Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance

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From submarines to the suburbsthe remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War

During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburghs eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the worlds leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs,Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers.

Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburghs suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburghs elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city.

Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the renewal of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.

Reviews

"Forget Silicon Valley, Google buses, and loft living in San Francisco. As Patrick Vitale shows in his deeply researched and compellingly written book, post-war American high-tech begins in gritty Steel City, Pittsburgh. Its workers are not todays multi-ethnic, collarless class making social media but white men wearing pressed white shirts, living in suburban tract housing, making the Bomb. High-tech becomes something quite different, politically conservative, socially exclusive, rather sinister."Trevor J. Barnes, University of British Columbia

"Nuclear Suburbs offers a new and important insight into the complex relationship between the Cold War, suburbanization, and post-industrial capitalism. Patrick Vitale expertly reveals how deeply enmeshed scientists lives and work were in the economic and spatial restructuring of cities like Pittsburgh. It provides a powerful, important retort to anyone suggesting that science and knowledge workers are the solution to urban problems."Lily Geismer, author of Dont Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

"Even readers who dont share Vitales political conclusions might be intrigued to learn about Pittsburghs place in nuclear history, which is little recalled today."Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Author Bio

Patrick Vitale is assistant professor of geography in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Geography at Eastern Connecticut State University.