.THINK .SPACE SYMPOSIUM | MONEY

.PITTSBURGH, A CITY IN TRANSITION; a review of David Harvey’s “Rebel Cities” and

the civic organizational structure in the city of Pittsburgh

Eleni Katrini | [el.katrini@gmail.com | www.elenikatrini.com]

[abstract]

Money and space are tightly intertwined in a continuous loop of cause and effect.

Urbanization and creation of space serve as medium of absorption of capital surplus

and on the counter flow, urban development create more surplus value while changing

spaces and increasing land value. David Harvey in his book Rebel Cities describes how

the forces of capital accumulation, along with structures of class status and state power,

continuously look for creation of new urban space as a way to absorb the surplus

capital.i That is prominent during times of economic crisis, when urbanization and

construction booms come to place to create a new target of capital absorption,

particularly in places in transition, like Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh went from producing as

much as half of the US needs in steel in 1900s to a declining post-industrial city with

great environmental issues. Over the last decades, the city’s economic base has shifted

to education and health care, with investments from private corporations. At the same

time, Pittsburgh neighborhoods thrive in bottom up initiatives that transform the urban

space in the micro-scale of local communities.

Therefore we need to understand who are the ones in charge of the changes and

development in cities? Who is handling the “urban growth machine”?ii Harvey presents

the alliance of bankers, developers and construction industry to be pulling the strings of

how, when, where, and under which terms urban development happens. Basically, the

“urban growth machine” consists of those who have the money to invest in the “urban

factory”. To comprehend the proportions, in 2007, the poorest bottom 40% of the

American citizens, a little less than half the U.S population, possessed only 0.2% of the

country’s total wealth. On the flip side, the top 20% possessed the 85% of the total

wealth.iii That means that at most 20% of the citizens in US, decide how the urban

spaces and cities are being formed in the country. In other words, those few define the

everyday urban life as we know it today.

So, the question is how do people reclaim their “right to the city”? Lefebvre introduces

the term of the right to the city in 1968, as the citizens’ “demand for a transformed and

renewed access to urban life”.iv Harvey on the other hand describes it as the human

right to transform our cities and ourselves.v So how can this urban regeneration and

transformation happen by the citizens for themselves and not for serving the market?

What are the social structures that need to be formed to promote the citizens’ and

communities’ welfare instead of the financial benefits of the few? This paper will review

the main concepts presented in the book Rebel Cities, and test them within the context

of Pittsburgh. The paper will present the community structures and trends that are

currently transforming Pittsburgh and will indent to identify areas for change.

[the Pittsburgh story; the rise and fall]

Pittsburgh is a city of 305,700 residents, situated on the intersection of Allegheny,

Monongahela and Ohio Rivers in Western Pennsylvania.vi Unavoidably Pittsburgh’s

story has been tightly connected to the history of the construction boom in United

States. The city’s economy was heavily relying on industry and specifically on iron and

steel, which were distributed across the US, and hence made its name as the “Iron City”

or “Steel City”.

Pittsburgh’s industry started with boat building in the 1790-1810 and its economy was

based on commerce, mostly because of its highly strategic location and river access.

From 1814 to 1861, the city’s economy evolved to primarily industrial with iron being the

focus as well as oil refining. This period led to Pittsburgh’s so called “golden age” (1870-

1910). Its unique geography, along with natural resources and a group of young

entrepreneurs transformed Pittsburgh into a centre of great industrial and economical

activity. Pittsburgh was providing all the steel for the nation’s railroads, which within a 40

years’ time they increased eightfold from 30,000 miles to 240,000 miles.vii By 1910,

Pittsburgh was controlling 60% of the nation’s total steel industry. The main city had a

population of a little less than 600,000 and in the greater area of Allegheny County there

were more than 1,000,000 citizens. viii

Even though, the city’s “golden age” is often enough praised by many as a great time

and its fall as a misfortune event of deindustrialization, Pittsburgh’s history itself is

mainly based on the story and activities of private corporations. Pittsburgh’s industrial

and economic peak coincides with the successful businesses of a small group of

people; including Andrew Carnegie, the Mellons, George Westinghouse, Henry C. Frick

and Henry J. Heinz. Their economic activities and investments within the city offered a

great amount of jobs for locals and attracted a great influx of immigrants. The

international character of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods today is mainly an outcome of the

migration of workers from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the African

American North.ix These workers arrived in the city with the hopes of obtaining a job at

the mills. Despite the great economic activity and employment opportunities, life in

Pittsburgh was great only for the ones owning the factories. The working situation at the

mills was inhumane; workers were spending 12 hours per day at the mills and they were

working six to seven days per week only to earn the minimum wage.x

Pittsburgh’s “golden age” led to an unpredictably-great fall after the 1930s, leading to

uprisings by the workers unions and evident environmental degradation. By 1945, the

air in the city was so polluted by the mills that it was dark even in the mornings. The

riverfronts were full of mills and storage warehouses. In 1959, there was a 116-days

strike across the steel industry which opened the opportunity for steel import. Since then

Pittsburgh lost its monopoly in the steel industry and within the next 40 years, 29

companies went bankrupt, the population dropped below 350,000 people and the city

came second in the ranking of US cities with the eldest population. Today 75% of the

corporations that were thriving during Pittsburgh’s “golden age” are gone and they have

expanded their businesses elsewhere, leading to a great loss of jobs in the city. The

only corporations that still have their headquarters in Pittsburgh today are: PNC bank,

US Steel, Allegheny Technologies, H.J. Heinz, PPG and Mine Safety. The city economy

today is based on two main sectors; the educational and the medical. Carnegie Mellon

University and the University of Pittsburgh are a great part of the city’s welfare, along

with UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), which is the greatest academic

medical center in the US with revenues of $7 billion and over 50,000 employees.xi

[creation of urban space and the tragedy of the urban commons]

Pittsburgh’s history reveals the tight relation between urbanization and the forces of

capital. Being based on corporations and foundations’ capital, Pittsburgh’s economy,

and consequently its urban history, could not avoid the fluctuations of the capitalistic

model. Money and space are tightly intertwined in a continuous loop of cause and

effect. Urbanization and creation of space serve as medium of absorption of capital

surplus and on the counter flow, urban development create more surplus value while

changing spaces and increasing land value. David Harvey in his book Rebel Cities

describes how the forces of capital accumulation, along with structures of class status

and state power, continuously look for creation of new urban space and infrastructure

as a way to absorb the surplus capital. xii That is especially prominent during times of

economic crisis, when urbanization and construction booms come to place to create a

new target of capital absorption, as we have seen in the cases of Georges-Eugène

Haussmann in Paris and Robert Moses work in New York.

But who are the ones in charge of the changes and development in cities? Who is

handling the “urban growth machine”?xiii As Pittsburgh’s history reveals, a small group of

corporations and entrepreneurs were at the forefront of building the city. Harvey

presents an alliance bankers, developers and the construction industry to be pulling the

strings of how, when, where, and under which terms urban development happens.

Basically, the “urban growth machine” consists of the ones who have the money to

invest in the “urban factory”. To comprehend the proportions, in 2007, the poorest

bottom 40% of the American citizens, a little less than half the U.S population,

possessed only 0.2% of the total wealth. On the flip side, the wealthier top 1%

possessed 33.8% of the total wealth of the country, while the top 20% possessed the

85% of the total wealth.xiv, xv That means that at most 20% of the citizens in the US,

decide how the urban spaces and cities are being formed in the country. In other words,

those few define the everyday urban life as we know it today.

1 - Wealth inequality in the US (data source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/what-we-know-about-wealth)

So how are our cities created through capital investment? This is where Harvey

introduces the idea of monopoly rents. He revisits the concept of monopoly price by

Marx, where someone would pay an increased value for a product that is special and

one of a kind. But when it comes to urban space there are two kinds of values; the

actual land value of a property, in the case of purchase, and the rent value. The two are

closely related as “the monopoly price creates the rent”xvi. The more unique the identity

is of a place, the greater the “monopoly rent” is. People want to move in or visit places

and neighborhoods with unique identity and character, and they would pay a higher

price to do that. However, Harvey suggests that when referring to urban space and

cities, that unique identity, which boost the monopoly rents is shaped by two things; the

location of the place and the activity of the people in that place, with the latter being

more important than the former. He claims that it is not the land itself that it is rented

and traded anymore but the services, amenities, commodities and activities that happen

in that specific space.xvii And that is utterly true; urbanization is always driven by the

accumulation of a certain human activity in a certain space. Art galleries, innovation

hubs, sports centers, restaurants and coffee places, architectural places of interest; all

these places that attract visitors or residents are created by the human activity. People

come together in a place and they continuously and collectively produce the urban

space and qualities; they produce the “urban commons”.

2 - The tragedy of the urban commons

Nevertheless, as people produce collectively the urban commons, the market intents

to monetize them, in order to build on those competitive advantages that will increase

prices, bring more people and eventually will create significant profit. Harvey highlights

that:

’The problem is that it (the urban common) is just as continuously being enclosed and

appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetized form, even as it is being

continuously produced by collective labor. The primary means by which it is

appropriated in urban context is, of course, through the extraction of land and property

rents.’ xviiixix

Therefore, a place’s unique identity, however big or small it is, becomes a crucial

starting point for development to build upon it. The more unique a place is, the greater

the monopoly rent of the new development, the greater the financial benefits. A market

analysis of a new project research is being realized before the development to foresee

the amount of those financial benefits. It normally includes research on the existing

market as well as understanding the vision of the developer and realizing a feasibility

study for the proposed new uses in an area. Important piece of the puzzle is to

comprehend what is the highest and best use of land, if there is market to support the

project and what will drive demand. Later on, economical analysis and development

strategies come to place. What economic and fiscal benefits are generated overtime?

What is the absorption process of the project and what is an acceptable financial

return?

But what happens after the development is done? The market analysis does not

include what happens in general in the surrounding area of the project. It sticks strictly

within the limits of the specific site. When the market capitalizes on the unique identity

and character of a specific neighborhood, what it is not taken into consideration is how

that neighborhood is affected and entirely changed after the realization of the project.

The “urban commons” that attracted the development in the first place have been totally

transformed by the end of the development. Engels forms somewhat the same in idea in

his book “The Housing Question”:

‘The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in

those areas which are centrally situated, an artificially and colossally increasing value;

the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it,

because they no longer belong to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down

and replaced by others.’ xx

Here is where Harvey stresses the second contradiction of three related to the

monopoly rent which depicts the tragedy of the urban commons. The more economic

development and market try to build on the unique identities of places and make them

marketable, the less unique they become. Furthermore, as a development is put in

place, prices in the area have to go up. That usually pushes the lower-income residents,

or the have-nots as Saul Alinsky, founder of modern community organizing would sayxxi,

to difficult economic situations. Often enough they find it tough to keep up with the

increasing prices and they have to dislocate, which leads to gentrification. But we need

to realize that those who created the “urban commons” and built the unique identity of

that community in the first place, are the ones to get dislocated.

So, the question is how do people reclaim their “right to the city”? Lefebvre introduces

the term of the right to the city in 1968, as the citizens’ “demand for a transformed and

renewed access to urban life”.xxii Harvey on the other hand describes it as:

“It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common

rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the

exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to

make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious

yet most neglected of our human rights.”xxiii

[structures of civic organization and the problem of scale]

So how can this urban regeneration and transformation happen by the citizens for

themselves and not for serving the market? What are the social structures that need to

be formed to promote the citizens’ and communities’ welfare instead of the financial

benefits of a few? In his book Rebel Cities, Harvey presents a critical review of leftish

movements for horizontal and local organizational structures up till now. His main

critique is the problem of scale. Even though horizontal structures can promote the

ideas of individuals in a more participatory way within communities, when thinking in

bigger scales of cities and beyond the structure becomes too complicated to be

addressed just in a horizontal way. Even Elinor Ostrom who advocated for collective

ways of organization and management of the commons, when the examples of greater

communities of people come up, she turns to the theory of “nested structures” of

organization.xxiv,xxv To support his idea, Harvey presents also the idea of “confederalism”

firstly introduced by Murray Bookchin:

‘Murray Bookchin is acutely aware of such dangers-the “agenda of a libertarian

municipalism can easily become vacuous at best or be used for highly parochial ends at

worst;” he writes. His answer is "confederalism”: “While municipal assemblies working

through direct democracy form the policy –making base, the state is replaced” by a

confederal network of municipal assemblies; the corporate economy reduced to a truly

political economy in which municipalities, interacting with each other economically as

well as politically, will resolve their material problems as citizen bodies in open

assemblies." These confederal assemblies will be given over to administration and

governance of policies determined in the municipal assemblies, and the delegates will

be recallable and answerable at all times to the will of the municipal assemblies.’ xxvi, xxvii

That means that when going up in scales, it is inevitable that some kind of

hierarchical structure is needed in combination with horizontal nested structures, such

as municipalities that include directly the participation of the citizens. A confederation

that combines and organizes the self autonomous municipalities is needed. In that case

however, in order to avoid inequality in a larger scale, as a threat posed by Iris

Youngxxviii, Harvey replies that a higher authority is needed that will support ‘cross-

municipality transfers that would equalize at least opportunities and perhaps outcomes

as well.’ xxix

[collective ways of organization; the case of Pittsburgh today]

Looking at Pittsburgh today, we could imagine a confederation of semi-autonomous

municipalities in a set of nested structures. Pittsburgh consists of 90 neighborhoods with

unique identities at different levels of development and organization. Local action and

citizens’ organization and collaboration are significantly prominent. Their main goal is to

revitalize their communities. Pittsburghers, still marked with the stigma of living in “the

smoking city” since the 1940s, they strive to remake their communities and recapture

their identities. This effort is realized through city-wide strategies, as the Department of

City Planning is putting together a comprehensive planxxx, but mainly through the local

organization of the residents.

Pittsburgh citizens, both long-time residents and new-comers, come together and

form groups with the ultimate goal to advance their neighborhoods. Their local identity,

formed by the neighborhood they live in, is the powerful tool that pushes them forward.

The process of forming these groups is organic and unique for every neighborhood; it

begins with a group of people realizing that there is a steady decline in their

neighborhood. This decline might be related to lack of resources and infrastructure, to

aging population or environmental issues. Other communities have been identified as

shrinking neighborhoods, as their population has declined dramatically within the past

50 years, and now they are trying to re-invent their identity and get prepared to face

potential new development.

Whatever the reason might be, communities come together to form groups, which

give ad hoc solutions to emerging problems; organizing street and river clean ups,

creating community and rain gardens to deal with stormwater and safety issues,

revitalize abandoned lots with art projects to deal with increased vacancy or organizing

tree plantings to promote walkability in their neighborhood. These communal actions

vary from direct change of the urban landscape to social group activities and events in

public spaces. These projects are realized mostly by volunteering efforts from the

community. Often enough communities might collaborate with consultants or receive

small funding through city and county programs or grants from private foundations.

When these efforts escalate and the community has built a certain capacity for

realizing such projects, there is an emerging need for group formalization. Communities

tend to evolve from ad hoc solutions dealt by volunteers, to strategic planning

processes realized by a core group from the community in collaboration with the larger

neighborhood population. Critical part of this evolving process is the creation of a strong

vision accepted by all. In order though for such a jump in scale to happen, communities

form Community Development Corporations (CDCs) or some other type of not-for-profit

civic organizations that are capable of maintaining a small group of paid stuff and a

greater group of volunteers.

Almost 80% of Pittsburgh’s

neighborhoods have their own

CDCs or some kind of non-profit

Citizens Action Organization

(Figure 3). CDCs are not unique to

Pittsburgh and have been a long

tradition across the United States

since the 1960s. They started as

support and advocacy systems for

poor communities that were

struggling due to departure of

private capital. Moreover, in the

1970s with a shift in responsibility

of community development from the federal level to the county and municipal level,

CDCs gained increased interest and importance. Led by community members, they are

non-profit organizations that control the development and the local real estate market

with the long-term goal of neighborhood revitalization.xxxi Urban development driven by

CDCs can lead to decentralization, while giving the opportunity to citizens to organize

and manage their community in a collective way, as Elinor Ostrom advocated.xxxii

[the scale problem in Pittsburgh and the market forces in community development]

This process of evolution of community organization highlights the issue of scale

posed by David Harvey as well as the intrusion of the market forces within the higher

levels of scale. Communities grow from individual initiatives and collective groups to

non-profit organizations with paid staff in order to become more effective in their

revitalization initiatives.

However the transition from an initial “unorganized structure” to an organized one is

not always smooth. Certain communities struggle in making that leap in scale, either

3 - Neighborhoods in Pittsburgh with different number of Civic

Organizations (Map layers from US Census Bureau,

Data Source: Pittsburgh Department of City Planning)

due to the long process of internal transformation or due to the realization that external

assistance and expertise might be needed. Greater issues of urban transformation and

strategic planning need expertise that might not be available within the limits of a

community, but the introduction of external stakeholders in the community might lead to

internal conflicts.

The communities that do surpass

the scale issue and form CDCs or

some other form of organized

community structures, often enough

manage to see great advance within

the limits of their neighborhood.

These organizations are able to

realize greater initiatives such as an

identity visioning process, the

creation of a strategic plan for the

community by the community and

start acting on projects identified by

the residents. However, all these

above actions are in need of

resources, a great amount of work-

hours and external consultants and

experts. In reality, this translates to need for funding and influx of economic resources.

Even though communities might have started with a small-scale project, such as

creating a garden, which they collectively fund and operate, now they fail to address the

larger changes they are aiming for, via a local internal economy. That is why one of the

main roles of CDCs in place, apart from advancing the community’s quality, is to attract

external funding and resources to maintain and further advance its quality of life. xxxiii

In the case of Pittsburgh, this practice is very prominent. Communities mainly

address for funding and resources to state, county and city level initiatives but mainly to

higher-level private corporations that have built Pittsburgh’s history until today. This fact

raises two main issues. Firstly, an inter-city competition is created among communities.

When communities compete for funding from the same ex ternal pools, it is inevitable

that inequalities of a greater scale will take place, as posed by Iris Young.xxxiv As

community identity gets commodified and monetized, communities with stronger

identities become better cases for investment. As such communities prevail in making

4 - The scale problem

the case for economic support and investment, low-profile communities with weaker

identities and lack of internal capacity fail to attract assistance. Consequently, weaker

neighborhoods find it challenging to aim for urban transformation. This inter-

neighborhood competition is far from being characterized as “creative”, because it

amplifies the gap between communities within the city rather than closing it.

Secondly, while communities are dependent on funding by private for-profit

corporations they stay bound to the fluctuations of the market. As we have seen from

Pittsburgh’s history driven by the same corporations and general market forces, the city

has faced a grave decline. While communities depend on private capital, they cannot

ensure a stable progress or plan for long-term livability. Even though the structural

organization and decentralization of the city through the independence of its

communities highly promotes civic participation and gives the opportunity to residents to

reclaim their “right to the city”, the economical model of these structures fails to give

them the necessary local autonomy they need in order to thrive. Moreover, this model

does not manage to successfully keep market forces separated from the community-

driven, bottom-up development.

[conclusions]

With the short analysis above, certain issues of urban transformation via citizens-driven

initiatives are exposed. It is true that the existing structural organization within the city of

Pittsburgh promotes civic participation and gives the opportunity to residents to partially

reclaim their “right to the city”. However, in real terms, its formation faces rigorous

problems of economic resources. Local organizations can reach a certain level of

internal structure and capacity, without external financial support. In order to

successfully achieve a community-wide scale transformation, they still need to be

dependent on external economic support. The support often comes from private

corporations and foundations, which are in turn dependent on market-driven forces. If

urban transformation via private investments has failed as a model in the past, how can

communities ensure their long-term vitality if they are once again based on public-

private partnerships? This means they need to break loose from such dependencies,

and build local economies to support themselves. Further investigation needs to be

made in order to identify opportunities for local economies and community autonomy

formation. Community regeneration should aim for bottom-up approaches, independent

from opportunistic and temporary market forces.

[references]

i David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 2013.

ii Ibid.

iii Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle -Class Squeeze—

an Update to 2007” (Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2010), http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf.

iv Henri Lefebvre et al., Le droit la ville (Paris: Economica-Anthropos, 2009).

vv Harvey, Rebel Cities.

vi U. S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder - Community Facts,” 2010,

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml.

vii William S. Dietrich II, “A Very Brief History of Pittsburgh; The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the City That Built America,”

Pittsburgh Quarterly, Fall 2008, http://www.pittsburghquarterly.com/index.php/Region/a-very-brief-history-of-pittsburgh.html.

viii Stefan Lorant and Henry Steele Commager, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Esselmont Books,

1999).

ix “ExplorePAHistory.com - Stories from PA History,” accessed February 24, 2014,

http://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=1-9-15&chapter=2.

x Dietrich II, “A Very Brief History of Pittsburgh; The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the City That Built America.”

xi Ibid.

xii Harvey, Rebel Cities.

xiii Ibid.

xiv Elizabeth Gudrais, “What We Know About Wealth,” Harvard Magazine, December 2011,

http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/what-we-know-about-wealth.

xv Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle -Class Squeeze—an Update

to 2007.”

xvi Karl Marx, Capital (Electric Book Company, 2001).

xvii Harvey, Rebel Cities.

xviii Ibid.

xix Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).

xx Frederick Engels, The Housing Question, 5th Rep edition (Pathfinder Pr, 1995).

xxi Saul D Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

xxii Lefebvre et al., Le droit la ville.

xxiii Harvey, Rebel Cities.

xxiv Ibid.

xxv Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press,

1990).

xxvi Harvey, Rebel Cities.

xxvii Murray Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montr al; New York: Black Rose

Books, 1992).

xxviii Iris Marion Young and Danielle S Allen, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 2011).

xxix Harvey, Rebel Cities.

xxx “PLANPGH,” accessed February 24, 2014, http://planpgh.com/.

xxxi Christopher Walker, Community Development Corporations and Their Changing Support Systems (Washington DC: The

Urban Institute, December 2002), http://www.urban.org/publications/410638.html.

xxxii Ostrom, Governing the Commons.

xxxiii Walker, Community Development Corporations and Their Changing Support Systems.

xxxiv Young and Allen, Justice and the Politics of Difference.