Post-Industrial Pittsburgh
Since the 1980s and the collapse of steel, the story of post-industrial Pittsburgh has gained national attention. Often this transition has been held up as yet another successful version of “Renaissance” for a city that saw substantial elite-driven renewal actions over the second half of the twentieth century.[8] This popular narrative overlooks inequities in housing markets, access to employment, and health outcomes that still exist in Pittsburgh. Instead, it chooses to focus on the industry-turned-tech narrative that prioritizes the actions of universities, not-for-profit health care systems, and private-sector entrepreneurs. Fortunately, urban historians (who are often skeptical of glowing positive narratives) have introduced some necessary complexity. In fact, Roy Lubove started to tell this story even as Pittsburgh’s collapse was unfolding around him in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh Volume Two, published in 1996.[9] More recently, Tracy Neumann’s Remaking the Rust Belt, Allen Dieterich-Ward’s Beyond Rust, and Aaron Cowan’s A Nice Place to Visit, offer readers comparative and regional accounts of Pittsburgh’s postwar transformation.[10]
After World War II, a series of biomedical successes, including the Salk polio vaccine and pioneering work in liver transplantation by Dr. Thomas Starzl, made Pittsburgh a destination for patients, physicians, and scientists—which is a story that Andrew Simpson tells in his 2019 book, The Medical Metropolis.[11] By 2008 academic medicine had become so central to modern Pittsburgh that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, after relocating its headquarters to the U.S. Steel Tower, placed its logo atop what is the city’s tallest building.
But not all Pittsburghers have shared equally in a medical economy, as Gabriel Winant demonstrates in his 2021 book The Next Shift. The inequity in wages and health outcomes that has marked the care economy raises important questions about what this means for the future of Pittsburgh and other cities that have increasingly come to rely on a medical service sector for economic survival.[12] In addition to a growing health care sector, corporate and academic science has historically (and in the present) also been seen by regional elites as another engine of economic transition. This was fueled by changes in patent law, growing federal support for science in area universities, Cold War defense spending, and legacy corporations like Gulf Oil and Westinghouse.