response: "Defining Urban Sites"

The article about defining an urban site was very helpful to me. In choosing the Hill District, i was unsure about the extent of the site, where I would center myself, and where to draw the line for my intervention. I realize the key is to simply draw many lines, bounding each variable of the site on its own terms and context.

In New York, it is easy to trace waves of migration, and in turn gentrification, from one neighborhood to another, as prices rise and artists and young professionals move on to find a new greenwich village, a new williamsburg, another Long Island City, or the next DUMBO. In that sense I can see how urban sites "are crisis objects that destabilize our certainty of the real," but several of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods are experiencing a stable renaissance, yet are able to maintain their character and economic 'sustainability' for the original population because the waves of demand aren't as consuming as in New York City. The examples I'm referring to in Pittsburgh are Friendship/Garfield, Lawrenceville, and the Strip. One question is why hasn't this happened in the Hill....yet? The Civic Arena is a major urban barrier that has in a sense stabilized the Hill, but only to turn it into a disconnected and isolated neighborhood above the city. The only natural segue it had into the city was cut off by a field of parking lots that makes the circulation to downtown barren and passive. On the other hand and the other side of the hill(s), I want to look at the "Pittsburgh Acropolis," a project that was somewhat abandoned, but was a strategy for the UPitt campus to start riding up the Hill and become a symbol of the city.

Pittsburgh functions as distinct neighborhoods with their own spheres of influence and activity. Permeability relies on flow within neighborhoods and their ability to connect to the city's main arteries, which is why the Southside's Carson St. and Penn Ave. in the Strip are such succesful social and commercial corridors. It also makes it more important to define the site of the Hill/Pittsburgh in neighborhood and city scale separately. One of my interests is to redefine Bedford, Webster, Wylie, and Centre avenues as intra-city main streets and understand how the boundaries can once again be softened and the physical center of Pittsburgh become an urban center as well.