Pittsburgh, PA
The city of Pittsburgh has seen an
80% drop in its workforce from its peak and has been a city forced to reinvent
itself. I think as technology developed the steel industry in Pittsburgh declined as well. As Technology broke down barriers of
competition to the beast that was Pittsburgh steal. Pittsburgh has taken a huge
hit as have many other of the heavy manufacturing cities located in what is now referred to as the rust belt located in the north eastern
part of the united states .
As many of the other Rustbelt
cities have been struggling to reinvent themselves in the absence of the
abundant heavy manufacturing jobs of the past that acted as a sort of jet fuel
to the local economy, Pittsburgh is handling the change relatively well. The
story with Pittsburgh I think is not just another sob story of a dead
manufacturing town or of a has been city like Detroit where there are city
blocks of real estate left vacant for squatters and riddled with crime. Pittsburgh has taken a proactive lead in such areas of green technology as education,
robotics, financial services, and health care. It is possible that we may even
live to see day where the two words Pittsburgh and steel are not so readily
connected.
I think Pittsburgh is a great example of a
city that has seen the negative side of disruptive technology and then was able to use technology to dig
itself back out to be one of the more promising and technologically advanced cities
on the east coast. The new economic boom in Pittsburgh’s medical technology I
think is systemic to having schools such as University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie
Mellon University cranking out tech savvy graduates into the local workforce,
calling the city home. The Medical technology sector in Pittsburgh spans from cancer
research to synthetic human plasma.
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