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Contents
20th Century Context: Cramped Spaces and a Smoky City
21st Century Context: Sustainable Investment
After the Great Depression, Pittsburgh’s status as an industrial powerhouse began to wane, while its image as a polluted, grimy city prevailed (Penna 50). After World War 2, several Pittsburgh elites united to form the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), in order to “ensure the continued viability of their investments in the Pittsburgh region” (Vitale 36). To do this, they planned to “replace Pittsburgh’s reputation as a grimy, chaotic manufacturing district” (Mershon qtd. in Vitale 36). Through disinvesting in Pittsburgh’s industry and investing heavily in sectors such as education, research facilities, cultural districts, and white-collar suburbs, the ACCD transformed Pittsburgh into “a center of finance, corporate administration, medicine, higher education, and research” (Vitale 34). The committee packaged this transformation as “The Pittsburgh Renaissance,” boasting the city’s ability to “remake themselves into dynamic, “livable” centers of the postindustrial economy” (Vitale 34). Pittsburgh’s image as a livable, creative, and postindustrial city dominated the narrative of subsequent “Renaissances,” for the next seventy years, all of which were characterized by the same patterns of uneven disinvestment and investment.
Pittsburgh is just one of many cities in the “global west” which have had to rethink their images in a post-industrial world. Geography and Urban Planning Professor David Wilson explains how in the absence of the contribution of industry and in the face of population loss and real estate disinvestment, such cities are increasingly rebranding themselves from industrial hubs into “creative cities.” Rather than emphasize their contributions to the industrial progress of mankind, postindustrial cities have begun to utilize “a new technical vocabulary” that privileges “smart growth, sustainable cities, green cities, urban innovators, creative re-birth…” (Wilson 107). Therefore, as the image of the city is remade, its characteristic symbolism is also reimagined, with visual symbolism at the forefront of these efforts. Images emblematic of the city are of particular importance to the goal of recreating the perception of the city. As Wilson states:
…the drive to creativize these cities is not merely about fabricating an ideal spatial form, and it may not even be its principal aim. It is also about manufacturing a city of sight and meaning that communicates across the globe an effervescent creativity and internationalism…Creative city making becomes as much a discursive project as a material producing, with its center the drive to cultivate appearances and impressions that can trigger anticipated patterns of human decision- making (where investors will invest, where educational elites will live, where business people will locate new plants and businesses). (124)
In order to create the image of an up and coming, creative, and artistic city therefore, post-industrial cities must focus not only on changes to their economies, but to their visible landscapes as well. Indeed, in the interest of improving its visible landscape, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy released the previously mentioned 20 year “Master Plan” in 2000, hoping to revitalize Pittsburgh’s regional parks. The plan came “at a time of intense interest in Pittsburgh on issues of sustainability, green development and the need to capitalize on the “green assets” of the landscape setting of the City.” (“Executive Summary” 6), and sought to rediscover how Pittsburgh’s parks could benefit the city. Where parks were valuable in the 19th and early 20th centuries primarily as avenues of escape from the city, by the turn of the century, the value of Pittsburgh’s regional parks lay instead in their ability to “expand Pittsburgh’s character as a green city” (“Executive Summary” 7). In 2016, the then still dilapidated Westinghouse Memorial became the newest addition to this aspirational expansion, as the site of a $2.7 million restoration project (Lindstrom).