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      Cities and the Postindustrial Imagination

      In 1968, shortly after Jack Moore became Hamilton, Ontario’s, first economic development commissioner, he took a trip to Pennsylvania. Concerned about industrial decentralization, suburban migration, and central city decline, Hamilton’s municipal officials had replaced the city’s Industrial Development Commission with an Economic Development Commission and initiated a series of urban renewal projects intended to reinvent their drab steel town as a bustling regional service center. Pittsburgh, Hamilton’s steel-producing neighbor to the south, offered them a successful model, and Moore went down to investigate. Hiram Milton, president of Pittsburgh’s Regional Industrial Development Corporation, and John J. Grove, executive director of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, took Moore on a tour of the city’s redevelopment sites. But Moore was more interested in learning the details of how the corporate-led Allegheny Conference had worked with public officials to turn the city’s smoke-filled downtown into a modern commercial center. “My principal reason for visiting Pittsburgh,” he had written to Grove when arranging his trip, “is not just to look at industrial development but to learn a good deal more about how your organization was successful in spearheading the redevelopment of downtown Pittsburgh. I am particularly interested in knowing how you can demand and get active participation from your top business executives.”¹

      For Moore and the city officials he represented, reproducing Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership looked like the best route to making Hamilton something more than a steel town. Public officials in other manufacturing centers had the same idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than seventy national and international delegations of urban policy tourists who hoped to replicate the “Renaissance,” as the city’s urban renewal program was known, arrived in Pittsburgh to see first-hand how Democratic mayors and Republican businessmen had worked together to scrub clean the streets and skies of the dirty, polluted, and flood-prone city. Visitors from Dayton and Detroit wanted to know more about Pittsburgh’s urban renewal program and the public-private partnership behind it; so did officials from Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Germany, and Scotland. Canadian policymakers were especially interested in the Renaissance, sending a stream of urban specialists to Pittsburgh from Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba.² International consulting firms, too, recommended that their clients visit Pittsburgh. In fact, the year before Moore’s trip, Hamilton’s Economic Development Commission had hired Boston-based Arthur D. Little and Company to study Hamilton’s lackluster commercial development. Citing successful downtown renewal efforts in U.S. cities, and especially Pittsburgh, the consultants urged Hamilton’s city officials to diversify the regional economy by working with local businessmen through a civic organization that was separate from but worked closely with local government.³ In response, the Economic Development Commission sent Moore to Pittsburgh.

      When Moore arrived in Pittsburgh, pundits, politicians, and policymakers did not yet describe the city’s physical redevelopment as “post-industrial”—that term would not gain widespread usage until the 1970s, when a wave of plant closings devastated communities in the U.S. manufacturing belt. But what Moore observed on his visit was, indeed, the beginning of postindustrialism: the social and physical redevelopment of manufacturing centers that accompanied economic transitions from heavy industry to finance, services, and research in heavily industrialized North Atlantic cities in the second half of the twentieth century.⁴ Postindustrialism included a pervasive ideology that privileged white-collar jobs and middle-class residents, as well as a set of pragmatic tactics designed to remake urban space, including financial incentives, branding campaigns, and physical redevelopment, typically carried out by public-private partnerships.

      Beginning

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