People's Cities: A Summit

This event was Co-sponsored by Urban Democracy Lab, NYU Collaborative on Global Urbanism, Department of Metropolitan Studies, and Deutsches Haus at NYU. Will cities save us? In the last decades we have witnessed a resurgent interest in cities, accompanied by a great deal of urban optimism, even in the face of the exclusion and inequalities of our cities. Cities have become a privileged target of investment, as professionals and elites have rediscovered urban cores as desirable locations. At the same time, cities have become a veritable laboratory for new technologies in transportation and infrastructure, ones that promise to be more sustainable and resilient. And most recently, urban progressivism has captured the imagination of many large cities, like New York, Barcelona, London, and Los Angeles, and smaller ones, like Jackson, MS, and Berkeley, CA. Such places have played important roles in advancing innovative progressive policies, but also as symbolic beachheads holding up socially just principles in the face of global tides of conservative and reactionary politics playing out at the national level. And yet a number of questions remain about the viability of progressive strategies at the local level. Join us for an exciting public debate and conversation about the possibilities — and limits — of municipal, and city-led, politics. Moderated by Juan Gonzalez (of Democracy Now, and author of Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities), confirmed participants so far include Gerardo Pisarello (Deputy Mayor of Barcelona), Kali Akuno (author of the Jackson Plan), Margit Mayer (Professor of Political Science and co-editor of Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City), and Carlina Rivera (NYC Councilwoman, 2nd Council District).