The post title is the premise of the CNN piece that was supposed to air last night on Anderson Cooper 360 but that got preempted by Natasha Richardson and AIG (not that those two things have anything to do with each other). I was interviewed on camera for the story, so there goes my anticipated five minutes of national TV fame.
If you are curious what the piece was about and what I had to say, here is a link to my writeup of the whole thing, which I posted at Pittsblog.
This doesn’t have much to do directly with law and technology, but conceptually my interest in re-growing Pittsburgh is of a piece with my interest in building and governing commons and other knowledge-based institutions (universities, newspapers, documentary filmmaking, “open source” biology). A city is a kind of knowledge commons. Pittsburgh all but died in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and now it’s back. At least the Pittsburgh commons is alive and kicking, even if it isn’t completely healed. How did we do that? And can it be done elsewhere?