Uploaded on 2014-11-09 by macengr

Water has always been important, as the city is located at the confluence of three rivers. It was a battleground between the English and French due to its strategic position, and later the rivers made Pittsburgh a major manufacturing location due to the fact that they could be used for transporting materials. Even today, they are used for this purpose. They also ensure a supply of drinking water as well as plenty of recreational activities, now that they have been cleaned up from the days of heavy steel manufacturing. People are another key flow in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s urban population is 300,000 but swells to over a million each workday. In the long-term, Pittsburgh’s population has been declining as people have migrated away and older residents have died. This has been changing lately, though. With the growth of the computer industry and the fact that Pittsburgh is a location for several major colleges such as Carnegie-Mellon, as well as a center for medical research due to excellent hospitals located in the region, information has become a key flow in the city. Google has opened an office here and the robotics industry is growing as well. Ways to change these flows in the future include continuing to develop the riverfronts for human use as well as ongoing efforts at cleaning them of pollution from upstream sources. Encouraging the growth of Pittsburgh’s computer and information industry will help develop both data warehouses as well as delivering useful advances to the entire globe. And with people, increasing the stock of people living in the actual urban area, and reducing the outmigration, will help the city to continue to be a great place to live. ![enter image description here][1] [1]: https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1204/5168462862_812685ccde.jpg