Reforging the Steel City: Symbolism and Space in Postindustrial Pittsburgh

Abstract

With an eye to urban branding campaigns in global cities such as New York, in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s public officials worked with local corporations and media outlets to market “dynamic” Pittsburgh to a national audience. This article examines the relationship between the “imagined space” of boosters’ urban branding campaigns and their decades-long efforts to physically and economically reorganize the region’s “material space” around service and finance industries, and medical and educational institutions. Through urban branding, local elites’ efforts created new mental maps of the region that excluded its mill towns and manufacturing workers and emphasized, instead, the relationship between the city and its well-heeled suburbs.