The rusted steel that binds: how craft producers form neolocal economies in Pittsburgh, PA

ABSTRACT

As many post-industrial cities shift to service and information, manufacturing legacies – material and symbolic – persist in diverse ways. The “Steel City” of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania exemplifies both deindustrial transition to “eds and meds” and vibrant small-scale production. Cultural geographers interpret place-based craft production as neolocalism, while economic geographers emphasize ways craft can be embedded in evolving economic regions. To understand how local craft production is situated within economic and urban change, this project asks: How do craft producers work – individually and collaboratively – to produce neolocal economies in formerly industrial Pittsburgh? Semi-structured interviews, workshop tours, and a mapping exercise with twenty craft producers and suppliers explored the nature of small-scale production, its embeddedness in place, and professional and supplier networking. The research reveals ways craft workers, suppliers, and organizations in Pittsburgh self-consciously adapt social and material legacies of manufacturing, cluster in particular neighborhoods, and network to build local supply chains and communities. While producers are unevenly engaged in industrial legacies and economies and bound up in wider processes like gentrification, craft labor and collaboration can help maintain traditions of production in places once defined by them.

KEYWORDS:

• Craft
• neolocalism
• path dependency
• clustering
• local economies
• Pittsburgh

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker is a recent Master of Geography graduate from Miami University (Ohio) interested in craft and neolocal economies in post-industrial cities. As geographer and welder, he explores ways to preserve industrial-labor knowledge and histories amidst the construction of new, tech-based urban futures.

David Prytherch

David Prytherch is Professor of Geography at Miami University. He is an urban geographer interested in the contested planning of cultural landscapes, including recent research on the regulation and design of public streets. He is the author of Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street (2018), teaches in and advises the Urban and Regional Planning major at Miami University, and serves on City Council in Oxford, Ohio.