Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh | and a point about world class cities

I did some work in Pittsburgh in 2008 and got a good sense of some of the revitalizing neighborhoods there, in particular Lawrenceville, the Strip District, and East Liberty, and the city dynamics.  A couple years later, I responded to a Richard Florida piece when he was at Carnegie Mellon, calling out what I saw as Pittsburgh's advantages, which he re-tweeted.

-- "Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes," 2010 

Pittsburgh is considered one of the cities that did urban renewal, at least downtown, right (people say it failed in the Hill District, and it did; some developments on Penn Avenue towards East Liberty were torn down later.

Because "de-"vitalization started earlier there with the decline of the steel industry, they've had longer to decline, and also to experiment.  So it's a good city to pay attention to for programming.

For example, one of the first urban Main Street programs was on East Carson Street.  When we lived in DC, we vacationed there a bunch.  Etc. So I've written a bunch of pieces on it, including:

-- "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh" 2014
-- "One hidden element of the revitalization of Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood," 2015
-- "Revisiting Pittsburgh," 2019
-- ""Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?," 2021
-- "Revisiting Pittsburgh and Allegheny County as an opportunity for city-county consolidation: The "RiversCity" proposal," 2023
-- "It's not the age of the housing stock, but the ability of property owners to maintain it: Disinvestment in Pittsburgh," 2022

Pittsburgh has strengths.  I like Pittsburgh a lot, and given the relatively un-innovative nature of DC, I think they do a lot with the resources that are present.  Local foundations really invest in the community and there are strong grassroots networks.  They have world class medical facilities and universities like Carnegie Mellon which help to cluster business development.  I mention within broader entries best practice arts initiative there, including the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Penn Ave. Arts Initiative (one of the best conference tours I've ever been on!).   The Allegheny Regional Asset District is a national best practice for arts and culture funding.

The Post-Gazette seems, at least online, to do a pretty good job covering the city and region.  The city, for its size, has decent transit, including a "free fare" zone Downtown. They've got good visitor centers, a great local history museum, the Carnegie Library system, Schenley Plaza, the rivers and outdoor activities.  Stadiums on the river.  Great historic building stock from the rowhouse era.  Strong historic preservation programs.  Besides "eds and meds" there are advanced business clusters developing, even though it's a much smaller city. Etc.

A desperate willingness to experiment.  I used to say that cities like Pittsburgh have a desperate willingness to experiment because they have no other choice. From afar, it seems like an innovative place, when all is said and done, but without enough resources in an overall conservative state.

So I, not being there all the time, am less negative that the chief editorial writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette but I sure do appreciate his insight, and I figure he's probably right.

"Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh" is a new series for the paper's editorial section.

Which reminds me of a great past feature in the newspaper, on Sundays, on big ideas, called "The Next Page.  One author, Robert Firth, wrote a bunch on mobility and transit.

• The Long Squiggly Line That's Killing Our Transit System (and News of a Brazilian Cure), January 28, 2007 (on Circulator buses)
• The Big Leap in Transit We Didn't Get -- But Could, June 28th, 2009

• A Life in Pittsburgh ... With a Lot Less Car in It: The 12-Step Program, May 2nd, 2010

• "Ditch the Port Authority"), March 12th, 2012

• A bicyclist's lament: imperfect humans drive cars ..., August 12th, 2012  

Big Ideas.  The new series builds from some columns by Brandon McGinley, "How Pittsburgh’s delusions of grandeur hold it back," "McCormick summit shows that leaders matter, and that Pittsburgh needs more of them," and "What Pittsburgh progressives got right — and how Corey O’Connor can accomplish what they couldn’t."  From the last article:

There was a time when Pittsburgh’s political-corporate-philanthropic leadership was united and, if not cutting edge, at least innovative and creative. But that time has passed.

This isn’t meant as a personal criticism, but as an observation about the lifecycle of institutions and leadership cohorts: They necessarily become stale without an infusion of fresh talent and purpose — and those usually come from external challenges and competition. It is neither the 1970s nor the 1990s nor even the 2010s any longer. The strategies that worked then, from the nonprofit sector to the nitty-gritty of economic development, don’t work as well, or at all, today.

The Mayor of Pittsburgh can’t fashion the region’s leadership all by himself, but he can set the tone — one of openness to new ideas and new people, including ideas and people considered beyond the narrow range of respectability defined by the existing establishment. He can also take the lead by empowering people, both in government and through his influence beyond government, who represent a new generation and who have the ambition to challenge incumbent leaders by forging a new establishment, or co-opting the current one.

Interestingly, when I read those columns (I tend to look at the newspaper once/month, and review the backfile of local coverage) and it spurred a still in draft blog entry about visionary campaigning/transformational projects action planning as a positioning device for Mayoral elections.

So I think this is a great idea.

From the article:

Losing ground. One of the most noticeable trends in Pittsburgh in recent years has been a steady retreat from ambition. Nascent plans for maglevs and gondolas from years past are remembered scornfully today as vain and unrealistic — which they may have been! — but they also represented a willingness to swing for the fences, to think about how Pittsburgh could make a splash in the Allegheny rather than hit a few singles here and there.

At the same time, the biggest projects regional leaders have taken on have been increasingly abstract, such as eliminating inequities based on class, race and gender. These are very real problems worthy of significant attention, but they are also largely beyond the scope of a city or county to solve.

Further, we believe that Pittsburgh can make greater progress in mitigating inequities, especially in resource-intensive areas like affordable housing, if the region is more economically dynamic. That won’t just mean more tax dollars to deploy, but also more opportunities for everyday people to find jobs with family-sustaining wages and to start businesses of their own, and more chances for people to begin community projects.

Squandering Potential. This should be Pittsburgh’s time to shine. Yet generating enthusiasm about Pittsburgh’s present and future, and a plan for deploying the region’s assets in a strategic way, has proved challenging. 

We believe this is due in part to confoundingly complex institutional structures (both governmental and nongovernmental), in part to a relative lack of savvy and inspiring leaders who can organize competing interests and in part to a habit, related to the first two, of thinking small rather than thinking big.

Thinking Big. Big Ideas for a Better Pittsburgh will present proposals for improving life in southwestern Pennsylvania that go beyond the usual policy tweaks and small-time building projects. They will generally be speculative, which means we don’t plan to endorse ongoing projects but rather to introduce something new to the conversation, and plausible, which means there’s potentially a real path toward funding and completion. 

Sometimes they will reflect ideas that are in circulation, but are considered to be politically risky, and therefore never progress beyond conversation. But that’s exactly why needed changes never happen.

 =====

Cities must keep striving to improve, but innovation is risky.  At a conference, Martin O'Malley--then mayor of Baltimore and later governor of Maryland--made a joke that cities want to adopt something new, but only after it has been proven elsewhere.  Because there is almost no room for error, and that any mistake or hurdle in a project is immediately excoriated, making them extremely resistant to risk and failure.

World class cities give rise to innovation in other places.  Riffing from a presentation by arts-based revitalization writer Charles Landry, I came up with the belief that "world class" cities don't just take from elsewhere, "they give to other cities," in how once they adopt and/or scale best practices, other cities adopt the ideas for improvement.

The two best cases in the west are Paris and London.  

While not necessarily the first, Paris introduced bike sharing at a massive scale, leading to adoption in hundreds of cities across the globe.  It has probably the most ambitious transit program of any major city outside of Asia--although the cost of transit hasn't led to widespread adoption.  

It is a leader in sustainable mobility programming, to the point where the result of less driving is cleaner air.  They've made the River Seine swimmable.  And these are only some of Paris' accomplishments.

London, like what O'Malley said, isn't necessarily first, but its adoption of a couple motor vehicle control mechanisms put them on view internationally in a manner that the earliest adopters couldn't.  

A key example is the congestion zone, introduced in 2003 (finally adopted by NYC 22 years later), and a newer zone banning higher polluting vehicles, called the Ultra Low Emissions Zone.  It also has big investments in bike sharing and sustainable mobility.  Has a world class transit system, and was one of the earliest adopters of a transit card, called Oyster.  Has the double deck buses.  Wayfinding signage.  The London Underground map and history of marketing. Etc.

The other lesson, and this pertains to Pittsburgh's Big Ideas Initiative, is that you can never stop striving to improve (my point about "continuous process improvement").  Other cities leapfrog, technologies improve superseding older programs, etc.  

I'm not into sports, but read articles as a way to not think about Trump.  Years ago, there was an article about why the Washington Football Team didn't improve the next year over the previous.  They thought they were fine, and didn't need to improve.

You can always improve.

Also see "Michelle Wu stands up for cities, not just for Boston," Boston Globe.