The Ancient Inhabitants of Pitt's Burg

WASHINGTON—A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

...

With his team having so far cataloged the decaying ruins of more than 400 edifices believed to have been used solely for human employment, Mueller said he now believes the inhabitants of mid-20th-century North America may have built their territory—in particular, the Great Lakes region and northern Appalachia—into one of the most advanced and prosperous civilizations in the world.

Numerous scholars told reporters the findings have challenged everything they thought they knew about the fundamental organization of human societies, calling it "staggering" and "almost unbelievable" that a culture predating our own had been able to provide work to nearly every person who sought it.

"By today's standards, the job creators' society was highly unusual," anthropologist Carla Delgado of the Smithsonian Institution said. "One of its more bizarre customs involved workers being employed at the same job at the same location day in and day out for their entire adult lives. It was grueling, perhaps, but astonishingly, some of these individuals were able to set aside part of their earnings for the future, slowly saving money with the hope of improving the prospects of their offspring."

"The amazing part is, this bafflingly high level of economic security went on for generations," Delgado added.

Archaeologists who participated in digs on the sites described ghostly scenes of intact but empty homes, halted conveyor belts, and crumbling storehouses still full of the lost people's signature "auto parts."

By examining recovered artifacts, they have reportedly been able to decipher the names of what they speculate must have been the grandest settlements from the height of the job creators' empire: cities known among the ancients as Gary, Lansing, Cleve-Land, Sandusky, and Pitt's Burg.

Link to the full story.

Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh, Part 2

Here is the next installment on my brief “Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh” series. Read the first installment for the background and the premise.

Today’s topic: Pittsburgh’s social and culture climate.

I’m pretty sure that if I were coming fresh to Pittsburgh today, I would react very much as I reacted when I arrived in 1998. This place is full of warm and friendly people. The core decency of Pittsburgh, its communal and communitarian spirit, its family-friendliness, its respect for history and tradition (which good things in my book, all things considered), its presumptively accepting nature – or at least its tolerant spirit – come through pretty quickly in social settings across a broad range of Pittsburgh neighborhoods and the towns of the region. Fred Rogers was still alive and active in the late 1990s, and I like to think that his “neighborly” spirit, so evident in his life as well as in his work, continues to pervade Pittsburgh. There aren’t a lot of decent-sized cities in the US, I think, where it’s expected that you will know your neighbors, and that they will know you.

That’s the great news.

As with any portrait like this, there is some less-than-great news. And it took me a little while to figure this out, but it comes through as clearly to a sharp-eyed newcomer as Pittsburgh’s friendliness does.
All of that neighborliness, all of that friendliness, all of that know-your-community spirit is descended from generations of Pittsburghers living in an essentially static place. Thousands and thousands of people emigrated to Pittsburgh over the course of the 19th century and built rich communities and neighborhoods. (Culturally rich, if not always financially rich.) In the 20th century, they stayed. And their children stayed. And their children’s children stayed. And so on. And then a lot of people left.

What’s missing in that lightning-quick account of Pittsburgh demographics is a story of thousands and thousands of people moving to Pittsburgh over the course of the 20th century, bringing the topsy-turviness of modern urbanity to Western PA as it came to bigger places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, and New York. That didn’t happen, at least not on a broad scale. Over the course of the 20th century, Pittsburgh became (or remained) a massive collection of small towns, masquerading as neighborhoods. Today, you get that small town neighborliness, and you also get that small town insularity, nosiness, and exclusion – even in, or perhaps especially in, the upper echelons of Pittsburgh “society.” Business networks, status hierarchies, and community politics are built on participation in and knowledge of decades of living in the same town. At its worst, Pittsburgh’s friendliness comes at the price of submission and acceptance of neighborhood orthodoxy, where neighborhoods exist at different and overlapping scales, and exist both physically and conceptually. In the late Spring, you may see people walking the streets of Pittsburgh wearing Philadelphia Flyers sweaters. Pay them no mind; friendly Pittsburghers know better than to engage with such wrong-headedness. Instead, recite “Let’s Go Pens!” at every available opportunity, until the slogan becomes trivial – a statement of belonging, rather than belief. To live in Pittsburgh and question loyalty to the Penguins or the Steelers is to acknowledge that you are somehow not a “real” Pittsburgher.

Is that too grim (and unfair to hockey fans in particular)? Maybe. Some of the nastier edges of these things have been sanded off over the last decade, at least in some parts of Allegheny County, as population flows have stabilized – somewhat, as the “not born here” community has gotten more traction and confidence in local affairs, and as the influence of multiple generations on single native communities and neighborhoods has been diluted. I can still point to this neighborhood or to that one as the home of the Italian community in Pittsburgh, or the Polish community, or the Germans, and I know which towns up or downriver have strong Czech or Slovak traditions. A lot of people are justifiably proud of the continuity represented in all of those places. But the great strength of Pittsburgh society and culture – its sense of community-based history and tradition – is also, when “tradition” becomes faith, or “traditionalism,” its greatest weakness.

To someone with “Fresh Eyes,” does any of this make a difference?

Yes and no.

No, in the sense that people are people and communities are communities, and we live among each other and make the best places we can. Pittsburgh’s obsession with professional sports reflects its community spirit. Sports don’t create that spirit. Just look at places that have fantastic and successful sports teams – San Francisco, right now – and note the utter absence of the kind of community-based society and culture that is characteristic of Pittsburgh. Sports can’t create community where no community is present. When community is totally lacking – Los Angeles – sporting culture is almost entirely detached from the life of the place. Perhaps sports in LA authentically reflect its artificiality.

Yes, in the sense that Pittsburgh’s traditions and traditionalism at times spill over into bigger, interesting domains, like civic renewal (did Pittsburgh reinvent itself through great top-down planning over the last 20 years? So says the Economist magazine, and if the Economist says so, then it must be true! Bah.); the relative absence of a risk-taking entrepreneurial culture in the arts and business communities (at long last, this may be changing); and decades-old partisan political debates, and divides between city and suburb. Some time back, I characterized Pittsburgh culture with the following bit of snark: Don’t just do something, stand there! But I think that phrase isn’t as applicable to Pittsburgh, socially and culturally, as it once was. The changes in the region’s culture, like greatness in general, have been thrust upon it rather than sought out, but either way, Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers are mostly happy to have them.

Next up for my painting with a broad brush: arts and sports.

Pittsburgh's Mind Bank

A profile of East Liberty in the upscale British travel/culture/lifestyle magazine "Monocle" (paywalled here; an expat friend sent me the full text) asks:

Is East Liberty America's Next Silicon Valley?

The answer: a qualified "maybe." Ah, the Fourth Estate.

The piece includes a fabulous quote at the end of the following paragraph, from the Warhol's Eric Shiner. The excerpt is an accurate and pithy rejoinder to the misleading "Pittsburgh rebuilt itself!" narrative.

Buoyed by vibrant medical and academic sectors, and propped-up by well-financed family foundations, a leaner and increasingly greener Pittsburgh has emerged as a low cost/high quality of life location for knowledge industry start-ups and venture capital. As Andy Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner explains of his home town, “Although my generation all left after college, the universities and rich cultural institutions helped keep the city’s mind bank alive.

Master Gardening Pittsburgh

Having blogged in Pittsburgh for a long time, I get press releases.  Lots of press releases.  Most of them go into the spam file; that way I don't have to read two releases from the same agency.  But I usually glance at the subject line, and once in a while there is something interesting.  I found something interesting today:

Pittsburgh's Phipps Conservatory, by any measure one of the true jewels of the region, hired top-drawer South Side PR pros Red House to distribute this press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 26, 2011 Phipps Now Accepting Applications for 2012 Master Gardener Program

One of Pennsylvania’s oldest and most respected training courses open to new participants. Pittsburgh, Pa.—“What is wrong with my tomatoes?”; “Why are my pine trees losing their needles?”; “When and how do I plant flower bulbs?”: These are just a few of the questions answered daily by Master Gardeners, a group of horticulture volunteers who share their knowledge and experience as volunteers for Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. As a new year approaches, Pittsburgh’s premier public garden is now pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for its 2012 training course.

Conceived in 1972 by a Cooperative Extension Service agent in Washington state, the Master Gardener Program was developed to train volunteer gardeners to assist professional horticulturists in meeting the increasing public demand for gardening help. The program held at the Phipps Garden Center in historic Mellon Park—one of the oldest and most respected in the state—is not only tailored to Pittsburgh’s changing horticultural needs, but also helps the Conservatory carry out its educational mission.

“Whether they are answering horticultural questions for members of the public, teaching classes, or working in our greenhouses, Master Gardeners are integral to the work that we do here at Phipps,” says Director of Horticulture Margie Radebaugh. “By helping members of our community learn new skills, find solutions to problems, and achieve success in their landscapes and gardens, they are not only connecting others with nature, but also making our city a greener and more beautiful place to live.” Phipps Master Gardener Program classes, covering topics from plant problem diagnosis and pruning to botany and entomology, start in January 2012 and run for 23 weeks on Tuesday evenings from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Those interested in applying are asked to contact Sarah Bertovich at 412/441-4442, ext. 3925 or sbertovich@phipps.conservatory.org. The application deadline is November 10, 2011.

Whatever the reasons for the renewed interest in urban gardening, the renewal is great. Fortunately for local gardeners, Allegheny County has an abundance of resources -- in addition to Phipps.

Master Gardener-wannabes in Allegheny County should know that there are *two* Master Gardener programs here, one (above) run by Phipps, and the other run through the Penn State University Cooperative Extension. The latter group -- the Penn State Master Gardeners -- is the volunteer education and training group that is trained by and affiliated with the national Master Gardener movement. That movement is connected in every state (well, 48 out of 50) to that state's public agricultural extension service, provided through public land grant universities. In other words: these volunteers are part-and-parcel of your tax dollars at work! Penn State launched its Master Gardener program in 1982, and well north of 1,000 volunteer Penn State Master Gardeners now provide services to the public in 58 Pennsylvania counties. To the best of my knowledge, the Phipps program is not part of the national public MG enterprise.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Master gardening programs.

Here is the American Horticultural Society description of MG programs.

I don't have any personal acquaintance with the Phipps program. I do have lots of experience with the Penn State program, which is big (and growing) and varied and hugely successful and populated by smart, dedicated, and caring people who provide all kinds of *free* resources to both casual and serious gardeners. And since the Penn State folks don't have the resources to hire Red House and send out press releases, once in a while I like to throw a few Pittsblog props their way.

See the Penn State Master Gardeners of Allegheny County website here. Find lots of programs and free resources!

See the principal Master Gardener website for Penn State.

See this earlier Pittsblog post about gardening resources in Allegheny County.

Fresh Eyes on Pittsburgh, Part 1

Some time back I promised to take a look at Pittsburgh with Fresh Eyes. When I wrote that post I was inspired by what turns out to have been an all-too-brief run of great play by the Pitt Panthers football team. But I’ll follow through anyway. Who knows? With the right players, the spread offense may have a future at Pitt. My Fresh Eyes series is intended to be similarly open to the proverbial possibilities.

Here is my premise: What if I put myself today in the position that I was in during the late Summer of 1998: fresh to Pittsburgh, with young kids and just about zero knowledge of the city and region? Well, not me, but someone in more or less that position. What does Pittsburgh look like to a newcomer in 2011?

I’ll skip over answers to some important, interesting questions, such as where would this person be coming from, and what that person’s backgrounds and interests would be, and why that person is coming to Pittsburgh? In 1998 the “why Pittsburgh?” question might have been asked – both here and elsewhere – with a serious look: What sane person would give up a life in (New York) (Boston) (Washington DC) (Chicago) (Seattle) (San Francisco) (Los Angeles) (Denver) (Topeka) (Memphis) (Pierre) and move to the heart of the Rust Belt?

I had a good job waiting for me in 1998, but I had my doubts about Pittsburgh. I knew that Pittsburgh had a hub airport for USAir, a football team that was an arch-rival of the Oakland Raiders (and I was something of a Raiders fan when I was young), some surprisingly cheap if relentlessly grey real estate, and an extraordinary small-town chip on its collective shoulder. I figured out a couple of things pretty quickly. I learned about the essential family-friendliness of Pittsburgh and its community-based sensibility. I noticed that Pittsburgh is home to some extraordinary economic and cultural resources. And I puzzled over the continuing stagnation. I remember an early lunch with a colleague at Pitt, who arrived in the early 1990s, where I expressed some wonder at an obvious disconnect. Why did Pittsburgh, a city with so many things going for it, beat itself up in public? Why wasn’t Pittsburgh leveraging those resources? Why wasn’t it a proud economic powerhouse?

I spent many thousands of words a couple of years ago reviewing my answers to those last questions, as the tides came in and Pittsburgh's fortunes slowly turned. I won’t repeat all of that here.

Instead, the question now is: What would my impressions be today? I’ll take things in a series of posts: the economic climate, the social/cultural climate, arts and sports, politics and government, and the environment.

Today: The economic climate.

Economically, there is living, and there is working.

On both fronts, Pittsburgh today suffers from a collective boosterism that is difficult to avoid or ignore. The Allegheny Conference and its affiliates focus relentlessly on the Pittsburgh’s silly “most livable city” status. And it's not just the ACCD; somewhere, there is a giant vat of Pittsburgh Kool-Aid, and folks like the well--intentioned staff of the National Geographic are drinking it.  Set the livability rankings aside; any newcomer to the region would have to do the same thing. Look at where people are living, and what they are doing there.

First, on the living front, the good news: A new generation of developers and urban homesteaders have revived residential real estate markets Downtown, in the Strip, across to the North Side, up into Lawrenceville and Highland Park, past the 14th Ward and the East End, across to Greenfield, and down into the South Side. My best guess is that Uptown is poised for a move, and when the post-Civic Arena dust settles, the Hill, too, may re-emerge. (It may re-emerge to discover a Cheesecake Factory at its edge, however.) Pittsburgh’s “livability” reputation is due largely to its low-priced and modestly moving real estate market, but it isn’t entirely undeserved; newcomers have a broad range of attractive living options, especially in Pittsburgh proper.  Pittsburgh’s suburbs haven’t benefitted from quite the same buzz that has driven and been driven by a few city neighborhoods, but you can find a few with mojo, I think (Dormont?), even if the majority are cruising complacently along (Mt. Lebanon?). A dozen years ago, when I was deciding whether to live in the city or in the suburbs, the quality of public schools was a key factor for me, and perhaps the only factor.  As a veteran of urban public school politics in other places, I didn’t have the energy to fight or to ask my children to endure the school-based battles that I foresaw if I settled in the City of Pittsburgh. To the suburbs I went. I haven’t regretted that decision. But I am not sure that I would make the same choice so quickly today. In part the City of Pittsburgh has made education a priority. That road has been rocky at times, but on the whole city residents have options for their kids that didn’t exist a dozen years ago. In part some of the better suburban districts have taken their eye off of the education quality ball. I know that’s been true in Mt. Lebanon, where I live. For several years the Lebo School Board and much of the community have been embroiled in a nasty and unproductive debate about how gold-plated a gold-plated new high school complex should be. A while back I called Mt. Lebanon the canary in Pittsburgh’s community coal mine; if Lebo, as smugly well-managed as it has been historically, can’t keep its act together, then what would the future hold for the far more economically diverse and historically contentious City of Pittsburgh? The jury is out on that one; maybe Lebo is just an outlier.

There is not so good news on the living front. Neighborhood and community revival has come, when and where it has come, largely on the heels of population turnover. Pittsburgh neighborhoods and communities in the region that have seen less in-migration (or continued out-migration) continue either to suffer and stagnate or not to reap the benefits of Pittsburgh’s newish buzz, or both. Schools are mediocre – when they aren’t being closed. Pittsburgh broadly writ still bears the burden of a century-long decline of the steel industry that, in many subtle ways, the region didn’t internalize until the early 1980s, when the region had no choice.  Those places aren’t “livable” in the sense that Forbes or The Economist recognize. A dozen years ago, a newcomer to Pittsburgh couldn’t help but notice them, because the scars of the collapse of steel were just about everywhere. I remember the first time I drove up to Kennywood, during my first summer here, and thinking that what I saw pretty much confirmed my stereotyped sense of a place that had never escaped its Deer Hunter time or iconography. Today, many of those scars give the appearance of healed tissue, but some of the deepest wounds remain.  They are marginalized, to a special degree, in Pittsburgh’s modern public narrative.

Second, from living to working: Here, too, there is good news and bad news. The good news, I think, is that a sense of cautious optimism pervades most of Pittsburgh’s private economy today to a degree that is unprecedented in my time here. The fact that this optimism persists in the face of a global recession/depression makes it all the more impressive. In 1998 I felt a distinct sense of apathy about the region’s future; today I feel a corresponding sense of pace, even impatience.

The bad news, is that optimism about the region’s future is badly distributed across Pittsburgh’s geography and across markets. Focus on energy, entertainment, IT, robotics, life sciences, and higher education, and the future looks bright. Focus on low-tech manufacturing, professional services, and health care, and the future looks glum, or murky:  declining employment (manufacturing) or consolidation and oversupply (professional services, health care).  That's the mixed figure; the equally mixed ground is a new labor market and a new global context.

From the standpoint of labor markets, on this blog I used to complain a lot about Pittsburgh’s shortage of middle management. Pittsburgh had the technology developers, it had the CEOs, and if you knew or know where to look, it had the investors. It didn’t have, and couldn’t attract, corporate middleware: VPs and directors to run growing companies. I don’t hear those complaints any longer. Anecdotally, that tells me that the demand curve has shifted; moving to Pittsburgh isn’t quite the risky career move that it might have been back in 2002, because exit options exist here now that didn’t exist before. A less-risky labor market for newcomers means a modestly more risky labor market for those who already live here.  I've said before that I think that Pittsburgh wins in that trade-off, but I'm sure that not everyone agrees.

From a global perspective, in 1998 Pittsburgh was almost righteous in its insistence that the city and region had little to do with the rest of the world, unless the rest of the world wanted to buy Pittsburgh stuff. That attitude has largely evaporated. Pittsburgh isn’t as aggressive about building economic bridges to other countries as I think that it should be, but the region is light-years ahead of where it was a decade ago. That openness has done wonders for Pittsburgh’s small and medium size firms. A better funded if still somewhat conservative investor community has also helped, along with some important real estate development initiatives in the city proper and some key local R&D investments by global firms. In many ways East Liberty has been malled over, but a thriving mall is much better for the city than a lot of vacant housing and storefronts.) Pittsburgh’s giants are trying to figure out their places in the new world order. Higher education is, all things considered, on a slow but steady path to stability, although in general higher education here is a bit “old school,” if you will, in its thinking about what colleges and universities should be. The recent and ongoing UPMC/Highmark battle suggests that the region’s sclerotic health care community has a long way to go. Opening Pittsburgh's doors more broadly to the outside means that there will be some winners in Pittsburgh.  And some losers.  To a newcomer, in time this will make Pittsburgh more like many regions elsewhere -- somewhat more prone to highs and lows than it has been over the last several decades.  Will that be good overall for Pittsburgh? 

Next: Pittsburgh’s social and cultural climate.

Jobs Story

[Cross-posted, with some changes, from my other blog.] 

Much of the media blitz surrounding the death of Steve Jobs focused not only on amazing Apple products (AAP) that he shepherded to the market, and not only on what an inspirational, visionary leader he became, but also on How Can We Find More People Like Steve?

Carl Kurlander's piece is representative of this view:  What Pittsburgh needs is more outliers willing to be different!  We just have to find them.

Steve Jobs, visionary leader that he was, thought about this problem. It’s an innovation problem, and more or less like the innovation problems that IP systems wrestle with all the time. Once we innovate, how do we ensure that the innovation thrives, and takes hold, and propagates (or is propagated) for the benefit of different communities and future generations? Jobs seems to have convinced himself that the way to do this was not just by ensuring the survival of Apple itself, or Pixar. The key was more Steves, or simulcra of Steve.

“More Steves” suggests that more Steves could be made, not just found. Is that true? Can Steve-like leadership (vision, innovation, iconoclasm, persistence) be taught — and if it can be taught, can it be learned?  Is the problem not "finding Steve" but "teaching Steve"?  Or at least a good bit of the first, given that the second is really, really hard?

Apple has built Apple University on the premise that the answers are “yes.” The existence of Apple U. has been openly talked about for a while, but the program of Apple U. has not been clear. Jobs’s death and that LA Times story in the link bring it out into the open for the first time that I’ve seen. For several years, the Apple U. initiative has been led by former Yale School of Management dean Joel Podolney. Back in 2006, I wrote here about Podolney’s record at Yale, which was, in a way that must have appealed to Steve Jobs, transformative.

Analysts say Jobs drew inspiration for the university from Bill Hewlett and David Packard, whose greatest creation was not the pocket calculator or the minicomputer, but Hewlett-Packard itself. Hewlett and Packard famously set out their company’s core values in “The HP Way.”

With Apple University, Jobs was trying to achieve something similar, people familiar with the project say. He identified tenets that he believes unleash innovation and sustain success at Apple — accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, secrecy. And he oversaw the creation of university-caliber courses that demonstrate how those principles translate into business strategies and operating practices.

The idea of building an ivory tower on a corporate campus goes back decades with the best-known — and oldest — run by General Electric. Corporate universities fell out of favor in the 1990s, considered too expensive, bureaucratic and out of touch with the companies they were supposed to serve. Even Apple shut down its corporate university.

But Jobs’ interest in a corporate university never wavered, former employees say. For years he pressed for a way to study the success of Apple’s executive team as well as Apple’s culture and history. His model was Pixar. The animation studio that Jobs sold to Disney for $7.5 billion in 2006 runs Pixar University, a professional development program that offers courses in fine arts and filmmaking as well as leadership and management to steep employees in the company’s culture, history and values as well as its craft.

The HP Way could become the Apple Way. Or (a la Pixar) Jobs Story. When I was practicing law in Palo Alto years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet and briefly to work with some senior HP executives. I heard a lot about the HP Way, and I saw some of it in action. In its day and in its way, the HP Way was incredibly impressive – and effective. It preached collaboration, respect, achievement, and integrity. Not quite the set of values reported above with respect to Apple, and not quite the set of values associated with Steve Jobs in the many public accounts of his life and behavior. But times have changed.

[Updated (Oct. 11 2011): Kieran Healy has related thoughts in this post, A Sociology of Steve Jobs.]

Pitt Law IPI: Google Event Coming

It's been awhile since I posted anything about the Innovation Practice Institute (IPI) at my home institution, Pitt's law school.  We've been programming up a storm, but our social media presence has, let us say, lagged.

Coming next is an event that is too interesting to let slip:

The Innovation Practice Institute (IPI) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law cordially invites you to our second Investing in Innovation event on Thursday, October 20th, 2011, at 4:30 pm, at Google Pittsburgh (Bakery Square).

The IPI’s Investing in Innovation series promotes innovation and economic development by showcasing a new or developing industry in the region, and by introducing local innovators and start-ups within that industry to the regional civic, business, and investment communities. Our next Investing in Innovation event – Above the Cloud: Pittsburgh and the Data Revolution -- celebrates Pittsburgh as an emerging global center for cutting-edge big data and cloud computing research and innovation.

The event is hosted by the Innovation Practice Institute (Pitt Law) and Google Pittsburgh, and will be held on October 20th at Google Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square Office. The evening will commence at 4:30pm with welcoming remarks by Congressman Mike Doyle, and a keynote address by Andrew Moore, the Engineering Director of Google Pittsburgh, followed by a moderated panel discussion featuring regional innovators Pat Scanlon (Post-Gazette), John Dick (Civic Science), Jerome Pesenti (Vivisimo), Kevin Perkey (3RC), and Robert Namestka (Screaming Data).

Refreshments will be served.

This event is made possible through the generosity of Google Pittsburgh, Alpern Rosenthal and Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis, LLP.

It's free, but advance registration is required.  Register here.

The first "Investing in Innovation" event was held last May, at Carnegie Mellon:  "Astrobotic Technology and Pittsburgh’s Quest for the Moon."  There are more on the way.

[Updated 10/12/11:  Pitt Law now has an event announcement up on its "Events" listing.]

Powering Up Pittsburgh

There is another new "innovation task force" on the runway:  "PowerUp Pittsburgh."

From the Mayor's Office:

The purpose of PowerUp Pittsburgh is to accelerate the commercialization of tech innovation activities to create jobs, particularly in underserved neighborhoods around Pittsburgh. It is a collaborative strategy that will bring together a wide range of participants to ensure that community resources – research and innovation, grant funding, government policies, corporate and philanthropic dollars – are aligned to take commercialization activities from the Oakland hub to spokes across the city.

The strategy will include:

• The creation of PowerUp Pittsburgh, including a university-funded director position to coordinate the broad regional effort;
• The creation of a dedicated Director of Innovation position at the URA to serve as a liaison to innovation, technology, and new economy based companies;
• The formation of the Pittsburgh Innovation Economic Panel;
• Efforts to enhance tech transfer at the Universities;
• Coordinated regional applications to numerous federal programs;
• And an effort to leverage the Oakland technology economy with numerous physical incubation spokes in Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including a major spoke in Hazelwood.

From the Post-Gazette:

Mr. Ravenstahl said he envisions a "hub-and-spoke" system with research and entrepreneurship in Oakland -- the city's university and hospital corridor -- spilling into other neighborhoods. The initiative complements his efforts to extend a spate of residential and commercial development and other improvements, the so-called Third Renaissance, from Downtown into the neighborhoods.

From Essential Public Radio (formerly WDUQ):

William Generett, Executive Director of the Pittsburgh Central Keystone Innovation Zone, said Pittsburgh has done well recently. “One thing that disturbs me is how bad our African American population is doing here”, said Generett. “African Americans make up about 27% of the city’s population and our data shows this group is one of the poorest African American groups in the country. So a lot of our work today needs to be connecting the group to the benefits of the innovation economy.”

It's my nature to be skeptical of things like this.  I was skeptical of the Mayor's tech task force, launched with a lot of fanfare last December.  I think that the last ten months -- even the launch of "PowerUp Pittsburgh" -- confirms that the skepticism was warranted.  I won't be quite as critical here.  I hope that something good comes out of PUP.  But here are reasons to be skeptical -- again:

1.  The name.  It sounds like a sports drink.

2.  The players.  Pittsburgh loves to appoint the usual C-level suspects to run task forces.  The leaders of this one?  Ravenstahl, Nordenberg, Cohon, Yablonsky.  Heard of these guys before, have you?  Where are the new folks?

3.   The strategy.  In the innovation economy, you can't pick winners.  You've got to create fertile territory, make lots of resources available (money, innovation talent, and management talent) and place a lot of bets.  And the "you" in that equation is rarely "the government."  "The government" should mostly make the place attractive to the money, innovation talent, and management talent, which means having a public services infrastructure that is robust, well-managed, and not - er - essentially bankrupt.  (That's a hugely simplified picture, but this is a blog, not a policy paper.)  Once the table is set, let the economy do its thing.

4.   The payoff.  The innovation economy is not a jobs driver.  In the PG, the Mayor is quoted:

Speakers at Thursday's news conference didn't give any specific goals for job-creation, but Mr. Ravenstahl said he expects to see vacant storefronts used for business start-ups and research ventures.

"That will kind of be the litmus test for me -- which neighborhoods are experiencing jobs, which neighborhoods are experiencing opportunity," he said.

If that's the litmus test, then the PUP is setting itself up for failure.  The innovation economy is an ideas and new ventures driver first, and a jobs driver only second - and only over the long term.  There are references in the news coverage to finding and unleashing the next Steve Jobs -- in Pittsburgh.  That's an awesome vision.  Yet Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) was hardly a US jobs behemoth in its first incarnation.  Within five years of its founding, Apple had 1,000 employees; a similar number in Pittsburgh today would make a huge impact here.  Where did Apple employees work?  They weren't all in Cupertino; in fact, a large number of them weren't.  Apple had manufacturing facilities in California, Texas, and Colorado -- and India, Ireland, and Singapore.  And its growth wasn't sustained.  After Jobs was forced out, the company came perilously close to crashing and burning in the mid-1990s.  It's on top of the world today -- outsourcing much of its manufacturing to China.  The US jobs are, on the whole, at the high end, not the neighborhood and store-front (or garage and warehouse and wet lab) jobs that start-ups typically generate.  Apple is proposing to consolidate its management and marketing at a new Cupertino headquarters.  The expected employment at the new facility?  13,000 people.  Let us hope that Pittsburgh finds a Steve Jobs today - and ends up with 13,000 people in a beautiful office building 35 years from now.

Several years ago I gave a presentation at a University of Pittsburgh Faculty Senate plenary session on innovation and tech transfer.  The Chancellor -- who in my view has done amazing things for Pitt -- sat in the front row.  I put up a big slide of an old wagon wheel -- a metaphor for a hub-and-spoke industrial system.  I said that this was old, out-dated thinking.   I followed that with a graphic of a network:  lots of nodes and hubs, lots of connections criss-crossing, with no clear center.  I said that this was the future of technology-based economic development:  growth that comes from the bottom up (and from the sides in, and out), not from the top down.  The university needs to understand and play its many roles in that networked system:  taking in and supporting high quality faculty and students, taking research dollars (across many units of the university, some in partnership with state and especially federal governments, some in partnership with industry), and distributing faculty effort, trained students, and research itself (some via patenting and licensing, some via industry partnerships, some via good old-fashioned sharing of disinterested basic research).  And then circulating all of these things, in lots of different combinations; the university is not a linear production enterprise.  Apple Inc. is the long-term *output* of a diverse innovation economy; it is not the *input* to a diverse innovation economy.

Among the biggest impacts that a giant not-for-profit such as Pitt can have in its own backyard isn't via research in/research out -- but via local spending:  employment, employment taxes, local procurement (space and materials), and payments in lieu of the real estate taxes that the university is not required to pay.  If PUP really wants to make a difference in the city's neighborhoods, it would work on getting Pittsburgh's tax-exempt not-for-profit giants to work at pumping dollars directly into the city's and region's tax coffers.

A New Pittsburgh Survey

In the current issue of Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine, publisher Doug Heuck puts on both of his hats at once (Doug is also director of the Regional Indicators project at pittsburghtoday.org) to describe a forthcoming Pittsburgh Today project:  an updated "Pittsburgh Survey."

The original Pittsburgh Survey, published in several volumes roughly 100 years ago, was a pioneering sociological study of living and working conditions in an urban, industrial community.  (The Wikipedia entry is here.)  The research was prompted by and was part and parcel of the Progressive Era reforms of the early 20th century.  Its data supported decades of further research; the researchers who worked on it went on in many cases to influential careers. 

Still, and despite the Progressive ambition, the results were revelatory.  For the first time it became clear just how wealthy the Pittsburgh wealthy were -- and just how hard the rest of Pittsburghers, especially Pittsburgh's women and children, had it.  I've written at Pittsblog before about what I call today's First World Pittsburgh, Second World Pittsburgh, and Third World Pittsburgh.  It should come as no surprise to most people, but it may surprise them anyway, that Pittsburgh's current "tale of two [or three] cities" has its roots in the steel industry of a century ago.  It is probably not an understatement to say that the Pittsburgh Survey changed not just how Pittsburgh was viewed, but how cities were viewed, and how they were studied, and how they were approached for public policy purposes.  I want to look at Pittsburgh with fresh eyes, but doing that requires a supreme effort.  And I've only been here for little more than a decade.

Doug's story about the new study is itself titled, "A Tale of two Pittsburghs."  That headline refers, I'll bet, to "old Pittsburgh" and "new Pittsburgh," but it also should be understood to refer to the rich and to everyone else, revealed in all of their detail in the original Pittsburgh Study and waiting, one suspects, for revisiting, renewing, and updating today.  The Pittsburgh Today study is a fantastic but daunting proposition.  No one should assume that it reveal only good or even middling news.  There is much to celebrate in modern Pittsburgh, but much of the Progressive agenda remains unfulfilled.

Fresh Eyes at Pittsblog

Save for a couple of months at the end of 2008, I have been writing Pittsblog more or less regularly since the start of 2004.  That's close to eight years.  Yikes.

That's the thought that occurred to me late last week in the wake of Pitt's demolition of the University of South Florida at Heinz Field.  That's not the first thought that occurred to me, of course.  I watched the latter part of that game on TV.  The first thought that occurred to me was this:  This is entertaining.  Pitt football is entertaining.    I don't want to get ahead of myself; this was just one game.  But in the more than dozen years that I've now lived in the Pittsburgh region, I can't once remember thinking to myself that Pitt football is entertaining.

That led to the second thought -- above.  The point is that I've been doing this (blogging here) for a long time, and along the way I've acquired habits and things that keep me seeing things in the same old way.  (And I've only been here since '98!)  Maybe Pitt football was entertaining before (at least, before Dave Wannstedt took over) - but I never saw it that way.  I couldn't.

So:

In some posts to come -- and to come infrequently; since the middle of last Spring, I have been away from Pittsburgh almost as much as I have been in Pittsburgh -- I'll venture some thoughts about Pittsblog themes (economic development in Pittsburgh, entrepreneurship, arts and culture) from the imagined perspective of a newcomer.  What does Pittsburgh look, feel, and sound like to someone who is just moving to town in late 2011, someone who is likely to have lived in a number of places previously, some smaller and more insular than Pittsburgh, and some larger on more cosmopolitan?  What are the opportunities and challenges facing the region today?

Look East

From the Economist (Sept. 1):

At the new Museum of Liverpool (above), a sleek limestone affair of Danish design, the city’s Chinese community, which began with an influx of sailors at the start of the 19th century, gets an exhibit to itself. The emphasis seems a little odd, until you consider the city’s regeneration strategy, which rests on a characteristically 21st-century mix of the local and the global. The aim is to use Liverpool’s storied past to attract investment from around the world—and from China in particular.

These little Economist columns often obscure as much as they reveal (what's the real story in Liverpool?), and Pittsburgh and Liverpool are more "unlike" than "alike."  So it is not quite fair to point to a story about Liverpool and say to Pittsburgh, "try this."  Still, the local-meets-global story and the explicit outreach to China seem ... interesting.  Hmmm.