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.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Ford Foundation funded an urban planning exchange between American academics and Yugoslav urban planners as something of a test case in transferring American planning technology to the socialist world. The American-Yugoslav Project was one of several international urban development projects the Ford Foundation pursued at mid-century as part of its Cold War-era cultural diplomacy efforts. The largely unsuccessful technology transfer at the center of the American-Yugoslav Project was a contributing factor to the Foundation’s retreat from international urban development and provides a case study in how one-size-fits-all development models falter when challenged by real-world conditions.
This article examines the role and influence of neighborhood organizations, state governments, and city officials in urban policy formation during the Carter Administration. In 1978, Jimmy Carter released the United States’ first comprehensive national urban policy, A New Partnership to Conserve America’s Communities. With its emphasis on voluntarism, decentralization, and public–private partnerships, the national urban policy accelerated the devolution of social policy begun under the Nixon Administration and laid the foundation for Reagan’s retrenchment. Looking beyond the urban policy deliberations to the activities of two other Carter initiatives, the National Commission on Neighborhoods and the White Conference on Balanced Growth and National Economic Development, demonstrates that state and local officials and neighborhood advocates were complicit in establishing and legitimating urban policies predicated on privatization and devolution.
17. The pinnacle of US Steel's industrial disinvestment was in the early 1980s, when, after more than forty consecutive years of profits, it shuttered many of its mills, while continuing its real estate development activities and purchasing Marathon Oil, which was at that time the biggest merger in American history. 18. Sistaker, "The Quiet Billionare," 151.
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