Pittsburgh, Pennsylvani
a, has become a bit of an urbanist darling — it’s a magnet for educated millennials and with Uber, Google and Ford’s Argo all working on autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence in the city, it’s quite possible that the future of urbanism is being invented here.
But as recently as a decade ago, Pittsburgh, like Detroit, was a stand-in for the dozens of cities across the U.S. that suffered greatly in the second half of the 20th century, as globalization and technology eroded the manufacturing industries that once defined the Midwest. Between 1970 and 1990, this city lost an estimated 100,000 steel jobs, shed nearly one-third of its total population, and unemployment hit a high of 18 percent.
