Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America by Tracy Neumann (review)

The postindustrial transformation of North America’s historically industrial cities and regions is one of the most important and challenging subjects for modern urban and economic historians; how, within a few short decades, did the industrial framework that had sustained large parts of North America (and Europe) give way to a radically different postindustrial economy, driving in its path equally profound social changes. While the broad outlines of the story may be well known, the details are not. Comparing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Hamilton, Ontario, Neumann’s book illuminates some of those details, including the actions, decisions, and rhetoric that accompanied—and may have helped foster—that transformation.

Neumann has done a prodigious amount of research to trace the ins and outs of the process of change in these two cities, and yet in the end, the sheer number of trees tends to block any view of the forest. Indeed, I found the most significant issue to be the author’s failure to address to any extent the economic factors that drove the transformation, factors such as overproduction, technological change, increased global competition, and the economic turmoil of the 1970s, which form the essential context for the machinations by such diverse actors as city and state government, chambers of commerce, and individual corporations that she describes in such detail.

The book is suffused with an implicit subtext that, were it not for those machinations, somehow the steel industry would have not only survived but thrived in Pittsburgh and Hamilton. I doubt that this is the case. After all, during the same period, European countries were spending billions in what turned out to be a vain effort to sustain their steelmaking industries. What is notable is the extent to which, despite the author’s efforts to distinguish the two cities’ practices and decisions, the ultimate trajectories of manufacturing in Hamilton and Pittsburgh have been largely the same. To the extent they differ, it is in the continued vitality of one of Hamilton’s two steelmakers; it would have been valuable to explore why that firm has been able to buck the tide of deindustrialization.

Moreover, by concentrating on the actions and language of elected officials, bureaucrats, and corporate executives, Neumann has allowed the most significant element of the cities’ postindustrial transformation to escape unnoticed. From a broad economic and social standpoint, the shopping malls and office buildings that form the objects of her subjects’ machinations are at best a sideshow. Since the 1970s, the emergence of Pittsburgh’s postindustrial economy has been a function of growth in the city’s universities and medical institutions, to the point where today the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is not only the largest employer in Pittsburgh but the largest private-sector employer in the state of Pennsylvania. Without the growth of the “eds-and-meds” sector, the demand for the neighborhoods and shopping malls, not to mention the creation of opportunities for technology-based redevelopment, would not have taken place. Why that sector grew to such an extent and what role political and corporate action played in its growth are the central questions that must be answered to understand Pittsburgh’s postindustrial transformation.

While in some respects the book’s strength lies in the extent to which it provides a rich texture of quotations from those engaged in the process of transformation, that approach carries its own pitfalls in a tendency to conflate rhetoric and outcomes. Rhetoric, or discourse, affects outcomes, to be sure, but the two remain distinct. An instructive example appears in the book’s discussion of the outcomes for the two parts of the former J&L Works; while the author clearly approves of the ultimately unsuccessful plan to restart the South Side Works (147–48), she juxtaposes that plan against the construction of the Technology Center on the site of the Hazelwood mill, which she sees as an effort to “showcase its postindustrial high-tech vision for...