To the outside world, Pittsburgh is invoked as a symbol of American industrial might, of catastrophic decline, of improbable reinvention. The storyline is familiar: steel collapses, the city nearly breaks, then universities, hospitals and technology rush in to fill the void. It is a narrative that flatters policy-makers and comforts outsiders. It is also, according to economist Christopher Briem, deeply misleading.
In the preface to Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation, Briem offers a blunt disclaimer about what this book is—and is not.
“Readers will be disappointed if they expect this to be a concise cookbook describing the policies regions should follow to promote regional growth or avert decline.”
Beyond Steel, which will be published by Kent State University Press on February 3, is not a manual or a victory lap. It is, in many ways, an unsettling argument and historical stocktaking. Pittsburgh’s future, Briem contends, was never as tightly bound to steel as its mythology suggests. Many of the city’s hardest reckonings stem from how long it took to accept that fact.
A regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, Briem has spent decades studying the city’s economic geography, demographic change and labor markets. The book, which has been gestating for more than a decade, grew out of a recurring frustration with how Pittsburgh’s story is told: as a sudden rupture followed by a clean pivot, rather than a long and uneven transition shaped by resistance, delay and denial.
Long before the steel industry collapsed in the 1980s, Briem notes, economists were already warning that Pittsburgh’s competitive advantage had eroded. By the early twentieth century, many of the geographic and economic conditions that once made the region the world’s most efficient steel producer had faded. Steel persisted not because it remained competitive, but because global crises—the Great Depression, world wars and Cold War geopolitics—delayed an adjustment that was already overdue.
At the same time, Pittsburgh was quietly imagining alternative futures. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, institutions in Oakland were laying the groundwork for a research-driven economy, exploring models borrowed from Stanford and the Research Triangle—even as steel continued to dominate employment and identity. The result was not reinvention after collapse, but decades of contradiction: planning for a post-industrial economy while remaining emotionally and politically tethered to an industrial one.
Crucially, Briem argues that every story of Pittsburgh’s tech-based resurgence has been matched by a less visible counterstory: the failure of many of the region’s mill towns to rebuild anything resembling their former prosperity. While growth clustered in universities, medical centers and innovation districts, river towns built around steel production were left grappling with an economic geography that no longer supported them. Those municipalities did not disappear, but the industries that sustained them did, leaving behind structural challenges that remain unresolved.
These uneven outcomes, Briem says, cannot be separated from Pittsburgh’s enduring racial inequities. Across successive eras of economic growth and decline, Black residents and other marginalized communities were systematically excluded from the benefits of prosperity and disproportionately exposed to the costs of collapse. Those disparities did not begin with deindustrialization, nor were they resolved by the rise of eds, meds or technology. The disparities endure.
Briem describes Pittsburgh as a place of “long memory,” where steel continues to function as an emotional and political reference point long after its economic dominance has faded. That memory, he argues, still shapes development policy and public storytelling—flattening complex histories into morality tales of loss and redemption.
In the conversation below, Briem reflects on why Beyond Steel took so long to write, why he resists offering prescriptions or shortcuts, and why Pittsburgh’s most enduring challenge may be learning how to imagine prosperity—not just growth—without waiting for a single industry to replace what steel once was.
Q: You’ve said this book had been forming for a long time. When did you realize it needed to be a book, not just a series of essays or talks?
Christopher Briem: I think the need for the book was always there. The core questions it deals with, about how regions change, how industries persist longer than they should, and how difficult transitions really are, have remained remarkably relevant. Even though it’s largely a book about history, the issues it raises are very much alive today.
Q: What are those issues, broadly speaking? What kept pulling you back to them?
Briem: At its core, the book is about how regions look toward the future, and how much of that future is imagined as an extension of legacy industries. In Pittsburgh’s case, steel has loomed so large for so long that it continues to shape how we think about progress, decline, and possibility.
The story that Pittsburgh evolved away from steel is true in a basic sense. We do have a more diversified economy today than at almost any point in our history. But the process of getting there was not easy. There was a tremendous amount of resistance and pushback along the way, and understanding that resistance is one of the main themes of the book.
Q: The title suggests movement, “beyond.” What does “beyond steel” actually mean to you?
Briem: To be clear, there is still some steel production in the region. Most of what remains is the legacy of investments made more than a century ago. But the reasons that once made Pittsburgh the most competitive place in the world to produce steel faded a very long time ago, about a hundred years ago, not forty or fifty. Steel can now be produced competitively in many regions of the world. The geographic advantages Pittsburgh once had largely disappeared long ago. “Beyond steel” is about recognizing that reality and understanding how long it took for the region to accept it.
Q: You argue that Pittsburgh’s future became decoupled from steel much earlier than people realize. When did that decoupling actually happen?
Briem: The competitiveness of the steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania really began to erode in the early twentieth century. That raises the obvious question: if steel was no longer competitive, why did it persist here for so long? That’s actually the central question of the book.
Steel should have begun declining much earlier. But global historical events, the Great Depression, world wars, Cold War geopolitics, delayed that process. Those forces kept steel alive here well past the point when it would have otherwise begun to fade. A core message of the book is that Pittsburgh lived in denial that decline was even possible, let alone likely.
Q: Why did that denial last so long? Why does steel remain such a powerful emotional and political reference point even now?
Briem: That probably moves us into the territory of psychology and sociology as much as economics. Even though the number of people employed in steel today is relatively small, there’s still a living memory of that period. Many people’s parents and grandparents worked in the industry.
If you compare today to the 1950s, steel employment in the region is probably down 90 or 95 percent. But memory doesn’t disappear just because the jobs do.
Places like Braddock are powerful examples. In living memory, Braddock had tens of thousands of residents and a dense retail core. Today, the population is a fraction of that. If you’ve lived through that transformation, or heard about it directly from people who did, that memory stays with you. I understand that.
Q: You’ve described Pittsburgh as a place of “long memory.” What does that mean in everyday terms?
Briem: Most newcomers to Pittsburgh eventually have the experience of being given directions that reference not just one, but several landmarks that haven’t existed for decades. More broadly, this is a region where many people have lived in the same municipality, even the same house, for much of their lives. That’s less typical elsewhere. People remember what their communities once were, and they watched those changes firsthand.
That long memory shapes how the region understands itself.
Q: Nationally, Pittsburgh is often held up as a model of post-industrial success. What does that story get wrong?
Briem: People tend to conflate Pittsburgh with the American steel industry because for so long Pittsburgh was its center. But what’s happening today in the national steel industry, good or bad, is not Pittsburgh’s story anymore. The geography has shifted. Pittsburgh has evolved separately from the national steel industry, and it will continue to do so. Treating the city as a proxy for national steel policy obscures that reality.
Q: You’ve been skeptical of the shorthand that Pittsburgh simply “pivoted” to eds, meds, and tech. Why?
Briem: That story makes it sound spontaneous, as if steel collapsed and we collectively pushed a big, easy button and became something else. That’s not how it happened. The evolution toward a research-, healthcare-, and technology-based economy did not emerge overnight. It didn’t happen as quickly or as cleanly as the storytelling suggests. Different choices could have led to different outcomes. The reality was much messier.
Q: If nothing truly replaced steel, how should we understand Pittsburgh’s economy today?
Briem: Steel was so large that nothing could replace it. And that’s normal. Today we have a diversified economy made up of many industries that grew slowly over decades. There isn’t, and probably won’t be, a single defining industry here again, or in most regions anywhere. We’re still called the Steel City because steel was so dominant for so long. I’m not sure we’ll ever forget that. It’s a testament to how powerful that industry was.
Q: You argue that Pittsburgh’s transformation was shaped by choices, not destiny. What kinds of choices mattered most?
Briem: One of the themes of the book is that steel’s dominance displaced economic diversity. Activities that could have grown earlier simply couldn’t compete for space, capital, or attention. Moving forward required accepting that reality, that progress meant allowing other forms of economic activity to grow once steel’s dominance receded. That was not an easy transition.
Q: What were the hidden costs of that transition?
Briem: Steel jobs were spread far beyond the city center, along the rivers, in mill towns that still exist even though the mills are gone. Those municipalities haven’t disappeared, but the economies that sustained them have. We’re living today with a geography built around an industry that no longer exists at scale, and that’s been deeply damaging for many communities.
Q: You’ve challenged the assumption that population growth is necessary for prosperity. Why?
Briem: Population growth is neither necessary nor sufficient to build a prosperous community. Many regions that place all their bets on growth are likely to be disappointed, especially given demographic trends in the U.S. and globally. There are many ways to build quality of life without population growth, and Pittsburgh needs to think seriously about that, probably more than most regions.
It’s not just about retaining people who are already here. It’s about becoming a place that attracts people from elsewhere because it offers opportunity and quality of life. After steel collapsed, it made sense for young people to leave. Their economic futures weren’t here. Today, the challenge is the opposite: how do we become the best possible place for a wide range of people to choose?
Q: What lessons should other post-industrial regions take from Pittsburgh?
Briem: Competition between regions is far more intense now than it was when Pittsburgh was dominant in steel. Regions need to evolve faster than Pittsburgh did. Pittsburgh endured one of the greatest peacetime economic collapses in U.S. history because it delayed change for too long. No region that’s lived through that should want to repeat it.
Q: Did anything surprise you as you were writing the book?
Briem: The book took so long to write that my thinking evolved alongside it. But in the end, the questions that motivated it at the beginning are still valid. That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the world moves on before a book is finished. In this case, it didn’t.
