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CHAPTER ONE

The Roots of Postindustrialism

In declining manufacturing centers throughout the North Atlantic, public-private partnerships that allowed political and civic leaders to provide public subsidies for private development were vital to postindustrialism. Such partnerships flourished in U.S. cities like Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 1960s but emerged more slowly in other parts of the world. In Canada, for instance, public development corporations were “difficult to form,” according to the U.S. consultants who had advised Hamilton Mayor Vic Copps to look to Pittsburgh for a redevelopment model.¹ Yet when Copps sent Jack Moore to Pittsburgh to study the Allegheny Conference in 1968, neither the mayor nor the economic development commissioner appeared to give much thought to why that was the case. This was perhaps because the consultants had cavalierly assured city officials that there was “nothing to prevent the Hamilton Economic Development Commission or some other body from encouraging interested private citizens to form a development corporation.”²

While it may have been true that Canadian laws did not prohibit formation of a private development corporation, Arthur D. Little’s “Lunchpail Report,” as local officials referred to it, ignored the influence of national political frameworks on when and where public-private partnerships formed and how they functioned. The consultants instead stressed the importance of strong mayoral leadership and the participation of “highly influential private citizens” in U.S. cities after World War II. In Pittsburgh, they wrote, the city’s famed Renaissance could not have occurred “unless well intentioned men decided to act.”³ They overlooked the fact that securing the long-term cooperation of those “well intentioned men,” in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, rested on changing state and federal laws to create an institutional framework for public-private cooperation that allowed business leaders to profit handsomely from their participation in publicly sponsored urban redevelopment plans.⁴

Public-private partnerships had a long history in North America by the time Arthur D. Little submitted the Lunchpail Report. In U.S. cities, ad hoc booster relationships established in the early nineteenth century transformed into informal partnerships around 1850, when businessmen formed civic associations and clubs through which to rationalize the urban landscape and create new opportunities for real estate development.⁵ Nineteenth-century U.S. and Canadian public works projects were often public-private ventures. Boosters on both sides of the border assembled subsidies and loans to attract private railroad companies in a way that foreshadowed the interurban competition for jobs common among North Atlantic cities by the 1970s.⁶ In Europe, Louis Napoléon’s reconstruction of Paris in cooperation with Crédit Mobilier was a nineteenth-century forerunner of the partnerships that implemented urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s. And in the United States the federal government began to underwrite locally led partnerships through New Deal housing and public works programs.⁷

From the ground, public-private cooperation often looked like a purely local affair, negotiated between a city’s political and business elites. But the power of public-private partnerships to make postindustrial places was shaped and constrained, materially and discursively, at the metropolitan, national, and global scales. National governments handled demands for resources from ascendant and declining regions in different ways, which limited local government budgets as well as the policy options available to urban growth coalitions. Within metropolitan regions, municipal officials’ autonomy over allocation of public resources for urban development varied, as did local executives’ interest in directing civic projects. In Pittsburgh and Hamilton, distinctions between the city’s position in its metropolitan region, national political institutions, and growth coalitions’ abilities to harness internationally circulating ideas about how to remake manufacturing centers meant that postindustrialism unfolded in spatially and temporally uneven ways.

Public-Private Partnerships for Urban Redevelopment

Postindustrialism opened a new chapter in a long history of idea sharing among municipal officials and city planners in the North Atlantic region. The mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the same cities that sought shared solutions to the decline of manufacturing a hundred years later led boosters, social reformers, and policymakers to develop a network of people, institutions, and frameworks that facilitated the exchange of urban planning and policy ideas between North American, Western European, and colonial cities from Calcutta to Nairobi to Fez. In the late nineteenth century, boosters intensified these informal international transfers through selective borrowing among (or imperial imposition by) the elected officials, national policymakers, and bureaucrats tasked with solving the problems of modern industrial cities. Their fertile intellectual exchange continued into the early twentieth century, when urban experts in specialized institutions, philanthropic foundations, and nongovernmental organizations established formal exchange organizations to disseminate what contemporary planners might call “best practices” for urban social and physical development.⁸

As a result of shared ideas and policy circulation, early twentieth-century plans for U.S. and Canadian cities replicated the grand boulevards of European capitals, while London and Paris adopted skyscrapers, industrial architecture, and technological innovations from the United States. In the interwar period, Americans traveled to Berlin to study zoning, to Birmingham to investigate municipal ownership of utilities, and to Vienna to visit social housing. British and German planners, in turn, kept a close eye on New Deal housing and infrastructure programs. In the 1940s, modernist design aesthetics pioneered in France and Germany influenced planners and architects in the United States and Canada, even as American planning ideas and discourses increasingly permeated European cities.⁹

After World War II, urban renewal programs occupied planners on both sides of the Atlantic. The ad hoc public-private partnerships that had built railroads across the United States and Canada and remade nineteenth-century Paris began to transition to more formal partnerships in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁰ In the midwestern and northeastern United States, cities emerged from the Depression and war with decayed downtowns, deteriorated residential neighborhoods, and severe housing shortages. New Deal programs had laid the groundwork for federally funded housing programs, and subsidies for suburban development and for industrial decentralization to the suburbs and the Southwest threatened manufacturing centers’ tax revenues. To secure the economic futures of the cities in which their enterprises operated, local businessmen and corporate elites joined forces with municipal officials to make over troubled downtowns, protect their capital investments, and restore investor confidence in industrial centers. Federal, state, and local officials used public funds to “leverage” private investment, typically under the auspices of federal urban renewal programs. Federal housing acts passed in 1949 and 1954, together with the 1956 Highway Act and various pieces of state legislation dating to the 1940s, provided the legal foundation for urban renewal. State and federal programs for the first time formally embedded public-private partnerships into government funding structures for urban development conceived during the New Deal.¹¹

In the United States, urban renewal was ostensibly intended to address urban housing shortages after World War II and provide decent shelter for all Americans. Coalitions of Democratic politicians, Republican businessmen, real estate developers, and unionists from the construction trades lobbied for renewal legislation and the federal funding that made it possible. Federal urban renewal funds required cities to use their powers of eminent domain to acquire land and transfer it to private developers at low or no cost; once they had done so, federal funds could be used for clearance and development subsidies. Making funds contingent on public-private partnerships was a new requirement, but the redevelopment partnerships that carried out federally sponsored urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s often had much longer histories. In places such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, mayors and local businessmen collaborated on large-scale slum removal and downtown redevelopment projects before federal urban renewal funds became available. State and local enabling legislation passed to support downtown redevelopment in those cities became models for federal renewal programs.¹² Whether using state or federal programs, however, the private-sector members of redevelopment partnerships typically took the lead, because urban renewal funds could not be released until a private developer signed on to a project.¹³

From the perspective of chambers of commerce boardrooms and mayors’ offices, the institutional arrangements of urban renewal were mutually beneficial for the public and private sectors. City officials expected new development to improve their tax bases and make downtowns more appealing to potential investors. Private-sector partners received public subsidies to enhance their property values and expand their activities. Government officials and civic leaders imbued their activities with a sense of public purpose by describing urban renewal as a way to meet public needs for adequate housing and commercial development. In practice, however, the benefits of urban renewal primarily accrued to a small number of local elites and blue-collar workers in the construction trades. The burdens of renewal fell most heavily on low-income, predominantly African American residents, who were displaced from aging central city neighborhoods and only occasionally provided with suitable replacement housing. Instead of affordable, high-quality housing for all, in the United States, redevelopment partnerships most often produced poorly maintained public housing complexes, office buildings, luxury residences, sports stadiums, and convention centers.¹⁴

Canadian, Latin American, German, and British cities also established expansive urban renewal programs after World War II, but, in those places, redevelopment partnerships were typically state led and managed, and public-private cooperation remained ad hoc.¹⁵ In Canada, as in the United States, urban renewal programs required a private-sector partner, but federal funds were contingent only on securing advance cooperation between municipal, provincial, and federal governments, rather than between public agencies and private developers.¹⁶ Under this scenario, local urban renewal authorities could use federal funds to acquire land through eminent domain and clear it before identifying a site developer, which gave public officials significantly greater freedom to direct where and what kind of investment took place. In the UK, too, public partners had greater control over the nature of redevelopment. Local governments determined redevelopment sites and, in the case of central city commercial regeneration, required developers to include features that public officials had identified as serving a pressing public need, such as a library or a bus station.¹⁷

Differences in the institutional arrangements of urban renewal between nations reflected a long tradition of privatism in the United States that was comparatively weak elsewhere in the North Atlantic. The central assumption of privatism—that serving private interests and public welfare was one and the same—was well suited to the political economy and social organization of the early American towns out of which the tradition developed.¹⁸ By the twentieth century, however, privatism had come to signify a shared belief between policymakers and business leaders that cities were engines for economic growth through unencumbered individual participation in free markets. Privatist ideology made it difficult for municipalities to allocate resources or regulate growth and development as public officials increasingly came to see the role of government as facilitating the production of private wealth rather than seeking to impose order or control over markets.¹⁹

Midcentury urban renewal programs reflected varying degrees of privatism between countries, but, by 1968, the transatlantic urban renewal order foundered in all of them. Trenchant critiques of modernist planning and design by American social critic Jane Jacobs and German-born Harvard professor Herbert Gans circulated internationally. Citizens’ organizations in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Germany successfully mobilized against urban renewal programs and highway projects that displaced residents and destroyed neighborhoods.²⁰ At the same time, privatism’s more pragmatic corollary, privatization, began to gain wide currency as a tactic of governance. In the United States, all levels of government began to outsource public provision of goods and services to the private sector. Over the next two decades, U.S., Canadian, and British governments began to transfer state-owned businesses, agencies, utilities, services, and sites to for-profit or nonprofit enterprises.²¹

When urban renewal programs collapsed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the redevelopment partnerships that had carried them out were left in flux. In the United States and Canada, public-private partnerships had relied heavily on federal money to conduct their activities, but both federal governments terminated urban renewal funding in the 1970s. In response to federal retrenchment, some existing partnerships fell apart, others retooled, and new partnerships emerged. Formal partnerships were written into public policy for urban development in the United States, Canada, and England; for economic development in Italy and Holland; and for industrial development in Germany and France. In North Atlantic manufacturing centers, urban development strategies increasingly became predicated on postindustrialism, which had a different kind of public-private partnership at its center. In the 1970s and 1980s, more flexible and more complex growth partnerships supplanted redevelopment partnerships. They took a range of forms, from business-led coalitions to local government-led collaboration to public-private organizations run by a national government. At all levels of government, public officials increased the powers of redevelopment authorities and encouraged entrepreneurial mayors to engage in international interurban competition for jobs.²²

Redevelopment partnerships of the urban renewal era laid the foundation for postindustrial urbanism, but in the 1970s and beyond growth partnerships facilitated the wholesale remaking of former manufacturing centers for service- and finance-dominated local economies. Growth partnerships were born out of multiple currents: national governments’ disinvestment in cities, privatization, deregulation, and the devolution of authority over and the responsibility of paying for urban development to the local level. Public officials no longer rhetorically justified government subsidies for private redevelopment by describing individual projects as meeting pressing public needs for decent housing or reduced central city congestion. Entrepreneurial mayors from across the political spectrum, instead, came to believe that free markets, rather than liberal social programs, would allocate resources in a socially just manner.²³ In the United States, where growth partnerships first formed, their members sought to create good “business climates” in distressed regions by adopting tactics from successful businessmen’s campaigns that had lured jobs and residents to the rising Sunbelt since the 1930s.²⁴ To attract private investment, growth coalitions incorporated new partners, expanded their activities to include economic development and the physical redevelopment of areas beyond downtown, and offered a broad array of financial inducements to attract development. They expanded local, state, and federal financial inducements for private investment, such as personal tax reductions, discretionary business tax incentives, changes in corporate and banking regulations, and technology development programs.²⁵

As privatist policy orientations and postindustrial planning tactics—sometimes ideological, sometimes pragmatic—traveled together through the North Atlantic, their implementation was contingent on the historical and geographical particularities of cities and regions and on the political, institutional, and cultural differences between nations. In the United States, public incentives to the private sector moved beyond direct federal subsidies. Entrepreneurial mayors combined programs like Richard Nixon’s Community Development Block Grants and Jimmy Carter’s Urban Development Action Grants with federal, state, and local tax incentives, bond issues, and loan guarantees.²⁶ In Britain, changes to the national Town and Country Planning Act in 1968 authorized local public authorities to partner directly with private developers on commercial projects. Under the new regulations, Birmingham subsidized a shopping center and hotel by securing a loan for the developer at public sector loan rates, and subsequently secured government grants to expand the project.²⁷ The mayor of Rennes formalized a decade-old ad hoc partnership in 1984 when he formed CODESPAR, a consortium of unions, business representatives, and public officials, to develop a regional strategic plan for the French city. CODESPAR reoriented economic development around advanced technology and health services and eventually built a high-tech office park.²⁸ Similarly, Hamburg’s Chamber of Commerce and major banks established the Hamburg Business Development Corporation in 1985, a semi-public corporation that used public and private funds to channel investment into the city.²⁹

Canadian municipalities were a bit slower to adopt U.S.-style growth partnerships. Historically, Canadian urban policy emphasized collective over individual good, while a stronger culture of privatism in the United States meant that urban policy was more commonly designed to encourage private consumption and corporate gain. This was due in part to different constitutional understandings of property rights: in the United States, property rights lay with the individual, while in Canada, property rights were vested in the Crown. One result was that Canadian cities were comparatively more public than U.S. cities.³⁰ The nature of federalism in the United States and Canada also shaped the range of tactics available to municipal officials who sought to adopt postindustrialism as an urban development model. Among the North Atlantic nations with declining basic industry, only the United States, Canada, and Germany had federal systems, a decentralized form of government in which the national government shared power with regional governments (states in the United States and Germany and provinces in Canada). Under the U.S. and Canadian constitutions, states and provinces held the exclusive power to establish local governments—municipal, county, regional, or otherwise—and local governments could only exercise powers delegated to them by state constitutions or provincial legislation.

In the United States, national and state governments shared a broad range of powers that affected the social, spatial, and economic development of cities. These included the powers to tax, borrow money, build highways, charter banks and corporations, take private property, and spend public money for the general welfare. After World War II, U.S. cities were highly dependent on federal funding for urban and economic development. With the exception of highway construction, U.S. states typically delegated powers that allowed municipal officials to direct urban and economic development, often with significant financial support but little oversight from state agencies. In the 1950s and 1960s, big city mayors formed close relationships with federal officials and agencies such as the Federal Housing Authority; after 1964, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had substantial influence over urban development.

Canadian municipalities shared fewer direct relationships with the federal government than did U.S. cities in the postwar period. The national and provincial governments only shared authority over immigration, agriculture, and pensions. Provinces held sole authority over direct taxation, anything local or private in nature, business, transportation, banking, health, education, and welfare. Typically, provincial governments devised, funded, and administered urban and economic development programs and delegated fire protection, street maintenance, sewage systems, taxation of land and buildings, and land use regulation to municipalities. Canada’s substantially different system of intergovernmental relations meant that its federal government provided far fewer cost-sharing, grants-in-aid, or conditional programs for urban development than did the United States. When Canadian municipalities did receive federal money, it was subject to provincial oversight. As a result, the Canadian federal government had far less influence over urban social and physical development than the U.S. federal government, where relationships between federal agencies and mayors often bypassed state houses altogether. The very different relationships between the U.S. and Canadian federal governments and their cities created very different sets of political possibilities for growth coalitions in Pittsburgh and Hamilton.

The Urban Renewal Era

As policy discourses and tactics crossed national borders and postindustrial solutions to the social and economic problems in declining manufacturing centers became commonsense in North Atlantic nations, national politics and institutions framed the options available to local growth coalitions. So did metropolitan history and geography. The activities of steel mills and steel-related industries substantially shaped Pittsburgh’s and Hamilton’s social and economic geographies, but neither place had ever truly been a single-industry town. Both had more diverse industrial bases than Great Lakes auto centers like Detroit, Flint, or Oshawa, or smaller steel towns like Youngstown and Weirton.

Pittsburgh had the dubious distinction of being Pennsylvania’s only “second-class city.” A gateway to the Midwest, Pittsburgh was located more than 250 miles west of Philadelphia, the state’s largest metropolis and most important commercial and banking center. Pittsburgh functioned as the administrative center of a sprawling industrial agglomeration, as well as an important regional financial center, home to the headquarters of several Fortune 500 corporations. Historically, it was the urban core of an industrial region, surrounded by mill towns, mining villages, scattered rural development, and the administrative centers of rural hinterlands. Mesta Machine in West Homestead, Dravo Shipyards on Neville Island, Union Switch and Signal in Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Air Brake Company in Wilmerding all provided inputs to the steel industry as part of their production processes. Westinghouse’s electrical and, after World War II, nuclear facilities operated in Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs, and coke production took place in Westmoreland and Fayette Counties.

While Pittsburgh was the commercial and financial center of a heavily industrialized region, Hamilton was a heavily industrialized city in the middle of a predominantly agricultural region. The self-proclaimed “Ambitious City,” the heart of Canada’s Golden Horseshoe, was located a mere forty miles south of Toronto, the provincial capital and the commercial, financial, and cultural hub of Anglophone Canada. Most of Hamilton’s manufacturing industries, including Canada’s two largest steel companies, Stelco and Dofasco, were concentrated in four square miles along Hamilton Harbor. Other local manufacturing generally reflected national ownership patterns of U.S. branch plants and wholly owned subsidiaries of U.S. corporations. Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse, long the Hamilton region’s second-largest employer after Stelco, established its first of several plants in Hamilton in 1896. International Harvester, Otis Elevator, Proctor and Gamble, Hoover, Firestone, and the Beech-Nut Packing Company followed suit in the first half of the twentieth century.³¹

Figure 2. Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Figure 3. Hamilton and the Golden Horseshoe.

Pittsburgh, Hamilton, and their metropolitan regions were, at the end of World War II, at a moment of transition. Suburbanization was underway but had not yet drained urban tax bases.³² In 1950, 31 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s residents still lived in the city; forty years later, only 16 percent did.³³ Hamilton, with its less densely populated region, did not experience such a dramatic change: nearly three-quarters of the region’s residents lived in Hamilton in 1951, down to just over half in 1991.³⁴ At midcentury, Southwestern Ontario was a racially homogeneous place. Most of Hamilton’s residents were Canadian-born of British or French descent. Its small population of recent immigrants, primarily from western and southern Europe, tended to live near and work in the North End industrial area. Canada eased immigration restrictions in the 1960s, and, by 1996, a quarter of Hamilton’s residents were foreign-born; still, the majority of residents were white, with only 14 percent classified as “visible minorities.” Only 2 percent of those were black.³⁵ Pittsburgh in 1950 was more heterogeneous. The city’s African American population more than doubled between 1900 and midcentury, from around 5 percent to 12 percent. Far fewer African Americans moved to Pittsburgh during the Great Migration than to other northern industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, cities whose black populations increased from under 2 percent in 1900 to between 14 and 16 percent in 1950. By 1990, only a quarter of Pittsburgh’s residents were African American, compared to 39 percent in Chicago, nearly half in St. Louis, and three-quarters in Detroit.³⁶

Visitors to Pittsburgh and Hamilton at midcentury would have encountered similar physical landscapes: dirty, smoky cities with visibly aging downtown cores and residential areas. Steel production continued apace in Pittsburgh’s South Side and Hazelwood neighborhoods and in Hamilton’s North End. In 1950, nearly 38 percent of the Pittsburgh region’s workers held manufacturing jobs, and almost half of those were in iron and steel.³⁷ Most of those jobs were located in the mill towns along the along the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny Rivers. Four decades later, only 12 percent of the region’s jobs were in manufacturing.³⁸ In Hamilton, more than half of the labor force worked in manufacturing in 1951, and the majority of those jobs were located within the city limits.³⁹ By 1991, only 15 percent of Hamiltonians were manufacturing workers.⁴⁰

In 1950, neither city was yet equipped with the world-class universities that would later become central to postindustrial knowledge economies. The Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute had not merged to form Pittsburgh’s prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (they did so in 1967), and the University of Pittsburgh had not become a major research university. In a coup against Hamilton’s nearby rival, the Chamber of Commerce successfully convinced a Baptist college, McMaster University, to relocate from Toronto to Hamilton’s West End in 1927. When McMaster held its first classes in Hamilton in 1930, it offered only two professional programs: theology and nursing. During and after World War II, the university administration came under tremendous pressure from the province to develop a specialization in technical and scientific fields, but it would take until 1957 for McMaster to do so, when it dissolved its religious affiliation and become eligible for federal funding.⁴¹

Such were the conditions that elected officials and civic leaders faced at midcentury. Despite long-standing economic diversity in both Pittsburgh and Hamilton and hints of the change to come in ensuing decades, both cities were popularly perceived as smoky, decaying steel towns. It was that association mayors and civic leaders set out to shed, first through urban renewal and later through postindustrialism. At the scale of the metropolitan region, establishing public-private partnerships through which to offer a range of subsidies to private developers was the most important indicator of growth coalitions’ ability to do so. In Pittsburgh, the exceptional degree of public-private cooperation after World War II had deep roots in regional planning efforts dating back to the 1920s.⁴² In this context, in 1944, Pittsburgh’s civic leaders formed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (Allegheny Conference) to revitalize the city after postwar reconversion. Banking scion Richard King (R.K.) Mellon helmed the organization, which formed an archetypal redevelopment partnership with Democratic Mayor David Lawrence and the Allegheny County Commissioner to direct Pittsburgh’s urban development for the next fifty years. The press-shy and exceptionally private Mellon served in both World Wars and spent a year and a half at Princeton before dropping out to take a position at the family firm. He was the longtime chairman of the banking dynasty founded by his grandfather in the 1860s and expanded by his father, Richard, and uncle, Andrew, in the early twentieth century.

Pittsburgh was home to several prominent industrialists, but none was so nationally important as Mellon, who, with his sister Sarah Mellon Scaife and his cousins Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, was heir to one of the largest family fortunes in the United States. In 1957, Fortune listed the four Mellons among the eight richest people in the nation, estimating the family’s combined wealth at $3 billion—just a few billion shy of J. Paul Getty, the richest man in America. While Mellon’s better-known cousin Paul rejected the family business, relocated to Virginia, and, with wife Bunny, became a well-known philanthropist, R.K. lived most of his life forty miles from Pittsburgh on an estate in pastoral Ligonier and took an active role in regional civic affairs.⁴³

Under Mellon’s leadership, the Allegheny Conference’s institutional structure concentrated power in the hands of corporate elites, who ensured that it had the financial resources and political influence to carry out their development plans. The organization had more than a hundred members, but a smaller Executive Committee set an agenda carried out by an executive director and permanent staff. The Allegheny Conference’s bylaws required Executive Committee members, typically the directors of Pittsburgh’s largest corporations, to be physically present for meetings and prohibited them from delegating their responsibilities to subordinates. Allegheny Conference members had strong ties to the state legislature and city government, and the organization worked closely with groups such as the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA). The Allegheny Conference was also instrumental in establishing and then directing the activities of Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, a quasi-public corporation authorized by the state of Pennsylvania in 1946 to carry out urban renewal activities; the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC), formed in 1955 to attract industrial investment to the Pittsburgh region; and Penn’s Southwest, created in 1972 to market Southwestern Pennsylvania.⁴⁴

Mellon and Lawrence’s efforts to remake Pittsburgh reflected the shared concerns of political and corporate elites that Pittsburgh’s reputation as a smoke-filled industrial city would slow its postwar growth and deter new investment in the city and region, worries common to mayors and businessmen in aging manufacturing centers around the world.⁴⁵ Most visibly and most importantly, projects undertaken by the city’s redevelopment partnership improved Pittsburgh’s environmental conditions through smoke, pollution, and flood controls.⁴⁶ Lawrence touted Pittsburgh’s partnership as a possible model for other cities at national conferences. “This is a new kind of blending of public and private enterprise,” he told the National Association of Housing Officials in 1951. “It has novelty. It has untried phases. It has pioneering…. It is the most promising and rewarding program in our public life today.”⁴⁷

The primary goal of the Renaissance was to revitalize Pittsburgh’s central business district, known as “the Golden Triangle,” and “blighted” areas nearby. Private sector partners added office space to the downtown business district through skyscraper construction, while city officials undertook massive slum clearance projects and used public funds to subsidize Jones & Laughlin Steel’s expansion within the city limits. An industrial district at the Point, the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers, was reborn as Point State Park. The extent to which Pittsburgh’s massive urban renewal program benefited city residents was highly dependent on their race and class. The largely African American Hill District was partially destroyed to make way for a new convention center. On the city’s North Side, a working-class white ethnic neighborhood was torn apart for commercial development and a new sports stadium.⁴⁸

The Renaissance produced uneven development between Pittsburgh and steel- and coal-producing towns in its metropolitan region, as well between neighborhoods within city limits. Lawrence once described urban renewal as “another kind of soil conservation,” in which “the soil is the fantastically valuable kind that is measured in square feet instead of square miles—the heartland of our cities—the areas where we concentrate the population, the wealth, the productive capacity, and the leadership of our Nation.”⁴⁹ His analogy may have resonated with Pittsburgh’s industrialists and financiers, but it surely confounded workers in the strip mines in Pittsburgh’s hinterlands. By the early 1960s, Pennsylvania’s coal miners were permanently out of work and riverside factories stood empty.⁵⁰ Even as the PRPA praised the growth coalition for facilitating “a significant rearrangement of functions” within the city itself, in 1963 its planners issued a dire economic forecast for the region. In coming decades, the PRPA warned, increased corporate investment, job training programs, and additional government intervention and planning would be necessary to manage a coming economic transition from manufacturing to service and finance industries. That transition, they (correctly) predicted, would be more difficult in the Pittsburgh region than in other areas of the country because the regional economy and labor force were shaped “to an exceptional extent” by coal and steel specialization. “Nineteenth century industrial development patterns,” the PRPA cautioned, had to be jettisoned to make Pittsburgh more appealing to a postwar populace with greater spending power and more leisure time.⁵¹

The PRPA study anticipated the economic transition that Daniel Bell described a decade later in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Pittsburgh’s regional planners forecast that, faced with international competition, manufacturing in general and primary metals in particular would continue to decline in importance in the regional economy. In response, they contended, Pittsburgh’s public officials and business leaders needed to diversify the regional economy by attracting jobs in light industry, advanced manufacturing, and commercial services. Certainly, planners were not so prescient in the 1960s that they sought to redevelop the Strip District’s warehouses as live-work space, nor did they imagine that the South Side, then primarily home to steelworkers, would some day house the financial district’s young, white-collar workforce. Instead, planners predicted in general terms the types of economic activity that would come to dominate the urban and regional economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. They offered suggestions in broad strokes for moving away from development patterns associated with industrial cities toward a spatial organization of social and economic functions that would attract service, finance, and light industry, exhibiting early evidence of the postindustrial imagination shared among planners throughout the North Atlantic within the next few decades.⁵²

The mayor’s office and the Allegheny Conference’s board showed limited interest in regional development in the 1960s, delegating development beyond city limits to county governments and the RIDC. The RIDC acquired its first parcel for redevelopment in rural O’Hara Township the year the PRPA study came out and in 1966 began renting space in one of the nation’s first planned industrial parks to area companies for light manufacturing. Two years later, the organization began construction on a second industrial park at the edge of Allegheny County, eventually securing a U.S. post office sorting facility as a tenant and attracting the Society of Automotive Engineers away from their New York City headquarters. By 1971, the RIDC was so pleased with its economic diversification efforts that it issued a self-congratulatory report, “Transition of a Region: Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Changing Economy.” Its glossy cover juxtaposed images of steelworkers and the Golden Triangle. In case the symbolism was lost on readers, the RIDC staffers pointedly noted that the cover celebrated “the transition in the economic structure of the Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania region. The region appears to be moving from a mature heavy industry economy toward one with a balance of material goods-producing industries and service industries.” A presidential note at the outset cited National Planning Association data that indicated that service-producing industries had increased their share of regional jobs. The RIDC predicted that the Pittsburgh region would achieve a “balanced” economy by 1980.⁵³

In the early 1970s, heavy industry still formed the material basis of the declining regional economy, but urban renewal had laid the spatial and institutional foundations for a postindustrial rebirth in the city. Mayor Joseph Barr had symbolically marked the end of the Renaissance with the 1969 dedication of a new headquarters for Westinghouse, the last building completed in the Golden Triangle. “It’s hard to believe that less than twenty years ago this area where we now are standing was blighted industrial and commercial slum,” Barr said at the event, praising the $200 million downtown facelift that had, the Washington Post enthusiastically reported, “transformed one of the nation’s worst eyesores into a cluster of dazzling skyscrapers.”⁵⁴ Coal miners in the hinterlands may have been out of work, but downtown, modernist glass-and-steel skyscrapers had replaced the “nineteenth-century” architecture that the growth coalition believed forestalled new investment.

Hamilton was a different story. It did not share Pittsburgh’s long history of corporate welfare, and, because of its greater reliance on publicly funded, planned, and managed projects, postwar urban redevelopment moved more slowly there than it did in Pittsburgh.⁵⁵ The city had established a master plan in 1944, drafted by Toronto planning consultant E. G. Faludi. When city officials hired Faludi, Hamilton did not have a planning department. The city council appointed an ad hoc town planning committee composed of local politicians, civic leaders, and representatives from labor, industry, and women’s organization to assist Faludi. Faludi’s findings were worrisome for political and civic leaders: he and the town planning committee determined that more than three-quarters of Hamilton’s residences were blighted or in decline, and the report recommended that the city use the slum clearance provision of Canada’s 1944 National Housing Act to replace some of them with affordable housing. The master plan outlined an ambitious slum clearance program that led city officials to formally establish a planning department in 1947, but it would be more than a decade before public opinion and political will made a large-scale redevelopment program feasible.⁵⁶

Figure 4. Downtown Pittsburgh before the Renaissance with industry still visible at the Point, ca. 1950. Reprinted with the permission of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and its Affiliates.

Figure 5. Downtown Pittsburgh after the Renaissance, showing corporate headquarters buildings and Point State Park, ca. 1969. Reprinted with the permission of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and its Affiliates.

In Pittsburgh and other U.S. cities, redevelopment partnerships went hand-in-hand with central business district redevelopment. Hamilton’s city officials, too, were eager to implement a downtown urban renewal program in the early 1960s. In 1962, Vic Copps made downtown revitalization a central feature of his mayoral campaign. Copps won in a major upset, unseating thirteen-year incumbent Lloyd D. Jackson. Within months of taking office, Copps made overtures to local businessmen and corporate leaders to ensure their cooperation with his redevelopment plans. But his efforts were stymied: in 1962, Canada’s federal government only subsidized low- and moderate-income housing, not commercial development.⁵⁷

The ambitious Copps held office for nearly twenty-five years and was the patriarch of what would become Hamilton’s Liberal political dynasty—his wife Geraldine was a city councilor in the 1980s and 1990s; his daughter Sheila served in provincial and national parliament and as deputy prime minister under Jean Chrétien. A journalist by trade, Copps had moved to Hamilton shortly after World War II to pursue a career as a sportscaster. Riding on his popularity as a radio personality, he entered politics in 1960, winning more votes than any other candidate in a Board of Control election. As a councilor, Copps earned the loyalty of Hamilton’s pensioners through bus fare reductions and secured support from workers by introducing job retraining programs for the unemployed. By the time Copps ran against Jackson, Jackson and local labor leaders were in open conflict. The Hamilton and District Labor Council declined to endorse either candidate, but union officials and rank-and-file workers backed Copps and led him to victory.⁵⁸

Copps may have styled himself as a labor mayor, but he was eager to work with Hamilton’s businessmen and industrialists to realize his urban redevelopment goals. During his campaign, he presented his lack of experience as an asset, telling voters that it meant he was not “bogged down with a lot of political affiliations.” It also meant that he was not bound by patronage. “I was something like a frontbencher in Parliament,” he recalled of his time in council shortly after becoming mayor. “I could criticize freely and it wasn’t so important to seek harmony with those around me.” As mayor, he said, “I am trying to foster a real spirit of co-operation so that we can get a few things done around here.” That cooperative spirit extended to courting businessmen who had campaigned against him. Four months into his first term, Copps proudly reported, “A great many people who didn’t support me and weren’t too keen on seeing me as mayor have come forward with offers of help and have helped already.”⁵⁹

By the time the Canadian government amended its urban renewal legislation to include commercial development in 1964, Copps had established a congenial relationship with Hamilton’s businessmen. He did not, however, have a private-sector partner with the stature of Pittsburgh’s R.K. Mellon or an Allegheny Conference-style civic organization with which to work. Hamilton’s businessmen instead organized through the more traditional arena of the Hamilton and District Chamber of Commerce. Copps personally ensured the cooperation of individual executives and business owners on a project-by-project basis, but Hamilton’s corporate and business leaders were not particularly concerned with urban planning or economic development in the 1960s. Jack Moore intimated as much when he wrote to John Grove to arrange his 1968 Pittsburgh trip. He told Grove he was especially interested in learning how the Allegheny Conference secured the active participation of local executives. In Hamilton, Moore groused, “We can get ours to agree to serve but their attendance at meetings is not always of the best.”⁶⁰

Even if Hamilton’s business leaders had shown greater interest in attending meetings about civic projects, Copps’s ability to enter into a partnership with the private sector was limited by the province. In contrast with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which had little direct influence over urban development, Ontario was the final arbiter of land use and economic development in the province. Ontario’s 1946 Planning Act required all municipalities to develop a comprehensive plan, which had to be approved by the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB). Any subsequent amendments were also subject to prior approval by the OMB. This meant that private developers could appeal local land use decisions to the OMB, which sometimes overturned municipal regulations. Ontario also precluded local governments from offering wide-ranging economic incentives for industrial or commercial expansion, preferring instead to coordinate those activities at the provincial level. For these reasons, when Copps secured approval for a downtown urban renewal program in 1965, the formal “partnership” that supported it included only the provincial and federal governments, not the private sector.

Compounding Copps’s difficulties, a year after he unveiled an ambitious new plan to remake downtown Hamilton as a commercial and service center, the province launched a regional planning initiative that mandated Hamilton’s continued development as a regional manufacturing hub that would support, rather than compete with, Toronto’s role as Ontario’s service and finance center. The regional development initiative stemmed from Progressive Conservative Premier John Robarts’s concerns about Ontario’s competitive position.⁶¹ After taking office in 1961, Robarts established two agencies to advise him on economic issues, the Department of Economics and Development (a provincial ministry) and the Ontario Economic Council (OEC, an independent advisory committee). Staffed by economists and businessmen, the OEC advocated for provincial reforms that would benefit business interests. The OEC commissioned research reports from economic experts in the universities and private sector, who typically recommended that Ontario should reduce the social safety net, institute business-friendly tax reforms, and pursue various forms of deregulation and decentralization.⁶²

In 1965, on the advice of his economic policy advisors from the OEC and the Department of Economics and Development, Robarts held two international conferences. He invited experts from the United States, Canada, and the UK to address regional development in Ontario as well as Canada’s changing economic structure. A popular consensus in favor of governmentled regional planning and development emerged from the conferences. A year later, Ontario Department of Municipal Affairs Minister Darcy McKeough announced a comprehensive regional planning initiative, Design for Development, which launched what scholars later described as Ontario’s “golden age of planning.”⁶³ Robarts, despite his conservative economic views, thought centralized planning was the best way to ensure regional economic stability. He and McKeough explicitly linked provincially led regional planning to private sector initiatives. To achieve Design for Development’s goals, McKeough called for “a partnership relationship between the Provincial Government, municipalities, and private enterprise in bringing about the quality and pattern of development that we all want and that we are confident can be achieved.” He praised private developers, noting that, while most of the planning beyond the scale of individual projects would be carried out by the provincial and municipal governments, “by the quality of its performance this development industry has earned the right to be accepted into the partnership that will develop this region along the lines we are drawing here today.”⁶⁴ In contrast to local redevelopment partnerships in the United States, Ontario officials sought private-sector partners who would help the province carry out development projects initiated by public officials.

Design for Development created a series of economic development regions, through which provincial officials planned to decentralize industry out of Southern Ontario to the “underdeveloped” northern and eastern reaches of the province. The industrial belt around Lake Ontario with Hamilton at its center was the only exception.⁶⁵ Hamilton would remain a manufacturing hub. Hamilton’s supporting role in what provincial officials deemed the “Toronto-centered region” vexed municipal officials who wanted to develop their city as a regional commercial center. In response, Hamilton’s Economic Development Commission prepared a study that forecast the increasing importance of service sector jobs, while tacitly accepting that Hamilton would likely house a greater share of regional manufacturing due to industrial decentralization out of Toronto. Like Pittsburgh’s PRPA earlier in the decade, Hamilton planners proposed a regional development pattern that would “accommodate increasing preoccupation with leisuretime activities” and promote “a pattern of urbanization that is amenable to social changes based on future economic and technological developments.” They predicted intensified professional, cultural, and educational activities and recommended land uses that would encourage rather than hinder that intensification. This translated, for the planners, into zoning changes and public investment geared toward establishing new nodes of development around specialized industry, outside both the city center and the traditional industrial areas along the harbor. In apparent defiance of Design for Development, Hamilton’s planners argued that the city’s place in Ontario’s urban system should remain flexible.⁶⁶

Though they shared the postindustrial imagination of Pittsburgh’s growth coalition, Hamilton’s public officials and civic leaders were constrained by national regional development programs that privileged underdeveloped provinces, a lack of federal funds for commercial revitalization, provincial growth policies that protected Toronto’s regional supremacy, and a local business class with little interest in urban development. The expensive study Copps commissioned from Arthur D. Little and Moore’s subsequent trip to Pittsburgh to figure out how to create a redevelopment partnership did not change those facts. As the 1960s drew to a close, Hamilton had not replicated the redevelopment partnership that facilitated Pittsburgh’s Renaissance, and its proposed downtown renewal program was stalled.

Decentralization and Regional Development

Pittsburgh and Hamilton’s growth coalitions found themselves at a crossroads at the end of the 1960s, caught between optimistic downtown revitalization schemes and dire regional economic forecasts. In Ontario, provincial officials had taken steps to formalize public-private cooperation, which should have been a boon to Copps’s and Moore’s efforts to form a partnership. The designation of a “Toronto-centered region,” however, made Copps’s vision of Hamilton as a serious competitor to Toronto untenable. In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Conference shifted course as the first Renaissance wound to an end, leaving the city’s future development up in the air. The U.S. and Canadian federal systems, too, were approaching a crossroads. In the United States, federal housing policies dating back to the New Deal had promoted uncontrolled suburban expansion and deindustrialization and created racially segregated metropolitan areas through redlining and other discriminatory real estate practices. Urban renewal programs carried out under the auspices of redevelopment partnerships destroyed African American and working-class white neighborhoods, displaced long-time residents, and lined the pockets of real estate developers. These practices provoked urban uprisings that tore apart central cities, devastated urban tax bases, accelerated middle-class relocation to the suburbs, and led pundits to describe northeastern and mid-western cities as in the throes of an urban crisis.⁶⁷ By contrast, Canadian central city housing markets were not redlined, and residents could more easily get mortgages and home improvement loans than could residents of U.S. central cities. In the 1960s, Canadian cities did not burn. Instead, when Canadian policymakers talked about a looming urban crisis, they referred to an aging urban infrastructure insufficient to meet the demands of a projected population boom in the next decade.⁶⁸

To address its urban crisis, the U.S. government focused more attention and greater resources on central cities through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs; the Canadian government instead turned to regional development. Canada’s federal transfers to other levels of government generally took the form of unconditional equalization payments that, beginning in 1957, redistributed revenue from wealthier to poorer provinces to ensure that all provinces could provide similar services to their citizens at reasonably comparable levels of taxation, regardless of each province’s ability to generate revenue—a program for which there was no analogue in the United States.⁶⁹ Federal agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) and the Appalachian Regional Commission (1965) funneled federal funds for infrastructure projects to distressed regions, while the more ambitious but short-lived Area Redevelopment Administration (1961–1965) encouraged economic development primarily in Appalachia and the South.⁷⁰ None of these federal agencies, however, redistributed wealth at a national scale.

At the national scale, distinctions in U.S. and Canadian urban and regional development policy shaped the political possibilities for public-private partnership and postindustrial redevelopment in Pittsburgh and Hamilton. Canada’s stronger commitment to regional development and social welfare spending became increasingly evident as national policy orientations toward privatization and decentralization intensified steadily, if unevenly, in the United States and Canada after the political watershed of 1968. On both sides of the Great Lakes, newly elected leaders faced urban crises in cities in the East and the industrial heartland. At the same time, political and economic elites in North American boom regions—the U.S. Sunbelt and the Canadian West—exerted pressure on their national governments to stem what boosters in places like Phoenix and Calgary saw as undue federal aid for troubled manufacturing centers. U.S. president Richard Nixon and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau set out to quell the simmering tensions between declining and ascendant regions by renegotiating the relationship between components of the federal system. As centers of the old economy and beneficiaries of liberal social programs, Pittsburgh and Hamilton stood to lose their relatively privileged positions in their respective national urban funding hierarchies.

Nixon and Trudeau were often politically and personally at odds—Nixon intemperately called Trudeau a “son of a bitch,” a “pompous egghead,” and an “asshole”—but, by the early 1970s, both had implemented bureaucratic reforms intended to temper regional conflict.⁷¹ Trudeau tried and failed to centralize power in the national government, while Nixon sought from the outset to decentralize power to state governments. Their original intentions notwithstanding, both leaders ultimately reconfigured intergovernmental relations in a way that pointed to increased decentralization and public-private partnerships for urban development in the 1970s. Pittsburgh’s growth coalition was well positioned to flourish under these conditions, while Hamilton’s political and civic leaders struggled to form a durable partnership that would allow them to respond to a rapidly changing policy environment.

“Trudeaumania” swept the nation after the handsome young Quebecois Liberal formed a government in 1968. Shortly after taking office, Trudeau said he dreamed of a society that provided “individual freedoms, and equality of opportunity, health, and education.”⁷² He believed it was the government’s responsibility to ensure equal opportunity and fair treatment for all Canadians, and he staunchly defended liberal social programs such as national health insurance, equalization payments, and centralized planning. Trudeau had reason to think his goals would find wide support. In contrast to the United States, where small-government conservatives gained control of the national Republican Party in the 1960s, Canada’s Progressive Conservative party was not particularly concerned with reducing the size of the government or attacking unions. Compared to Democrats and Republicans, the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, Canada’s two largest political parties, differed more on cultural issues than on the role of government in society. The viability of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s labor party, in regional and national elections meant that neither the Liberals nor the Progressive Conservatives could afford to alienate business, labor, or welfare state supporters if they hoped to win elections.

Trudeau’s critics, however, attacked his liberal economic programs. They complained about federal overreach in relation to provincial governments when Trudeau sought to fund redistributive social programs with oil money from the western provinces—including those programs designed to address the so-called urban crisis.⁷³ In an effort to rationalize urban growth patterns, Trudeau established the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) in 1969 and the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (MSUA) in 1971. Through his new agencies, Trudeau embarked on a decade-long effort to centralize urban and economic policy and direct growth from Ottawa. DREE and MSUA were met with substantial resistance from provincial officials, particularly in economically strong Ontario and the western provinces, who thought Trudeau had overstepped his constitutional purview. Undeterred, Trudeau appointed his old friend Jean Marchand, former trade unionist and fellow Liberal Quebecois, head of DREE. Marchand, along with Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, had been one of Quebec’s “three wise men” hand-selected by the Liberal party to run for national office in the hope that their elections would curtail mounting discontent stirred by the separatist Parti Québécois. Like Trudeau, Marchand believed regional economic disparity stemmed from the uneven development of urban areas across Canada.⁷⁴

Toronto and Hamilton provided employment opportunities for migrants from Northern Ontario, but the Atlantic provinces lacked dynamic metropolitan areas, and residents often had to leave the region to find work. Instead of targeting small towns and rural areas, as had been the goal of earlier economic development initiatives, DREE sought to stimulate manufacturing enterprises in “growth centers.” The agency designated “Special Areas” in cities and regional centers in disadvantaged provinces, particularly in eastern Canada, to which it funneled federal funds to support development activities. DREE’s industrial incentive programs nominally funded distressed areas in all ten provinces, but Marchand’s focus on the Atlantic provinces stirred resentment in other regions, particularly heavily industrialized Southern Ontario.⁷⁵ When DREE provided the Montreal region with a substantial two-year subsidy under the Special Areas program beginning in 1970, officials in Ontario and the West were incensed: if Montreal was eligible for federal aid, why not Vancouver, Calgary, or Hamilton? Trudeau and Marchand thought that Montreal could counter sluggish growth with limited federal assistance and, in the process, address some of the economic concerns of separatists, who believed that Quebec’s economy had been hindered by decades of federal policy. To observers outside Ottawa, however, DREE appeared to be using its funds to ensure that only selected regions would grow.⁷⁶

The Liberals lost seats in the West in the 1972 federal elections, where provincial leaders accused Trudeau of focusing too heavily on eastern Canada at the expense of other regions. As part of his effort to placate voters, Trudeau replaced Marchand with Donald Jamieson, a Newfoundlander who had worked in that province’s Department of Rural Reconstruction in the 1940s and served as Trudeau’s minister of defense production and minister of transport before taking over DREE in 1972. Jamieson quickly tried to pacify irate provincial and municipal leaders in Ontario and the western provinces. In 1973, he eliminated the Special Areas program and introduced General Development Agreements (GDAs) and, in an unprecedented move, decentralized DREE’s administration to provincial and regional offices.⁷⁷ A “flexible” new joint federal-provincial administrative mechanism driven by provincial initiative rather than centralized planning, GDAs became a politically popular model for federal-provincial cooperation in economic development. GDAs also created a national institutional framework for the type of local public-private partnerships that Hamilton’s civic leaders and elected officials wanted to establish. DREE was legally precluded from working directly with the private sector or municipalities, but the terms of individual GDAs often created public corporations for which municipal governments served as agents. The arrangement gave municipal officials the authority either to undertake projects on their own, using federal and provincial funding, or to hire private developers to carry out publicly funded projects. In this way, municipalities had significant authority over the management of development projects, making GDAs popular with local as well as provincial governments.⁷⁸

Bureaucratic decentralization and the implementation of GDAs represented a sharp break from Trudeau’s plan to use centralized planning to redistribute wealth between provinces or regions within provinces. DREE’s new structure initially benefited wealthy Ontario and heavily industrialized areas like Hamilton. Under Jamieson, Canada’s economic development activities shifted toward provincially led development projects that leveraged federal incentives to entice private investment.⁷⁹ Jamieson announced in 1974 that “the process of regional development should not limit itself to rather narrow programs focused on solving problems.” Instead, he said, it should “include the process of identifying and pursuing in a flexible and imaginative manner the many existing development opportunities.”⁸⁰ The federal government began to use its regional development policy to stimulate private investment in distressed areas through federally financed demonstration projects, infrastructure improvements, and in some cases the relocation of federal offices, rather than to redistribute wealth from more prosperous to less prosperous regions. For municipal officials in cities like Hamilton who hoped to attract private-sector partners, DREE’s decentralization created tantalizing possibilities.

MSUA, too, quickly landed on public-private partnerships as a tool to achieve national urban development goals. Trudeau created MSUA to determine policy options for dealing with population forecasts that predicted an influx of new immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. Federal and provincial policymakers agreed that people and economic activity should be decentralized out of the primary population centers of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver to less-developed areas in those metropolitan regions and to smaller cities throughout the country, such as Hamilton. In contrast to DREE’s redistributive impulses in its early years, from the outset, MSUA officials rejected efforts to reduce population disparity or regional underdevelopment as an “explicit intrusion into the market” that might threaten business interests. Perhaps with the conflicts over DREE’s Special Areas program in mind, MSUA officials worried that the newly prosperous western provinces or economically weak regions in the East might begin to believe that they were at “some sort of serious disadvantage” relative to the industrial heartland and consider leaving the confederation. They were also concerned that population redistribution along the Windsor-Quebec corridor might agitate domestic and American-owned corporations that relied on proximity to the U.S. market.⁸¹

As the political climate shifted after the 1972 elections and the Trudeau administration sought to mollify western voters, MSUA officials, like those at DREE, began to look to provincial and private sector partners rather than centralized planning to achieve national urban development goals. By the middle of the decade, MSUA officials viewed public-private partnerships as a mechanism through which to secure private sector buy-in to Trudeau’s national planning agenda and to help finance urban development projects. DREE was prohibited from entering into direct agreements with municipalities or the private sector, but MSUA’s officials had greater freedom to facilitate joint ventures between the public and private sectors.⁸² They did so with a wary eye on similar partnerships in the United States and mandated that in Canada public-private partnerships must “satisfy the principles of responsible government,” which meant that no public agency involved in a partnership could relinquish its statutory duties to the private sector.⁸³ While MSUA officials acknowledged the need to provide an “attractive climate” for private developers, they also insisted that “no private agency should be able to profit from the public purse unduly” and that the government should “get a fair social return” for its investments.⁸⁴ Public-private partnerships were a fledgling enterprise in Canada in the 1970s, but thanks to DREE and MSUA, public officials at all levels of government were cautiously optimistic that partnerships might be part of the solution to the country’s urban and regional development problems. Hamilton’s elected officials had reason to believe that the Allegheny Conference-style partnership they desired might be on the horizon.

In the United States, as in Canada, tensions over urban and economic development simmered in the late 1960s within the federal system and between ascendant and declining regions. Four months after Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister, Nixon accepted the Republican presidential nomination. Nixon, like Trudeau, took office intending to restructure the relationship between national and subnational governments. Unlike Trudeau, Nixon did not see centralized planning as a vehicle through which to solve social problems. Instead, he argued that federal intervention exacerbated social problems. His predecessor’s Great Society programs had not ended poverty or the urban crisis, but they had dramatically expanded the federal bureaucracy and increased the complexity of federal aid to city and state governments. Democrats criticized Johnson for underfunding social programs, while Republicans denounced them as too expensive, civil rights leaders demanded a Marshall Plan for cities, community groups complained about increased red tape, and urban violence rose rather than fell. These circumstances allowed Nixon to take office with substantial bipartisan support for his plan to return control over urban affairs to lower levels of government, a proposal that found a receptive audience in the nation’s state houses.⁸⁵

During his first year in office, Nixon reminded Americans that the nation faced “an urban crisis, a social crisis—and, at the same time, a crisis of confidence in the capacity of government to do its job.” These crises, he said, were the legacy of three decades of failed social experiments emerging from New Deal. The government institutions established under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded under successive Democratic presidents, Nixon explained, had become a “bureaucratic monstrosity,” whose “entrenched” social programs were no longer relevant. His solution was simple: Nixon would restore to the states the autonomy Roosevelt had taken from them. It was time, he declared, for “a New Federalism,” a devolutionary program intended to decentralize authority away from the federal government and return power and money to the “states and the people.”⁸⁶

Nixon intended to decentralize federal power through revenue-sharing programs. He introduced a new program, general revenue sharing, designed to transfer a portion of federal revenue back to state and local governments. The week after announcing his New Federalism agenda, Nixon sent a message to Congress outlining a plan for general revenue sharing “to be used as the States and their local governments see fit—without Federal strings.” In his Congressional message, Nixon pointed particularly to the problems facing cities. Under Johnson, he argued, the federal government had promised too much and provided too little, which had created an urban crisis and led Americans to lose faith in the federal government. “Ultimately, it is our hope to use this mechanism to so strengthen State and local government that by the end of the coming decade, the political landscape of America will be visibly altered,” Nixon advised Congress, “and States and cities will have a far greater share of power and responsibility for solving their own problems.”⁸⁷

Nixon portentously described revenue sharing as a “turning point in Federal-State relations, the beginning of decentralization of governmental power, the restoration of a rightful balance between the State capitals and the national capital.”⁸⁸ He used the programs to direct federal aid away from socially and economically distressed central cities like New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh and toward constituents in prosperous suburbs and the Sunbelt.⁸⁹ His rhetoric of ending “unfairness,” restoring the constitutionally mandated relationship between levels of government, and fixing “broken” service delivery mechanisms obscured the basic assumption underlying his urban policy prescriptions: that out-of-control residents (and particularly the individual moral failings of African Americans in inner cities), rather than long-term structural problems such as racial discrimination and economic inequality, were the cause of urban social problems.

General revenue sharing proved popular among state and local officials. “General revenue sharing is the cornerstone of our national strategy and, as such, must be recognized and built upon,” National League of Cities vice president Allen Pritchard informed his board of directors. “We cannot allow those who don’t understand cities and our problems—as evidenced in their denunciation of general revenue sharing—to tear apart the coalition of city governments which triumphed over all odds in this field.”⁹⁰ Most governors, too, supported the new funding arrangements, which to them marked the success of two decades of lobbying for an increased state role in administering and distributing federal funds.⁹¹ Pennsylvania governor Milton J. Shapp, however, was among the program’s most outspoken critics. He broke with the National Governors’ Conference over revenue sharing and attacked Nixon and his supporters in state houses across the country for implementing a program that failed to solve the fiscal problems facing heavily industrialized states like his and manufacturing centers like Pittsburgh in both the short or long term.⁹² But serious critics of revenue sharing were in the minority, and the program remained popular among governors and mayors because it allowed them the nearly unrestricted use of federal funds.

Emboldened by the political success of general revenue sharing, Nixon set out to replace the categorical grant system used to administer social programs—the number of which had nearly doubled between 1962 and 1967—with special revenue-sharing “block grants” for particular types of activities, such as community development or public health, without reference to a specific project. Compared to categorical grants, block grants had very few conditions attached, required little federal oversight, and promised to dramatically reduce the number of applications city and state governments needed to file to receive federal aid in any given year. Administrators at all levels of government agreed that the federal grants-in-aid system had become unmanageable.⁹³ Nixon co-opted bipartisan support for streamlining administrative requirements for his more ideological project of realigning intergovernmental relations and weakening federal agencies that administered liberal social programs.

Gerald Ford signed Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) legislation into law the week after Nixon’s resignation. CDBG funds went disproportionately to central cities, and federal officials formulated CDBG as a “hold harmless” program, which ensured that urban areas had access to at least the same level of funding they had received through categorical grants. As a result, the program received fervent support from big city mayors like Pittsburgh’s Pete Flaherty.⁹⁴ With general revenue sharing and block grants, Nixon chose to sacrifice the fiscal for the ideological: he was far less concerned with transferring the burden of paying for urban development away from the federal government than he was with removing control of federal funds from the hands of Washington bureaucrats. Yet Nixon’s success with CDBG was evidence only of a widely perceived need for a streamlined grant application process, not of the emergence of a broad ideological consensus over the appropriate relationship between municipalities and the federal government.

In tandem with his revenue sharing proposals, Nixon decentralized oversight of federal urban development programs away from Washington. Federal housing, highway, and urban renewal programs required a large, centralized bureaucracy to review applications and administer and monitor grants; dismantling that capacity was the final aspect of Nixon’s New Federalism. In 1970, Nixon issued an executive order that created Federal Regional Councils (FRCs) charged with improving interaction between federal agencies and the local governments. The FRC system created ten multistate regions, each with a regional office and staff, to coordinate the grant-making activities of federal agencies. Nixon also decentralized HUD to thirty-nine area offices, which had the authority to make final commitments for almost all HUD programs. After expanding the federal bureaucracy in a bid to “streamline” government, Nixon called for drastic federal personnel cuts in the summer of 1971. At HUD, the expansion and almost immediate contraction of staff, combined with a pay freeze, damaged staff morale and capabilities for much longer than the duration of the hiring freeze.⁹⁵

Nixon invoked state and local autonomy to gain support for his attack on centralized planning. Like DREE and MSUA in Canada, general revenue sharing, block grants, and HUD’s decentralization fundamentally altered the relationship between the federal, state, and local governments. By minimizing federal “strings” on assistance programs, Nixon hamstrung federal agencies. He ensured that HUD officials “only had carrots and no sticks,” as one official complained, and made it difficult for federal agencies to implement a development agenda with a truly national scope. Instead, the federal government could shape national development patterns on a case-by-case basis only, by supporting projects proposed by the private sector or by quasi-public agencies.⁹⁶ Under Trudeau and Nixon, Canada and the United States had set out on different paths but arrived at the same destination: greater decentralization of federal authority and an increased reliance on the private sector to carry out urban development. U.S. cities like Pittsburgh had already established institutional mechanisms for public-private partnerships as part of federal urban renewal programs. DREE and MSUA laid the groundwork for Canadian cities like Hamilton to pursue similar arrangements.

In coming decades, the U.S. and Canadian governments would use decentralization and privatization as mechanisms to justify funding reductions in distressed urban areas. Growth coalitions with postindustrial ambitions in Pittsburgh and Hamilton had to work within the parameters of government retrenchment initiated under Nixon and Trudeau. In Hamilton, public officials and civic leaders continued to look to Pittsburgh as a redevelopment model but struggled to form more than an ad hoc public-private partnership. In Pittsburgh, the political coalition that nurtured the city’s redevelopment partnership began to lay the foundation for its eventual transition to a growth partnership. But at end of the 1960s Hamilton’s postwar urban renewal program remained stalled, Pittsburgh’s was completed, and public officials and civic leaders seemed unsure about the future direction of their cities.