Learning from one Rust Belt city’s postindustrial transition

While Pittsburgh is sometimes held up as a successful example of urban reinvention in the era after heavy industry (think “eds and meds”), its transition away from steel has in fact been uneven and contested. Christopher P. Briem grew up in the city’s Bloomfield and South Side neighborhoods watching that process. Now a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, he has spent many years working in multiple registers to document economic change—through his academic research, as a public authority consulted nationally when Pittsburgh is in the news, and as a spirited participant in popular debates about what is still called the Steel City.

Beyond Steel collects Briem’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city during and after its steelmaking heyday. Briem tells stories about the boundary between resilience and obstinacy, particularly as manifested in the ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of economic development through smokestack chasing. “Long before the 1980s arrived,” he writes, “future prospects for Greater Pittsburgh had decoupled from the prospects of the American steel industry, a reality that to this day remains difficult to accept for a region so long identified with the seemingly monolithic industry.” At once optimistic and cautious, Beyond Steel should help inform debates about how communities across the Rust Belt navigate issues of dynamism, heritage, and deindustrialization.