After her four-hour tour of Pittsburgh on Monday, Harvard urban planner Margaret Crawford had an idea for how to improve the city. She thinks Pittsburgh should be more ... Pittsburgh.

Instead of aspiring to be like other cities, Pittsburgh should try to be more of what it already is, Crawford said in an interview.

"People here in many respects appreciate Pittsburgh but also have a little bit of an inferiority complex about it," said Crawford, who was in town for a public speaking engagement about 101 Urban Salvations, a project she did two years ago with her students, who came up with ideas large and small for making Cambridge, Mass., more livable.

"I understand why [Pittsburgh] was No. 1 in places to live," Crawford said. "Every time I come here I feel like I should move here. I'm always struck by the topography, which I think is extraordinary, and the many different neighborhoods and affordable housing."

In Pittsburgh, "a lot of things are going on that are very interesting, yet a lot of the conventional notions of development still proliferate, like the new hockey stadium," she said.

Her tour with architect Anne-Marie Lubenau, president of the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh, took her all over the city and to Homestead and Braddock.

"The attempt to revitalize Braddock [through the arts and urban farming] is interesting, exciting and innovative," said Crawford, whose 1995 book, "Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns," examines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environments. Braddock is "an amazing effort ... really unique."

She launched the 101 Urban Salvations project because even though she thinks Cambridge has a "very competent" planning and urban design team, Harvard's hometown isn't as livable as it could be. Her students in the Graduate School of Design interviewed 400 residents about their lives and experiences, asking them to complete the sentence, "Cambridge would be a better place to live if ..." Students translated their responses into 101 ideas that could be implemented.

One of the most significant suggestions was charter reform, amending the city charter to have an elected mayor.

As Braddock shows, Crawford said, "Strong mayors are the only people in cities who have the power to innovate. You rarely see that with the kind of dispersed power of a council-dominated city."

Making public places user-friendly during Boston's long, cold winters was a recurring theme.

"The weather is a problem a lot of people talked about," Crawford said. How to make winter more fun is a particular challenge, with the only sledding park on the edge of the city. One of the 101 salvations is to gather snow from around the city and pile it in Cambridge Common to create a sledding mound.

Crawford sees a similar seasonal disuse here in Schenley Plaza.

Lubenau said there are no immediate plans to do an urban salvations project here, "but wouldn't it be great if this type of civic engagement resulted from discussions about our city and neighborhoods during the upcoming mayoral election?"

Crawford's talk at Point Park University was part of the Community Design Center's Design Excellence Lecture Series. To view the interactive Web site she and her students created for 101 Urban Salvations, visit www.urbansalvations.com.