Mapping the Evolution of a Wicked Problem
by Team Symbiosis
Ally Hopping, Master of Human-Computer Interaction
Julie Choi, Bachelor of Design with Minors in Human-Computer Interaction and Photography
Morgan Newman, Master of Public Policy and Management
Adam Cowart, Ph.D. Teaching Fellow and Researcher in Transition Design
Gentrification in Pittsburgh
At the beginning of the semester, our group chose gentrification in Pittsburgh as our wicked problem. While the public discourse regarding gentrification often centers around common challenges that cities face, such as racial discrimination, socioeconomic segregation, and government inaction, wicked problems cannot be removed from their local context. They are deeply embedded in place-based systems, as are the possible solutions for addressing wicked problems. Hence, through our first assignment of mapping gentrification in Pittsburgh, we sought to understand the general issues that many cities face and the unique factors at play in Pittsburgh that interact to create the more significant problem. This localized mapping of the issue allowed us to move quickly to our second assignment of mapping stakeholder relations. In this assignment, we focused on power relationships between stakeholders most connected to or impacted by gentrification. We identified Property Developers/Managers, Long-term Neighborhood Residents, and The Air as those most deeply related to the issue. We now turn our attention to the third assignment and look at the emergence and evolution of gentrification as a wicked problem in Pittsburgh.
Why use the Multi-Level Perspective Framework?
The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework assists in understanding why and how transitions in socio-technical systems occur. This, of course, is based on the assumption that the complex interaction between societal norms and technical systems are the fundamental drivers of large-scale change. As a group, we felt it was essential to critique this framework and challenge these assumptions of change while simultaneously using it to consider the evolution of gentrification in Pittsburgh. While privileging Culture and Technology as the drivers of societal transformation may be problematic, other common key drivers of social change, such as Ideas, Complexity, Power, and Conflict, could all be viewed as present within the MLP Framework.
The MLP consists of three layers: at the highest level, there is the Landscape, followed by the Regime in the middle, and the Niche at the bottom.
The regime is the space of the current context. How people and technology operate are normalized and ubiquitous, often to the point of not being challenged in any meaningful way. The regime also includes the structures around us. The landscape, visually at least, sits atop the regime and often influences what makes up the regime. This could include dominant paradigms like racism, global challenges such as climate change, and more significant economic trends such as industrialization and automation. Finally, the niche is the space where new ideas and innovations are developed, often in response to events or movements in the other levels. Niche is where the seeds of disruption are planted and grow, and they may or may not make it to the other levels of the map.
Our MLP Framework Mapping Process
Our first step in mapping the evolution of gentrification in Pittsburgh was to create a simple timeline of the city and major events both Pittsburgh-specific, national, and global. The displacement of the original inhabitants of the Pittsburgh area was a natural starting point for our timeline. It represents both the birth of the city as we define it today as well as an extreme form of gentrification through colonization. While exploring gentrification as a wicked problem, it cannot be forgotten that the inception of Pittsburgh was rooted in displacement.
We then undertook a heuristic analysis known as Era’s Analysis. An Era’s Analysis considers the more extensive historical timeline overlaid with the topic or domain under exploration. The goal is to both articulate and challenge the discrete units of time that will organize and inform the larger analysis. This allowed us to reflect on the arbitrary temporal borders we were placing around a complex and interconnected series of historical events. While seeking clarity we must be careful of oversimplifying our topic. The era’s analysis ultimately led us towards a few possible temporal framings for our MLP. Perhaps two of the most prominent were the four Industrial Revolutions (including pre-industrial) and shifting forms of racism (from indigenous displacement to slavery, etc.). Ultimately we chose to employ a simple story structure for the journey of the city from first contact and establishment of the forts that would become the City of Pittsburgh, through the decline of the city, to its current “rebirth.” While a useful temporal framing tool, we were also cognizant that we were imposing a narrative structure onto the history of the city.
Our Approach to Landscape, Regime & Niche
In determining how to structure each level of the map, we had an overarching discussion about the purpose of each level with some debate about what constituted a development within them. Each level impacts the other, and the boundaries are not always clear. For example, landscape events can spark niche developments that then make their way into the regime, and the question becomes how to frame them to fit within a specific level and create a visual language that represents the overarching narrative of the map. We decided that we wanted each level to tell a story of its own, which can then be parsed out into narratives flowing from one level to another.
The landscape level focuses on large, structural changes affecting the entire country (and often the whole world). We stretched large, ongoing circumstances or ideologies like displacement and neoliberalism across the length of the map to indicate that they exist in the background, impacting the way events unfold. Sticky notes represented shorter, pivotal events like wars, movements, or economic depressions. At the regime level, we placed circumstances or events that we felt constituted the status quo at the time, connecting them to items at the landscape and niche levels that affected their status as a regime. In mapping niche events, we focused on mapping pivotal moments or inventions whose significance could only be seen in retrospect, in relation to subsequent impacts on the other levels.
Mapping the Evolution
During our mapping process, an underlying theme emerged throughout history: cycles of growth and prosperity for some necessarily lead to cycles of displacement and poverty for others. In illustrating this, we’ll describe several narrative threads from the birth of Pittsburgh to today that connect all three levels of the map.
Native Colonization
When mapping wicked problems it is nearly impossible to find one specific thread that showcases the “root” of that problem. Though this is not a singular root, the colonization of native land is perhaps one of the strongest roots that appeared when mapping the evolution of gentrification in Pittsburgh. Some scholars have even gone so far as to call gentrification a “middle-class colonization” (citation) and it is clear that the tenets of gentrification we see today have connections back to the earliest European settlers in America. Native Americans inhabited the land that is now Pittsburgh for several millennia before the colonizers arrived in the 1700s, with the first known inhabitants dating back to 14,000 BC. Following the “discovery” of America and the forming of the colonies, European settlers began settling in the region in the 1750s and forcibly removed the indigenous people from their land. The diseases carried by settlers in the 1700s also devastated Indigenous communities, making it easier to take and reconstruct their land. In 1758 the British captured Fort Duquesne from the French and renamed the area Pittsburgh and thus the history of the modern city commenced. From landscape-level events like colonization and regional wars to the growth of a bustling mercantile economy to the niche level of individual settlers arriving and claiming plots of land as their own, Pittsburgh became a flourishing city because of the belief that land only has value when certain people inhabit it. This belief has thrived throughout American history and is why the problem of gentrification is so complex and pervasive in places like Pittsburgh.
Industrialization
Industrialization provides several narrative threads critical to understanding gentrification. The two areas of greatest interest to us are industrialization and migratory patterns of marginalized people and industrialization as central to a sense of civic identity.
Industrialization and Migratory Patterns
The Great Migration, the name given to the mass movement of African-Americans from the South to the North, heavily influenced the character of many Pittsburgh neighborhoods. African Americans, from approximately 1890 to 1910, migrated not just to escape the discriminatory Jim Crow Laws of the South, but also in search of greater opportunity. Pittsburgh in particular saw an influx of African American workers, many from Alabama, where they had worked at steel mills in Birmingham. Ironically, many skilled African American workers with experience in the South would only be given the unskilled labor jobs in the Pittsburgh steel mills.
The second great migration started in the early 1940s and continued until approximately 1970. Triggered in part by the need for workers to fuel the defense industry during WWII, approximately 5 million African Americans moved from the South to the North to escape overt racism and find opportunity. While the first great migration consisted mostly of rural workers looking for unskilled or semi-skilled work, the second migration was primarily urban residents that made their homes in city centers. This second great migration contributed to a high concentration of African Americans in city centers across the northern states in particular, which in turn contributed to another migratory pattern of white flight.
Finally, the “new” great migration is underway, during which for the first time in over 100 years, African Americans are migrating to the South from the North in significant numbers. This is widely seen as a result of the deindustrialization of the North, along with greater affordability in southern states. Gentrification is a key influencer of this new migratory pattern: as housing costs grow beyond reach, residents who formed roots in a community during the early to mid-1940s have now begun moving back to regions their ancestors had left.
Industrialization and Civic Identity
Each industrial revolution has normalized ways of working and modes of production that, over time, become closely linked with the identity of individuals and cities. The rise and fall of the steel industry in Pittsburgh is closely linked with the city’s sense of identity. Stories of street lamps lit during the day because of the darkening effect of pollution, and going to work with a white shirt and returning at night with a black one all serve to reinforce the underlying myth of “Steel City.” The decline of steel mills in the city, the resultant economic impact on residents and the city itself, and the more recent resurgence driven by Pittsburgh as a learning hub, has spurred a still-unformed emergent identity. At the same time, underlying assumptions that environmental degradation is necessary for economic prosperity lingers in the collective imagination of Pittsburgh residents.
Redlining
Through the years, the root of development has always been tightly connected with economic growth. As the hub of production, Pittsburgh has always seen constant development through the industrial revolution and into the 20th century. The cost of development also comes with sacrifices of lower-income citizens who are victims of redlining. From the early 20th century, minority groups which were mostly people of color were labeled as “hazardous” for housing loan distributions, making it difficult for them to buy homes and thus leaving them more vulnerable to instability, rising rents, and displacement. Policies started forming around this idea, while the African American population that started populating the city during the great migrations experienced restrictive covenants due to the post-war boom. In 1941, policies for environmental recovery such as the Smoke Control Ordinance were formed to boost the city’s economy. This caused a lot of burden on the working class and minorities because smokeless fuels were significantly more expensive than coal. Policies and reforms began to favor developments that brought money to the city while overlooking the breathing lives of many who were hardworking laborers in the business.
Discrimination and redlining is an embedded motif in the bureaucracy of Pittsburgh, and we easily see the same pattern today not only in the topic of gentrification but also from a broader lens. During the collapse of the steel industry and the decline of industrialization, many businesses shut down, causing unemployment to rise while residents were rapidly displaced. With the tech boom and increase in higher education, the long-term effects of redlining continue to impact minority neighborhoods, leaving them more vulnerable to displacement as the cost of living increases and affordable housing becomes more difficult to find.
Impacts of the Tech Boom & Highly-Skilled Workers
Similar to the other narratives, niche developments and landscape-level changes have led to another cycle of population and neighborhood transformation in Pittsburgh. In this case, the unprecedented growth of the science and technology industries since the early 1990s has led to high rates of redevelopment and displacement in neighborhoods such as Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, and East Liberty. Even as Pittsburgh’s population stays relatively stable (even shrinking slightly since 2000), the income per capita has risen and the average age of the population has decreased.
To explain these changes, we examine developments at each level of the map. As STEM jobs grew throughout the world, Pittsburgh was well-situated to benefit from this landscape development thanks to schools like CMU and University of Pittsburgh and organizations like UPMC. Universities have sponsored tech incubators for students to encourage the formation of startups in the area, and the high levels of student and faculty talent have since attracted larger companies like Google and Uber to open offices in the city. The growth of tech jobs attracts wealthy newcomers and increases the demand for high-end housing and businesses like Whole Foods and Starbucks, which property developers are eager to meet. The growth of STEM and redevelopment of neighborhoods can now be classified at the regime level. Niche-level responses have also emerged in response to the landscape and regime-level changes. Community Land Trusts have formed in many neighborhoods to support the preservation of affordable housing. Long-term residents have also formed urban gardens that aim not only to feed their communities but to empower residents and prevent displacement.
In looking to the future, it’s clear that the STEM field shows no signs of slowing down, so it will be vital for residents and the city to support community organizations at the niche level who are fighting to preserve livelihoods, communities, and housing affordability for long-term, low-income residents.
Our Findings & Insights
The overarching finding from our MLP mapping exercise is growth is only growth for some, while the negative externalities of growth are typically experienced by others. While the benefits of growth are not equally distributed, the burdens of growth are also not equally distributed. Hence, there is not a balancing loop in the system in regards to growth. Instead, there are two reinforcing loops: one, in which growth continues unchecked, and the second in which displacement and other negative impacts to the disadvantaged go unchecked.
While not insignificant from a contemporary perspective, the initial conditions of indigenous displacement have had an ongoing impact on Pittsburgh as a location of gentrification. In a sense, the birth of the city was itself an act of violent gentrification.
Several other key insights emerged:
- While not insignificant from a contemporary perspective, the initial conditions of indigenous displacement have had an ongoing impact on Pittsburgh as a location of gentrification. In a sense, the birth of the city was itself an act of violent gentrification.
- The Great Fire of Pittsburgh in 1845 was a phase transition in the city’s history, in which the destruction of a third of the city led to rapid growth and rising property values.
- The decline of the steel industry in Pittsburgh was a result of a confluence of issues including productivity gains spurred by manufacturing modernization, economic recessions in the 70s and 80s, depletion of resources, and global competition. No single policy solution would have prevented the decline.
- The identity of a city and the identity of a neighborhood are radically different, with the identity of the city being driven more by landscape influences whereas the neighborhood is smaller scale and influenced by niche influences. It is this divergence of municipal identity constructed through economic activity, and neighborhood identity constructed through civic engagement and relationships, that contributes to gentrification as an underlying aggravating factor.
