Pittsburgh’s cycling community is getting some love from Streetfilms. The active transportation nonprofit spent 48 hours in Steel City recently, and they had nothing but good things to say about the city’s bicycling community and walkable infrastructure.

I am especially intrigued by Pittsburgh’s membership-funded bike advocacy group Bike PGH and pedestrian piazza Market Square.

Cleveland and other cities in our region can learn a few things from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh deserves this national recognition.

Follow the jump to view the video.

Really interesting article in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek about Niagara Falls, New York, and some of the problems it faces despite being next to what is litterally one of the largest tourist attractions in the world.
The article details how Niagara Falls
“encompasses just about every mistake a city could make… a 1960s mayor’s decision to bulldoze his quaint downtown and replace it with a bunch of modernist follies. There was a massive hangar-like convention center designed by Philip Johnson; Cesar Pelli’s glassy indoor arboretum, the Wintergarden, which was …

There’s been a lot written about last week’s midterm elections and I’m hesitant to add to it.
But I know I’m not the only person who noticed several of the states that swung from blue to red were in our region: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Why is this? High unemployment? Higher turnout of white working class voters dissatisfied with Obama?
What do you think? We’ve got a lot of collective brainpower amongst our readers, I am curious to hear people’s thoughts. Also, what policies enacted by Obama and the Democratic …

Take a look at these two quirky videos about congestion pricing by Lewis Lehe

Where, you ask?
Hamilton, Ontario, that is. At least, according to this story in the National Post that says the affordable and beautiful real estate appeals to those who are sick of Toronto prices.
I like to think this blog does a decent job of covering developments in the Rust Belt, from Buffalo to Milwaukee and beyond. But we haven’t spent much time studying our Canadian counterpart. It sounds like Hamilton has some interesting neighborhoods to explore.
And I gotta give credit where credit is due. I was alerted to this by a …

If you are in Pittsburgh Saturday afternoon, check out Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City, screening at The Carnegie Museum of Art at 3 p.m.
Burnham was “one of America’s most important architects and urban planners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
-KG
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Clevelanders: This sounds like a great film screening to attend- The Olmsted Legacy: a film about Frederick Law Olmsted and America’s great city parks.
Lots of people know Olmsted as the landscape architect of New York’s Central Park, but he designed nearly 100 public parks in his lifetime.
You likely have even been in a park he designed – in any one of Buffalo’s system of parks, Belle Isle Park in Detroit, as well as parks in Chicago, Milwaukee, Dayton and Scranton.
“The parks, he held, were to be vital democratic spaces in …

Editor’s note: This piece is a guest editorial from William Black, an organizer of the Pages & Places book festival in Scranton, PA, in October. Here he describes a number of other developments happening in his hometown. -KG

If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton …

” A long time ago, things got broken here.”

“People got sad and left.”

“Maybe the world gets broken so we can have some work to do.”

“People think there aren’t any frontiers anymore. They can’t see that there are frontiers all around us.”

-Braddock, Pennsylvania

This is the script from a relatively new Levi’s commercial.

Video after the jump.

I’m excited to see Changing Gears, an NPR project about “Remaking the Manufacturing Belt” is up and running. Changing Gears aims to “report on a major developing story–the transformation of the Upper Midwest’s industrial-based economy to a post-manufacturing one. This transition is a turning point in the American economy with economic, social, environmental and cultural implications,” its web site states.
I had heard some rumblings about this project awhile ago so I’m glad to see it is off to a good start.
The project is “a product of the …