Remaking Small Post-Industrial Towns

Abstract:Throughout the American industrial heartland, hundreds of small factory towns along rivers and railroad lines have essentially been abandoned. The factories that once employed thousands of workers closed forty years ago, resulting in vacant industrial and commercial buildings, contaminated soils, deteriorated housing stock, and population losses of more than 50 percent, particularly of young people and skilled workers. Tax bases are inadequate for basic government services such as police, fire, public health, education, and infrastructure. However, many large post-industrial cities both in the United States, such as Pittsburgh, and in Europe, such as Turin, Italy, have transformed themselves over the last forty years. Success stories from ten cities, five in the United States and five in Europe, are documented in the book I edited, Remaking Post-Industrial Cities: Lessons Learned from North America and Europe (Routledge 2016). In this article, I use the lessons learned from those ten cities to examine recent revitalization efforts in four small post-industrial river towns in the Pittsburgh region.