Mapping the Evolution of a Wicked Problem: Socioeconomic Inequality in Pittsburgh

by Team Strange Attractor: Jean Chu, Yujin Lee, Will Martin, and Nikita Valluri

Introduction to the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) analysis approach to wicked problems

Wicked problems aren’t inherently unsolvable. They become more complex over time and are influenced by various factors. Left unaddressed, these issues intertwine with other problems, forming a complex system with no easy solutions.

Understanding their origins is key. We must examine how historical events (social, economic, political, etc.) have contributed to these problems. This analysis helps us identify the seemingly disparate events that have exacerbated these issues over time.

By delving into their history, we gain a deeper understanding of:

• Interconnectedness: How wicked problems connect to other issues.
• Stakeholder Influence: The different groups affected by and impacting the problem.
• Root Causes: The underlying factors that contribute to the problem’s complexity.

The wicked problem that we are addressing here is Socioeconomic inequities. Our first two assignments portrayed deconstructing the wicked problem through the Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political lens and identifying the key stakeholder groups, the existing power imbalances, and points of alignment and dissonance among the key stakeholder groups. At this stage in our project, we are attempting to trace the evolution of how certain events (social, political, technological, environmental, and economic events) occurring at global, international, national, and regional levels of scale have resulted in ecosystem changes. From affecting employment and income opportunities to education and healthcare, how have these given rise to inequalities in race, income, employment opportunities, etc. This activity aims to study these problems, think in long horizons of time and situate them in the present within the long context of history.

By understanding how the problem of race and income-based inequity has evolved in Pittsburgh, we can identify the root causes underlying this issue. These causes usually exist across different levels of scale. This helps discover areas where design-led opportunities lie and can be placed as interventions within the system. Sometimes, we can leverage these interdependencies that exist between wicked problems to design interventions that can address and potentially set forth transitions for resolution in the future. In this assignment, we try to “read” and “map” the terrain of our problem using the MLP framework.

To design effective interventions for socioeconomic inequity, a “wicked problem,” we must first trace its evolution. The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework helps us map this history across three key levels:

Landscape: This macro view examines major global trends and events with long-lasting impacts. Examples include World War II or the COVID-19 pandemic, which can accelerate or hinder progress toward socio-economic equality.

Regime: The meso level focuses on existing social and technological structures. Here, we analyze networks of companies, institutions, policies, and laws that shape specific sectors. In our context, this might involve historical events like community movements, regional trends that impacted consumer behavior, and social norms that influenced innovation and societal change.

Niche: This micro level examines local events and technologies that affect current conditions. We explore standalone discoveries, natural occurrences, and actions by individuals or communities that may have exacerbated or mitigated inequities.

By examining these levels in Pittsburgh, we understand how seemingly isolated events have contributed to the current state of socioeconomic inequity.

Using the MLP framework helped us in:

• Identifying Root Causes: MLP reveals the underlying factors driving inequities at different scales (global, national, local).
• Uncovering Design Opportunities: Analyzing historical trends helps us find areas where design interventions can address these root causes within the system.

This historical mapping lays the groundwork for the next step- developing design solutions that promote a more sustainable and equitable future.

Overview of the course exercise applying MPL analysis to the wicked problem of socioeconomic inequality in Pittsburgh, PA

In tracing the roots and ramifications of socioeconomic inequities in Pittsburgh and across the United States, our team embarked on a historical journey that spanned several decades. Our exploration began with the recognition of pivotal industries and sectors — resource extraction, steel, healthcare, education, technology, and finance — that have shaped economic landscapes and social structures.

Landscape Level: Broad Societal and Economic Shifts

• The influx of immigration/migration for job opportunities and the transition from the Steel City to the Rust Belt represent significant landscape-level shifts, reflecting global and national economic restructuring. These changes not only redefined the economic base but also the social fabric of cities like Pittsburgh, echoing the global transition towards a knowledge and service-oriented economy.

Regime Level: Structural and Institutional Dynamics

• At the regime level, the vertical integration of corporate structures and the emergence of unions to counterbalance corporate power illustrate the systemic entrenchment of industrial capitalism and its regulation. These elements shaped the labor market, influencing worker rights, corporate governance, and the broader socio-economic landscape. The evolution in transportation, extraction, and management processes further reflects the institutionalization of innovation, impacting how industries operate and compete.

Niche Level: Localized Responses and Innovations

• The localized response to industrial decline, such as the working class losing its societal status and the emergence of new companies in response to the industry shift towards health and higher education, highlights the niche level’s role in adapting to and innovating within these broader changes. These responses encapsulate the community’s resilience and creativity in facing economic transitions and the challenges of ensuring equitable growth and opportunity.

Connecting the Levels: From Historical Roots to Contemporary Challenges

This historical mapping exercise reveals the interconnected dynamics of socio-economic inequities, tracing how large-scale economic and social transitions (landscape) necessitate changes in regulatory, corporate, and labor structures (regime), which in turn influence and are influenced by localized responses and innovations (niche).

The transition from a steel-dominated economy to one focused on healthcare and education not only signifies a shift in economic priorities but also brings to the fore challenges related to class stratification and access to new economic opportunities. Understanding these interconnected dynamics provides a foundation for identifying targeted interventions to address the root causes of socio-economic inequities, fostering a more equitable future for Pittsburgh and potentially offering insights applicable nationwide.

By dissecting these layers and their interplay, we aim to uncover insights from the past to inform future visions and interventions. We acknowledge that the pathway to addressing socioeconomic inequities requires a nuanced understanding of their historical evolution and the systemic forces at play.

Elaboration of the MLP analysis application

We approached our multi-level perspective (MLP) analysis of socio-economic inequality with an initial focus on the predominant employment sectors in the region. Focusing on specific industries and their inter-temporal as well as spatial dynamics allowed us to sketch, at a high level, some of the dynamics that constitute socio-technical transitions. To bracket this analysis in time, we initially adopted major global conflicts as temporal anchors within the landscape level. Beginning with the American War of Independence in 1776, other significant conflicts included the American Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.

While these demarcations help facilitate our collaborative work, each researcher electing one of the four eras, we found it more helpful to translate these conflicts into eras that could be defined in economic terms instead of political struggle. Doing so would further align our inquiry with the wicked problem of concern — socioeconomic inequality. From this new perspective, we manipulated some timeline elements to more explicitly identify the history of concern based on economic terms. Subsequently, the beginning of the research expanded slightly to include the initiation of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the 1760s for the beginning of our analysis.

This historical moment represented a consolidation and coherence of much of the intellectual and scientific innovation of the Enlightenment into an applied set of practices that radically changed the trajectory of the regional and global political economy. Ideas, innovations, technologies, and people from the British Isles would soon play a predominant role in the early ascendency of Pittsburgh’s industrial economy, laying the foundation for much of the region’s social and economic future. American independence and the necessity of its new autonomy supported the experimentation and scaling of socio-technical innovations that would be difficult to achieve in the overwrought, post-feudal, monarchical society and space of Great Britain. Nowhere was this more prevalent than on the American frontier, which was even further removed from the incumbent colonial structures of eastern seaboard cities.

To further specify the evolving economic reality within our intertemporal analysis, we decided to break up the intervening 150 years into eras that roughly or precisely map onto the dynamic nature of modern industrial economies. These eras, not surprisingly, related strongly to our original conflict-based demarcations. The intervening eras became, provisionally, Industrial Expansion (1765–1860), Corporatization and Backlash (1860–1941), Shared Prosperity (1941–1989), and Globalized Inequality (1989 — Present). This framing set the stage for us to rework the factors impacting Pittsburgh’s socioeconomic inequality, from niche-level events in the region to regime-level policies and systems to landscape-level paradigms.

To fully flush out the emerging trends and potential socio-technical transition pathways, we sought to identify categories that could encapsulate the driving factors with clear niche and regime-level implications. Initial attempts to make inclusive categorizations based on qualities of the pathway (i.e., migration and diversification or innovations in corporate structure) felt challenging to follow and, in some instances, failed to address a more broad and generalizable concept to anchor the path. Understanding that 1) there is a dual and reciprocal nature between economic opportunity and migration, with people moving to where they can find jobs and businesses locating where they can find workers, and 2) employment is an essential determinant of socioeconomic status, we elected to pursue narrative paths that followed transitions within specific economic employment sectors to anchor the transition pathway.

We highlighted these pathways by color within the map and elected the most prominent sector of each era to identify the set of narratives to explore further as we sought to fill in gaps and expand research, especially moving both up and down from regime and niche level factors We elected extraction, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, education, and technology. While each of these sectors did not receive equal attention due to the project’s limited scope, in further research, we believe that producing an inclusive map of the transition within these sectors would paint the fullest picture of the multi-level perspective of the wicked problem of Pittsburgh’s socioeconomic inequality.

Finally, as we identified some of the more meta-level qualities associated with niche and regime influences, we highlighted these using tags. We could not fully adopt this approach due to the project’s limited scope. However, we have included them as an additional frame with which the reader might begin to supplement their reading of the relationships we have highlighted. Doing so would reveal important niche events with plausibly significant regime-level impacts to arise out of unexpected corners that were not easily unearthed through our economic sector approach.

The structure we adopted for these meta-level categories reflected the key tensions that we saw driving the thrust of the transition pathway by either energizing niche events or precipitating “cracks” in the regime level into which niche-level innovations would come to transform the regime and, in a few cases, put pressure on the landscape level. Due to this antagonistic structure, these categories contain dueling poles that characterize the underlying tension or conflict. The list we explored includes Assimilation vs. Stratification (dealing with the mixing and ordering of migrants into social strata based on demographic classes; this reflects a social dimension), Corporatizing vs. Unionization (reflecting the struggle for power and dominance within the industry and within the factory, this reflects a political dimension), Integration vs. Segregation (considering the spatial ordering of racial, class, or country of origin groups, this reflects a spatial dimension), Regulation vs. Deregulation (addressing the nature of economic activity in the context of the law, this is an economic dimension), Degradation vs. Sustainability, (considering the impacts to the natural environment through time, this is an environmental dimension), and Protectionism vs. Globalization (reflecting market dynamics for domestic production in the face of increased international trade competition).

While we did not have time to fully apply this modified STEEP analysis through the sectoral transition, it did help reveal key insights into the aspects and qualities of how the multi-layered perspective analysis provides a robust framework for revealing the specificities of such aspects while including their complex multidimensionality. In light of their full mapping, we will include these aspects in our analysis reflection below.

Emerging patterns from the MLP analysis exercise

In the limited context of performing research solely through secondary sources and with the exploratory and learning posture required of a course exercise, the following transition pathways emerged within the context of specific economic sectors that dominated or partially dominated the regional economy of Pittsburgh since its population began to surge in the late 18th century. Focusing on the migratory flows of workers and the places they worked, a dynamic web of niche-level innovations ultimately pushes from regime-level change. Before tracing some of these paths, however, we wanted to acknowledge a clear limitation of our approach — the absence of an integrated theory of the role played by the region’s geography. We contend, see reflection section below, that a framework that more fully incorporates geography could deepen the MLP analysis approach by focusing not only on the scalar qualities of socio-technical phenomena but also their multi-scalar spatial dynamics as well.

It is clear that the unique geography, with its steep terrain and penetrating position in the watershed as the easternmost inland port of the continent, plays a dominant role in Pittsburgh, including its genesis as a military outpost at the confluence of the inland, continental rivers’ vital transportation infrastructure. These are the specific, spatial initial conditions from which complex social and material forces, some predating the inclusive scope of our mapping exercise, emerge and become intertwined in systems with less geographically determinate qualities. While the geographic component is suppressed in this analysis, partly due to the explicit focus of the exercise on socio-technical factors, geography plays a primary role in the region, and integrating a spatial approach into MLP analysis would deepen a future analysis. Without that approach, we allude to spatial and configurational aspects of factors, if at all. We hope that this might be addressed in subsequent research. Instead, as described above, we focus on economic and population dynamics that prefigure many divergent social and economic outcomes and attendant inequality. Specifically, we traced the rise and fall of specific employment categories as the varying demographic make-up of their participants, from employees/laborers to upper management, map onto the range of socioeconomic inequalities we have unearthed in prior exercises.

To take the most geographically determined and chronologically first category, the sectors of resource extraction and, soon following, manufacturing capture a significant proportion of the region’s early economic and population dynamics. We will briefly follow some specific aspects of this transition pathway.

While hunger for land brought many travelers through Pittsburgh on their way further West, down the Ohio River, with the exception of the relatively few permanent occupants of the city’s pre-incorporation forts, the booming industries of oil and coal extraction pulled many workers into Pittsburgh. Initially, these workers were often of Scottish and Irish descent as the war in famine in their home countries had displaced hundreds of thousands who made their way to the new country to make a better life for themselves and their families. When they arrived, many found the Eastern cities overcrowded and not hospitable or welcoming to the lower-class migrants of different countries of origin — many of the early immigrants to the colonies had been wealthy British and Dutch aristocrats. As a result, many Scots-Irish were pushed to the inland frontier, where they sought freeholder land or jobs in the growing extraction and manufacturing industries.

Due to their shared heritage and early on-the-ground presence in the highly fluid frontier, the Scots-Irish predominated in early industrial leadership. Andrew Carnegie, the primary among them. While industry and job opportunities grew in the expanding sectors of steel and coke production, so did the wealth of the industrialists, with new immigrants arriving from other European countries, primarily Eastern European, creating a class system routed in the country of one origin. As new, more efficient industrial techniques radically increased production, corporate consolidation and fiercer competition for monopoly power intoxicated the elites; the working class, who were also regionally segregated into neighborhood enclaves, built solidarity as a countervailing force to corporate management — unions. Subsequently, the rise of corporate structure, which radically increased wealth, most notably the vertical integration of an industry’s raw inputs, transportation, manufactured produces, and financing, generated a simultaneous rise in worker power and solidarity in opposition to the increasing demand for ever more profits.

Labor relations and public sentiment toward corporate industrial power boiled over in several key events, including the Homestead Massacre, when striking workers at a prominent Carnegie Steel mill were murdered to break the strike. While tension among working standards and profit maximization in Pittsburgh’s steel industry and the interpersonal competition among other industrial barron in the region, including JD Rockefeller in oil, were building public opposition to the overwhelming power of these companies and the unimaginable wealth of their owners, Additional precipitating events like the Johnstown Flood in 1889, which 2,209 people died in the largest loss of civilian life in the countries history were tied to the callus inference of the same elite group began to crack the regime of industrial monopolies, and the rise of the progressive era of popular support for labor and resentment of the monopolies. This tension included counter-violence, including the 1892 assassination attempt on Henry Frick, who was intimately connected to both the Homestead Massacre and the Johnstown Flood, and the successful 1901 assassination of pro-business President McKinley only 6 months into his first term at the hands of the son of an immigrant who had lost his job in an earlier labor dispute, brought an anti-monopoly president to the Whitehouse in Theodor Roosevelt. Roosevelt became known, among other successes, as a “trust-buster” for his aggressive use of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Law, bringing 44 antitrust suits during his presidency.

Strong unions and resulting better pay for industrial workers in the north and in particular industrial hubs like Pittsburgh and Detroit drew many African Americans from the less industrial, unionized American South, resulting in the Great Migration. This demographic shift represented another significant compositional shift in Pittsburgh’s socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic composition. Many southern black residents of Pittsburgh faced significant racism and segregation. Discriminatory practices perpetuated inequality as mid-century efforts to address many of the legacy environmental challenges of the city’s industrial past and pivot to a more diversified economy often disregarded the interests and needs of the black community. Large urban renewal projects and broader national investment patterns tied to racialized housing policy known as “red-lining” perpetuated disruption and disinvestment in predominantly black communities.

Contemporary trends in the ascendancy of healthcare as a dominant employment sector following the industrial decline between the 1950 and 2000 as begun to replicate some of the same transition pathways of the earlier steel industry with mounting corporate consolidation in healthcare and health insurance behemoth UMPC starting to receive pushback from increasingly unionized workers and criticism for disparate health outcomes based on race. While the city’s dominant industries of healthcare, education, and financial services lack the nation-of-origin stratification of the earlier steel industry, racial stratification and inequality are pervasive. While Pittsburgh did not suffer from similarly acute precipitating events like racialized riots and rapid “white flight” like other rust-belt cities, socio-economic inequality correlates strongly to both class and race, and the city and the region remain very segregated. Mayor Ed Gainey, the first black mayor of Pittsburgh, was elected in 2022, representing a marked shift in representation in the region’s most powerful political posts. The Mayor’s insistence that the city’s growth and most successful sectors contribute to broader shared prosperity is reflected in his demands for affordable housing in rapidly gentrifying areas like East Liberty and insistence that the tax exceptions for large landholders in education and healthcare contribute more to city coffers that could provide vital services in underserved areas, many of which are predominantly black.

Given the skilled nature of many of the growing job sectors, those in the region who remain and once held industrial jobs need more job opportunities in the new sectors. Re-growth in extractive industries, especially related to fracking and petrol-based product manufacturing, have pit visions of the region’s economic future at apparent odds, with more elite, high-paying employment sectors looking to attract workers to the region, touting post-industrial renaissance and affordable quality of life, with many of the regions current residences who lack job opportunities broadly and support the growth of the maligned extractive industries. Global energy dynamics and the increasing prominence of US natural gas exports represent regime and landscape-level pressures.

Reflections on the MPL analysis exercise

Tracing the transition pathways in the Pittsburgh region connected to the wicked problem of “socioeconomic inequality” proved a daunting challenge. The vast complexity and deep historicity of the contemporary context of such entrenched inequality made efforts to appropriately scope the exercise difficult. The limited timeline and resources of the team perpetuated this challenge, as did the necessary asynchronous project work. The resulting breadth demanded a mapping approach that came to necessarily and insufficiently represent evolving aspects of the regional economy across niche, regime, and landscape level factors through multiple centuries. While later efforts to clarify the transition pathways of specific employment sectors began to bring much-needed constraints to the effort, in the context of this assignment, came too late in our process to have rendered the map and analysis sufficiently clear and expressive of the various transition pathways that emerged and receded over time.

Further analysis, condensation, and editing would improve this illegibility. The efforts to categorize transition factors based on types of related conflicts provided a fruitful mechanism for extracting patterns within the inherent noisy complexity of the map. We suspect that the relative prevalence of specific tensions, such as corporatization vs. unionization, would reveal aspects of an underlying and more foundational pattern in the transition pathways that relate to the wicked problem of socio-economic transitions. Within this frame, niche level events, including innovation, be they technical or managerial, that impact the power dynamics among the various inputs in the production of economic goods and services, we expect to play an important role in socioeconomic inequality dynamics. While landscape dynamics, including globalization and environmentalism, have contributed to contemporary tensions among the growing diversity of economic growth sectors in the region, it seems clear that niche developments like machine learning and artificial intelligence will likely play an essential role in regime changes in the near future. Specifically, these technologies threaten service-oriented sectors like healthcare, education, and financial services, which have been among the important growth drivers of the regional economy and the high-paid job opportunities. With this context, future mapping into the niche factors contributing to this development and their socio-economic dimensions (briefly touched on in the map) would warrant further study.