ABSTRACT
During the late 19th century, communities faced away from rivers that became sewers and canals, mills and mines refashioned the contours of the earth itself, and smoke that became a signature of economic prosperity filled the air. While adaptive reuse of industrial age sites has become a key organizing principle for economic and community development, the relationship between regional identity and industrial heritage in the early 21st century remains fraught and contested. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Pittsburgh area emerged first as an imperial frontier, then as a riverine mercantile community, and finally as the industrial Steel Valley, with shifting borders, economic foundations and cultural imagery. Metropolitan Pittsburgh's regional identity had long rested on a cultural construction of the region's environment, both human and manmade, that centered on heavy industrial production and extractive industries. Following Second World War, Pittsburgh's Republican business elite and Democratic political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development.
