Earlier this month, civic leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (a part of GMF’s Transatlantic Cities Network) officially kicked off a two-year participatory regional visioning project. The aim of the project will be to draft a set of concrete goals €“ a “to-do list” €“ for the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area, a 30-county region that spans four states and includes nearly 4 million residents.

Coordinators of the project, which is being headed up by former Pennsylvania State Senator Allen Kukovich, will focus on creating tools and forums to collect input from and build a consensus among the region’s residents, rather than the more traditional approach of drafting and implementing a long-term regional plan from the top down. Like a number of other older industrial cities, including many members of the Transatlantic Cities Network, Pittsburgh will use the regional visioning process as a way to begin approaching its post-industrial future with a sense of purpose and focus, shared broadly between citizens, stakeholders, and institutions.

The first major public event of the process was a town hall meeting on May 20, put together by cityLIVE!, an event series jointly supported by local foundations and media. The town hall featured former Mayor of Turin Valentino Castellani, whose participation was sponsored by GMF. During his term as mayor in the 1990s, Castellani spearheaded the creation of Turin’s region-based, internationally-focused Strategic Plan, which was drafted collaboratively by over 100 stakeholders representing a broad cross-section of civil society, government, and business. (While in Pittsburgh, Castellani also met more privately with the project’s leaders and filmed a segment with Allen Kukovich on local TV station KDKA.)

Pittsburgh’s regional visioning project is supported by approximately $2 million in grants from local and regional foundations, one of which is headed by Transatlantic Cities Network Representative (and Marshall Memorial Fellowship alum) Gregg Behr. In 2003 and 2004, Behr helped Ellen Pope, GMF’s Director of Comparative Domestic Policy, gather a group of Pittsburgh stakeholders to join a group of leaders from Cleveland, Ohio, for a pair of study tours to Turin, Italy and Lyon, France (both also TCN cities).

Behr credits the trips to Turin with connecting the right people in Pittsburgh with the idea that a participatory regional visioning process can be a crucial first step for a post-industrial city trying to renew and transform both its image and its economic base. Pittsburgh’s project also took direction from conversations between Behr and fellow MMF alum Tracy Russ, who worked on Crossroads Charlotte, a similar process now underway in Charlotte, North Carolina (another TCN city), which focuses specifically on building social capital. One of the key lessons from both the Turin and Charlotte experiences is the importance of creating a coherent image for the region that embraces its strengths and history as a base from which to move forward.

In June, the CDP program will continue to facilitate transatlantic learning on best practices in regional visioning with another study tour to Turin and Essen, Germany. Essen, another member of the Transatlantic Cities Network, lies at the heart of the Ruhr Valley, which is perhaps the best-known example of a region that has turned its industrial heritage and architecture into an asset. The region’s former mines, factories, and brownfield sites (most famously the Zollverein, a UNESCO World Heritage site) are now schools, parks, and arts and performance spaces, and the region’s economy is growing around a set of clearly defined cluster industries.

This June’s study tour will include leaders of the Pittsburgh visioning process who met with Castellani during his visit, as well as groups of leaders from Detroit and Cleveland. This fall, GMF will reconvene study tour participants for a pair of workshops in Detroit and Cleveland featuring a select group of experts from Turin and Essen, with the goal of drafting concrete action items to jumpstart regional visioning in (and between) Detroit and Cleveland. For Pope and the rest of the CDP program’s staff, it’s exciting to see the program’s ongoing investment in transatlantic learning bring concrete returns.

Background reading: Local news reports on the Pittsburgh project can be found here and here. A good history of Turin’s Strategic Plan can be found on the website of Torino Internazionale, a key organizer of the process. More information about the Crossroads Charlotte project can be found on the project’s website; a TCN case study on Crossroads Charlotte offers useful background for practitioners and additional resources.

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