V.W.H. Campbell Jr., Post-Gazette
	Prince Charles enters the Benedum Center in early March 1988, where he gave the keynote address at the Remaking Cities conference.

In the flurry of media coverage surrounding Prince Charles' visit to America, some reports have said that it's been 20 years since his last official visit, which leads to the question: What are we, chopped liver?

It's been 17 years and eight months since the prince unofficially stepped off a plane at Greater Pittsburgh Airport, as it was known in early March 1988, and into a late winter snowstorm. By the time his limousine reached Downtown, the city's celebrated view at the end of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, about which architect David Lewis had been raving to the prince on the ride in, was lost in a blinding blizzard.

It was the prince's first and only visit to Pittsburgh. The next day, he gave the keynote address at the Remaking Cities conference, an international event that brought together 350 architects, urban designers, economists, historians and ordinary citizens to brainstorm ideas for the revival of declining industrial towns from the Mon Valley to Germany's Ruhr Valley.

Before a packed Benedum Center audience, Prince Charles championed grass-roots involvement in preserving and regenerating older communities. He encouraged "a renaissance of craftsmanship and the art of embellishing buildings for man's pleasure and for the sheer joy in beauty itself."

Yesterday, the prince was awarded the National Building Museum's Vincent Scully Prize in Washington, D.C., for promoting traditional town planning and raising public awareness of architecture over the past 25 years.

But what, in the long run, did the conference accomplish? And what is its legacy today?

"There's volumes of legacy. Some of it's in Pittsburgh but mostly it's not," said Mr. Lewis, the conference organizer, who will retire in December after teaching urban design at Carnegie Mellon University for more than 40 years.

Using Homestead, Duquesne and McKeesport as case studies for Regional Urban Design Assistance Teams, the conference made some bold recommendations: Clear away the abandoned steel mills along the Monongahela riverfront; make it easy to get to the river; use the land under the mills as the new economic engines for the towns; put a racetrack in McKeesport and a garden festival in Homestead as tourist attractions until more permanent development comes along.

Today the mills and most of their buildings are gone; the land has been redeveloped with shops, apartments and industrial parks. Nowhere has the transformation been more complete than in Homestead. Based on the conference's recommendations, Mr. Lewis suggested to the Park Corp., which owned the mill site, that a Station Square-like shopping center could be built within the mill sheds, retaining the Gantry crane, stacks and other mill elements as artifacts. It proved uneconomical to heat and cool, but the company liked the idea of a shopping center that could tap the 1 million consumers who live within a 10-mile radius. By 1996 it had attracted a developer, Continental Real Estate Cos., which later teamed with Nationwide Realty Investors.

But for all the talk of citizen participation at the conference, The Waterfront development sits isolated from the Homestead and Munhall communities, separated by a railroad that is broached at only two locations.

"A lot of people have argued with me" about the design of The Waterfront, Mr. Lewis said. "There was a great deal of talk about making streets and apartments [above the shops]. But the only way they could get the developer commitment was to get the big boxes and they needed maximum parking."

He thinks that in time, the cost of gasoline and the value of the land will lead to increased density and structured parking.

"But I may not live to see it," said Mr. Lewis, who is 83. "Places evolve. What we think is permanent turns out to be impermanent."

A few months after the conference, Mr. Lewis demonstrated his commitment to the Mon Valley by moving from his Oakland apartment to a former mill manager's house he'd bought and renovated in West Homestead. Over time, he and his wife, Judith Tener-Lewis, purchased five commercial buildings on Eighth Avenue, Homestead's historic but decaying main street. They remain mostly unoccupied.

"We have not yet solved the problem of getting the people who shop in the Waterfront to cross the railroad line," Mr. Lewis said.

In 1990, Mr. Lewis began CMU's Urban Lab, which continues the work of the conference by creating teams of architecture, public policy and business students to work on urban design projects with citizens and elected officials. They have been involved in about 30 communities in Western Pennsylvania, from Vandergrift to Neville Island to Hazelwood to Mt. Lebanon.

Beyond the region's boundaries, the conference reinforced the idea of citizen involvement in creating walkable communities that develop their historic resources as economic assets.

"A number of cities have moved forward with varying degrees of success," Mr. Lewis said. "Glasgow is probably the most successful, and at the time it was very, very depressed."

Some conference-goers, like British architect Alan Simpson, carried the urban design assistance team concept across the Atlantic. Since 2001, Mr. Simpson, as Urban Renaissance Champion for the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward, has worked with citizens in 18 Yorkshire towns to create long-range plans for their evolution. Mr. Lewis also credits the vision and backing of John Prescott, Tony Blair's deputy prime minister.

Getting that kind of political and economic support, Mr. Lewis said, has been difficult in Allegheny County, for which the conference also recommended creating a metropolitan form of government, protecting the natural amenities that give character and shape to the city, and supporting only those changes in neighborhoods that enhance the sense of place.

He is especially critical of the planned Mon-Fayette Expressway, which will wipe out large sections of several communities, including Hazelwood, where his Urban Lab students worked on ways to minimize its impact.

"If you had a national competition to do, at one stroke, the maximum amount of damage to the future livability of a city," Mr. Lewis said, "that might be the winner."