Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern

Environment, Landscape, Transportation, Energy, and Planning

This book is highly recommended. The case studies are rich and meaningful, demonstrating lessons to be learnt from past fallacies and how legacies of environmental neglect will impact future decision making.

Technology and Culture

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Pittsburgh’s explosive industrial and population growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression required constant attention to city-building. Private, profit-oriented firms, often with government involvement, provided necessary transportation, energy resources, and suitable industrial and residential sites. Meeting these requirements in the region’s challenging hilly topographical and riverine environment resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the natural landscape. At the same time, the Pittsburgh region’s free market, private enterprise emphasis created socio-economic imbalances and badly polluted the air, water, and land. Industrial stagnation, temporarily interrupted by wars, and then followed deindustrialization inspired the formation of powerful public-private partnerships to address the region’s mounting infrastructural, economic, and social problems. The sixteen essays in Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern examine important aspects of the modernizing efforts to make Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania a successful metropolitan region. The city-building experiences continue to influence the region’s economic transformation, spatial structure, and life experience.

Table of Contents

Sample

504 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

December, 2019

isbn : 9780822945697

Subjects

Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning

about the authors

Edward K. Muller is professor emeritus of history at the University of Pittsburgh and former director of the university’s Urban Studies Program. He focuses on the history and geography of North American cities, particularly Pittsburgh. He is coauthor of Pittsburgh Rising: From Frontier Town to Steel City, 1750–1920; Making Industrial Pittsburgh: Environment, Landscape, Transportation, Energy, and Planning; and Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889–1943; and editor of An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail and DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good, among other books.

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Joel A. Tarr is Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor Emeritus of History and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci Medal from the Society for the History of Technology, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Society for Environmental History, and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America, coedited with Gabriel Dupuy; The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective; Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region; and The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the 19th Century, with coauthor Clay McShane.