Call it a moment decades in the making. Call it a blueprint for the revival of Rust Belt cities across the United States. Call it the beginning of the city of the future — the City of Bridges that may soon be the first city on the planet where drivers are a thing of the past.

Pittsburgh's relationship with self-driving cars has been called all of these things in the past few months, as its tumultuous relationship with Uber has put it at the forefront of autonomous driving technology. Uber put the eyes of the world on the Steel City last week when it announced that its first self-driving cars would begin to pick up passengers there this month.

Raj Rajkumar, professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, drives an autonomous vehicle down Schenley Drive in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, on June 1. Image: Nate Guidry/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP



Not San Francisco. Not New York City. Not Austin. Pittsburgh. For casual observers, the announcement may seem to have come from nowhere, as though Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had thrown a dart at a map and that's where his aim took the company.

But, as Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto told Mashable, "it's the overnight success story that took 30 years."

The city's economy was already imploding when Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) planted the seeds of revival in 1979. That year, the school opened its Robotics Institute. It's a detail that wasn't on the forefront of many minds in Pittsburgh back then, as unemployment shot up to around one fifth of the city's residents and the manufacturing economy on which the city was built dropped like the start of a roller coaster.

Some of the 10,000 unemployed protestors expected to greet President Ronald Reagan on his visit to a Pittsburgh hotel awaited his arrival in a steady rain, on April 6, 1983. Image: AP Photo/George Widman



But the university was able to wall itself off, to survive despite the "hell with the lid off" around it. The military, frustrated in its own attempts to build robots, got in touch with CMU engineers in the 1980s. In 1995, CMU opened its world-famous National Robotics Engineering Center. Like Stanford University to Silicon Valley, CMU was slowly molding Pittsburgh into a destination for top talent in an industry destined to shape much of the future.

Roboticists at the university began building a semi-autonomous car on a military contract in 2007, according to The New York Times, and from there the engineers and others at the school continued to up their level of expertise so much that, by 2014, Kalanick knew he wanted Uber's autonomous driving empire to start in Pittsburgh.

Uber announced a partnership with CMU early last year, but that partnership turned rocky and aggressive in a hurry, as Uber decided to hire away dozens of the school's top robotics talent for its own lab just down the road.

Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, gives a speech at Startup Fest Europe. Image: Maysun/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

That's what can happen when researchers and academics and engineers, long toiling in the obscurity of a university, realize their work can provide the pillar of an industry that could well be worth billions and billions of dollars. Uber offered them money that the university simply couldn't match, and a chance to see their ideas driving around on the road, as Uber's self-driving cars have been this year as they prepped for passengers.

What happens next, for the city, could very well determine the trajectory of Pittsburgh for decades to come. Uber and other big-name tech-centric firms know what Pittsburgh has to offer — the talent and the livability. But will this injection of high-powered start-up culture bring all Pittsburgh natives up with the rising tide, or will it wash away those who don't have the degrees or technical skills to participate in this more modern economy? Can the city avoid selling part of its soul to compete with cities more commonly mentioned in stories about tech hubs, such as San Francisco and Austin and New York?

A boat moves along the Monongahela River adjacent to the central business district in downtown Pittsburgh. Image: AP Photo/Bill Sikes



Peduto talked a lot about what makes Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh. He talked about how much the city fought to keep its culture, its sports teams, as it searched for a new economy its citizens could stand on. He talked about gentrification in Silicon Valley, and how corporations infused with eye-popping sums of cash can pump up the cost of living so much that natives not working in the industry can be forced out.

He said he believes the city can build itself around this new pillar, that auto technicians will be a necessary part of the ecosystem, that schools can begin to train people for industry jobs such as software engineering at the high school level. He hopes, too, that success in the new economy might resurrect a little success in the old economy, that riding the boom of self-driving cars might lead to an increase in manufacturing jobs.

"You don't have to have a Ph.D. to be a part of this economy," Peduto said.

Uber employees test the self-driving Ford Fusion hybrid cars in Pittsburgh. Image: AP Photo/Jared Wickerham



And if Pittsburgh succeeds, it might well point the way back for other Rust Belt cities still looking for a long-term revival plan. Partner with a university, believe in the future of an industry, and good things can happen.

Peduto said it was innovation that built Pittsburgh, and it's innovation that has brought the city back from the edge, too. Now, as companies try to capitalize on the fruits of that innovation, the city will have to make sure it's not cut out of the rewards.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.