial uses. The subsequent administration of Richard Caliguiri (1977–1988) embraced these priorities and launched a major downtown revitalization program dubbed Renaissance II. Unlike the top-down decision-making of the postwar era, however, fiscal constraints on both the government and corporate sides forced the inclusion of a broader range of voices and required that the city’s primary role in urban development be in arranging incentives, such as tax increment financing, to private investors. The success of Station Square and its symbolic inclusion in Renaissance II also highlighted the increasing role of foundations and community development corporations (CDCs) not only in funding projects but also in conceiving and nurturing new approaches to urban development that relied less on direct government oversight, overt public financing, and the use of eminent domain.19

      Beyond Rust thus places the ideas that scholars associate with the emergence of the “neoliberal city” since the 1970s, such as the privatization and dismantling of public services, the increasing use of tax credits and other novel financing instruments, and the expanded role of public-private partnerships within a longer historical trajectory as well as a broader metropolitan framework.20 Certainly, the decline of federal funding for urban development coupled with the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s forced the region’s political leaders to embrace market-driven solutions that often did little to address the problems of inner city poverty. However, many of the features urbanists ascribe to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s had long been part of the Renaissance model. The Allegheny Conference and local politicians created many of the key institutional players involved in Pittsburgh’s reinvention of the 1980s and 1990s, including the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, decades earlier. Similarly, the successes of newly formed CDCs could be traced to the basic pattern of public-private cooperation established during the redevelopment of the Golden Triangle and modified during the community backlash of the late 1960s. By contrast, the region’s smaller cities, such as Wheeling, West Virginia, where a public referendum abolished the city’s Urban Renewal Authority in 1973, again struggled to assemble the political and economic capital necessary to forge effective public-private partnerships in the even more complicated context of rapid deindustrialization. The Steel Valley thus provides a key opportunity to explore the etiology and divergent outcomes of neoliberal urbanism as it developed in an older industrial region attempting to stimulate new growth.

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      Metropolitan Pittsburgh’s strong sense of regional identity emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the deep interconnections between natural and built environments. The rugged, mountainous topography separated and distinguished the Steel Valley from other areas, while the Ohio River and its tributaries were a constant presence whether commuters were on bridges, miners were loading coal onto barges, residents were dealing with water pollution, or boaters were enjoying a sunny day on the water. On the other hand, there was nothing natural or fundamental linking the communities of the Upper Ohio Valley—the mountains and rivers, after all, served equally well as barriers to regional unification depending on the time, place, and context. Instead, each stage in the area’s social and political evolution required a cultural reimagining of the relationships between and among humans and their surroundings, which, in turn, produced a range of material changes. Over time, the imprint of these land use patterns never fully disappeared, but instead existed as layers in the landscape that constrained and directed the region’s subsequent evolution.21

      Whether on the scale of the nation-state or the metropolitan region, a strong case can be made for adopting an environmental history approach in understanding the formation of “imagined” communities.22 Pittsburgh’s rise to prominence was based on the rationalization of natural resources into a production process that sought to eliminate waste and create efficiencies of scale. Even as residents celebrated the image of the shirtless, blue-collar laborer that defined civic identity, the massive assertion of power over the physical landscape went hand-in-hand with ubiquitous and sometimes violent efforts to control workers. Corporate executives proved adept at securing employee loyalty on the shop floor and in communities, eliminating or coopting political opposition, and weakening industrial unions, especially after the failure of an infamous 1892 strike in the mill town of Homestead.23 On the other hand, air, rivers, mountains, and natural processes presented a host of formidable challenges that raised costs, hindered institution building, and constrained development. The region’s bituminous coal, which formed one of the foundations of its industrial growth, also created notoriously smoky skies and those with means attempted to escape the problem by establishing wealthy enclaves upwind from the factories. By the early twentieth century, Steel Valley communities that had once begun at the water’s edge increasingly turned their backs on rivers that became ever more unappealing, unsanitary, and inaccessible to residents.24

      Pittsburgh’s story allows us to push this exploration of social and environmental history forward in time to examine the complex connections between urban renewal regimes, suburban highway construction, and rural resource extraction in the countryside during the latter half of the twentieth century. As environmental costs mounted and the industrial base failed to keep pace with population growth, the public-private partnership behind the Pittsburgh Renaissance presented the revitalized Golden Triangle as a symbolic and material hub. Gleaming skyscrapers connected to new suburban residential areas by modern highways rose above a new state park that replaced a congested rail yard and tenement houses with a scene of bucolic tranquility. This symbolic erasure of the nineteenth century landscape echoed in the development of both large coal surface mines and public recreational areas on the rural periphery. Strip mines and parks, while seemingly on opposite ends of the environmental spectrum, shared important structural similarities, including the consolidation of enormous tracts of land, the application of massive amounts of outside capital to local communities, and the blurring of lines between nature and artifice. They also provided necessary ingredients for the Renaissance: profit for corporations, employment for workers, and leisure activities seen as necessary for attracting and retaining middle class residents. As with urban renewal, residents of rural “sacrifice zones,” areas that shouldered a disproportionate burden of negative environmental effects so that other communities could prosper, divided in complicated ways among supporters and opponents of local projects that became flashpoints in state and national battles.25

      By the mid-1980s, an increasing number of residents and community leaders saw in the Steel Valley’s industrial heritage and newly cleared riverfront brownfields an organizing framework for revitalizing communities devastated by urban decentralization and the collapse of heavy industries. Unlike the long-standing Renaissance vision of razing the messy urban/industrial landscape in order to build a modernist cityscape, historically themed sites, heritage-based building rehabilitation, and riverfront trails sought to nurture a sense of community identity, revitalize “authentic” neighborhoods, and enhance the area’s reputation among the highly educated professionals that Richard Florida later called the “creative class.” Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy (1994–2006) reimagined most fully the nineteenth-century city as an economic development tool, championing the conversion of abandoned rail lines into recreational trails, pouring municipal resources into the remediation of polluted brownfield sites, and advocating for new office buildings, museums, theaters, and sports stadiums that embraced rather than ignored the rivers. Drawing inspiration from Pittsburgh, local officials and preservationists in Homestead and Wheeling secured designation as National Heritage Areas and achieved some success in remaking their declining downtowns.26

      Metropolitan Pittsburgh’s evolution into a national model for postindustrial transformation thus emerged, in part, out of neighborhood and environmental activism that sought to adapt and reuse rather than erase or ignore the region’s working landscape. As a result, its story provides important lessons on the uses of public history for community revitalization. As Murphy found out during his sometimes heavy-handed attempts to foster economic development, the very neoliberal municipal politics he rode to electoral victory meant that elected officials seeking to reorganize the urban fabric had to contend with a wide variety of preservationist, community development, and environmental organizations with their own visions for the future. During the 1990s, activists,

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