Remaking the Rust Belt. Tracy Neumann

and study tours.⁷³ Pease, after his 1991 retirement from the Allegheny Conference, served as a consultant on urban redevelopment projects in Japan, India, Ireland, and the UK.⁷⁴ Canadian cities, too, remained interested in Pittsburgh’s redevelopment tactics. Despite fundamental differences between the political and institutional frameworks governing public policy, Hamilton, like other declining North Atlantic manufacturing centers, emulated Pittsburgh’s postindustrial rebirth and the partnership behind it, with very different results.⁷⁵

       Slouching Toward Partnership in Hamilton

      When Pete Flaherty took office in 1970, Pittsburgh’s first Renaissance and the partnership that facilitated it had just wound down; across the border, however, Vic Copps’s redevelopment efforts in Hamilton had finally begun to pick up steam. Copps had already inaugurated an urban renewal program intended to create a new civic square, but federal and provincial wrangling over urban and economic development and the province’s subordination of Hamilton’s commercial district to Toronto’s meant that the project was by no means guaranteed to succeed. Yet, as early as 1972, city officials congratulated themselves for the “ambitious programs” underway “to shed [Hamilton’s historic] role and develop strong commercial and cultural sectors.” Their plans included establishing a secondary commercial and industrial district on previously undeveloped urban land and a downtown building program tailored to the perceived needs of corporate headquarters and financial institutions. That year, Toronto’s Globe and Mail ran a feature on Hamilton’s downtown facelift, noting that the city’s “building plans for the Nineteen Seventies are directed toward reshaping Hamilton as the business and cultural focus for more than a million residents of Southwestern Ontario.”⁷⁶ Copps aggressively promoted a postindustrial vision of the city, but Hamilton lacked a public-private partnership through which to realize his plans.