Abstract
Since 1985, Pittsburgh has been hailed as a model of the livable city. Just like in the heady days of the steel industry when delegations arrived to learn industrial secrets, today they come to learn the secrets of civic rebirth. Tracy Neumann's Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America is part of a growing historical literature that challenges a popular narrative of postindustrialism which treats the recent transformation of cities as an inevitable outcome of modern capitalism. Neumann persuasively argues that in the United States and Canada the remade city is the product of intentional actions by elite growth coalitions that "narrowly focused on creating the jobs, services, leisure activities, and cultural institutions that they believed would attract middle class professionals. In doing so, local officials abandoned social democratic goals in favor of corporate welfare programs, fostering an increasing economic inequality among their residents in the process."
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