What do they have in common? Air-powered brakes, tomato ketchup, steam ships, radio broadcasts, jeep cars, nuclear power, Apollo spacecraft, McDonald's Big Mac Burger, polio vaccine, heart transplant surgery.... If you're not sure, what do the following people have in common? Andy Warhol, George Benson, Thomas Mellon, Henry Heinz, Andrew Carnegie…. Perhaps many readers will answer Carnegie's name. The answer is Pittsburgh. I've listed the products, artists, and entrepreneurs born in this city. I've been to Pittsburgh, a city of long innovation and creation. It was the end of February when COVID-19 exploded in Daegu and the United States issued a warning against travel to Korea.
Pittsburgh is a small city with a population of 300,000, but the Pittsburgh area is the 20th largest metropolitan area in the United States with a population of 2.6 million. When we think of Pittsburgh, we usually think of only the Oakland area where Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are located, and the magnificent high-rise forests where the Allegheny and Monongehela rivers intersect. However, until the 1960s, Pittsburgh was a center of industrial production that was lined with numerous steel mills and manufacturing plants along these two major rivers and the Ohio River. Pittsburgh's true appearance may be in a lonely riverside industrial zone that is now empty of factories.
Pittsburgh is connected to Washington DC by canal, and through the Ohio River, it is the starting point for inland logistics that reach the Midwestern industrial zone off the Great Lakes coast with Chicago and Detroit to the north and the Mississippi River to the south. In addition, it was called "America's Birmingham" as it was rich in coal. In the early 20th century, when Carnegie, the steel king, owned 40% of the region's steel mills and was in charge of 60% of the U.S. steel production in Pittsburgh, it was called the Iron City and was a hub of money-and-people industries. Founded by Thomas Mellon from Pittsburgh in the region, Mellon Bank owned or raised leading companies during the industrialization period such as Gulf Oil, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, US Steel, Heinz, Westinghouse and Alcoa. During World War II, it was in its heyday with the production of munitions, and it became notorious as a "Smoky City" where factory smoke covered the sky. After World War II, when the specialties of war disappeared, Pittsburgh Renaissance movements such as eradicating soot and redeveloping the city center took place, and electronics, space, and nuclear industries centered on Westinghouse were newly developed.
But once upon a time, when traditional U.S. industries were undergoing restructuring in the 1970s, they were pushed by latecomers, and Pittsburgh, along with other industrial cities in the Midwest, fell into the so-called Rust Belt. From 1977 to 1987, 75 percent of steel mills closed and 350,000 jobs were cut in the steel industry alone. When construction of a new nuclear power plant was halted after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Westinghouse also went downhill. With a population of 700,000 people, Pittsburgh plummeted to 300,000 a city.
But now it is different. The city has been reborn as a city leading the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With 1,600 high-tech companies in the city, it was chosen as the second largest American Dream city and the fifth largest city to live in. In 2009, the G20 World Summit was held in Pittsburgh. It became such a successful city that President Obama praised, "Pittsburgh is an exemplary case of creating new jobs and industries in the 21st century." What made the representative Rust Belt city become the new economic model of the 21st century?
The Ben Franklin Partnership (BFP) project conducted by the Pennsylvania state government in 1983 was an opportunity for a comeback. It was to create cooperative governance between the state, the business community, and research-oriented universities in Pennsylvania, and to establish Advanced Technology Centers in four locations. BFP also served as a venture capital. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh jointly attracted the BFP project to establish a technology investment company called Advanced Technology Center and Innovation Works. The focus was on technology development and start-up support that could be commercialized. It was decided to industrialize R&D by utilizing world-class research universities, away from the geographical advantages of Pittsburgh in the past, such as abundant resources and logistics.
Carnegie Mellon University already had world-class competitiveness in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer science. Because of its successful R&D industrialization, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Intel, Oracle, Yahoo, and Walt Disney are currently conducting industry-academic cooperation by establishing research institutes or branches. The University of Pittsburgh specialized in medical and bio, focusing on University Hospitals (UPMC). Currently, UPMC has grown into a non-profit organization with 40 hospitals and 87,000 employees across Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania and has become Pittsburgh's largest employer. In Pittsburgh, a metropolitan area with a population of 2.6 million, the number of knowledge industry workers is 415,200, and it is estimated that the number has increased by 128,400 since 1990. It is also the second city in the United States to have significantly increased residents with bachelor's and master's and doctoral degrees, following Boston.
Pittsburgh did not become the center of the new economy in the post-industrial era solely with state funding and university research. It was followed by the Allegheny Conference, a civil society-led public-private consultative body and think tank. The Allegheny Conference was established in 1944 by the Mellon family's Richard King Mellon, Carnegie Endowment for Technology Robert Doherty, and Pittsburgh Mayor David Lawrence, who successfully led the Pittsburgh Renaissance movement after World War II.
As Pittsburgh's industry collapsed and the economic crisis accelerated, the Allegheny Conference, which included political figures such as business leaders, university presidents, scholars, and mayors, presented a vision of Strategy 21 in the 21st century and triggered the second Pittsburgh Renaissance movement. The core of the movement was the technology-based industry and the creation of an attractive city. It quickly attracted the state's BFP projects, helping to create new growth engines centered on the R&D industry. In 1985, it created a 2 trillion won urban infrastructure innovation project with the monetary value, and achieved the construction of a new airport and the expansion of a wide-area transportation network through state and federal support. In order to create a city where highly educated populations such as scientists, engineers, and venture investors want to live, it has also started redeveloping the city center and expanding cultural facilities. These include the construction of the Andy Warhol Art Museum, the relocation of the Pittsburgh History Museum to the city center, and the construction of PNC Park (the home baseball stadium of Pittsburgh Pirates).
Recently, Pittsburgh has been called the Brain Belt, not the Rust Belt. It has successfully entered the knowledge-based new system in post-industrial society. It attracts as many highly educated young people as San Francisco does. However, it does not have a bright side. Rick Stafford, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was the former general secretary of the Allegheny Conference, expressed concern, saying, "Fitzburg has successfully revived. However, we must overcome the growing income inequality between classes and regions and the challenges of digital deviations." High-wage service jobs in the Hi-tech and medical industries have increased, mainly in the Oakland area, but most of them are knowledge workers from outside the country. Many of the region's natives, especially those from former steel mills and factories, have left their homes, leaving only the elderly.
In 1877, trams connecting the factory area along the Mononguehela River and the residence of workers in the mountain neighborhood began to run. Since then, 60 have been installed to help workers commute to and from work. Currently, only two are in operation for tourism. Among them, I climbed the mountain neighborhood by Duquesne Incline. In front of the mountain town, there was an endless line of luxury houses. This may be because it has a heavenly view of the Dumulmeori River and the forest of high-rise buildings in downtown Pittsburgh. Behind it were somewhat old houses. This may be because the houses were built on a hill with no particular view. Small observations are prepared everywhere between high-end houses. We looked at the Mononguehela River and the empty land that would have been a factory site in the past. Surrounding industrial areas such as Ulsan and Pohang on the Taehwa River came to mind. Using Pittsburgh, the mecca of Korea's heavy and chemical industry, as a contrast teacher, we tried to do our best not to lose the competitiveness of the existing industry, and took Pittsburgh as a model to hope that high-tech knowledge industries could grow around universities such as Pohang University of Technology and Ulsan National University of Science and Technology.
