Title: Wuhan vs. Pittsburgh: Urban Transformation of Old Industrial Cities under Globalization Impacts Authors:

Wuhan and Pittsburgh, as a pair of Sino-US sister cities, are both important industrial cities of their countries in the history. Since 1970, Pittsburgh gradually transformed itself from an industrial city to a post-industrial city, impressively solved its pollution problems and became one of the most livable cities in the U.S. However, over the past decades, which may be called the global era, Pittsburgh failed to stand on the superior position in the global competition for capital and talent. The city is losing businesses as well as losing people especially young graduates from the outstanding universities, such as Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh. The local industries didn’t benefit as much as they should from the leading researches in robotic, artificial intelligence and biotechnology in the universities, and can not achieve the status of the traditional industry role in the history. Wuhan, which is a metropolitan located in central China, is a traditional base of manufacturing industry and also one of the biggest iron and steel industry bases in China. From 1990s, Wuhan focused on the development of high-tech industries and has become the biggest photo-electronic information industry base in China in virtue of the large amounts of universities, including two famous universities in China which are Wuhan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. But its development still left far behind other cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and etc. The two cities are typical examples of old industrial cities in developed and developing countries facing challenges from globalization. Considering the flows of manufacturing industry from the U.S. to developing countries like China in recent years, Wuhan and Pittsburgh are actually on the two poles of the same globalization process. This paper focuses on the comparative study of the two cities in industry structure transformation and urban physical environment transformation impacts of globalization. The analysis of the role of brainpower in the new economy under globalization impacts will be carried out. According to the study of common and unique challenges and opportunities the two cities are now facing, economic and urban policy suggestions are made for both cities, and old industrial cities of their kind, to achieve their economic and urban development goals.