Cities After COVID
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The Institute for Public Knowledge, in partnership with the NYU’s Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality, invites you to join a conversation on the post-pandemic future of cities. The event is moderated by Eric Klinenberg featuring Thomas J. Sugrue, Shlomo (Solly) Angel, Vanessa Léon, and Kimberly Johnson.
We encourage you to RSVP and join us live to pose your questions directly to the panel. For those unable to attend live, we will record and upload each event to IPK’s YouTube channel here.
Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and Director of the Cities Collaborative at New York University. He is the author of four books, including the prizewinning, Origins of the Urban Crisis, and editor of four others, most recently Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization (2017) and Neoliberal Cities (2020). He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given nearly 400 public lectures throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia.
Shlomo (Solly) Angel is a Professor of City Planning at the Marron Institute. He leads the NYU Urban Expansion based at the Marron Institute . Angel is an expert on housing and urban development policy, having advised the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He currently focuses on documenting and planning for urban expansion in the world at large. In 1973, he started a program in Human Settlements Planning and Development at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. He taught at the Institute from 1973 to 1983, while researching housing and urban development in the cities of East, South, and Southeast Asia. From the mid-80s to mid-90s, he worked as a housing and urban development consultant to UN-Habitat, the Asian Development Bank, and the Government of Thailand. In 2000, he published Housing Policy Matters, a comparative study of housing conditions and policies around the world. From 2000 onward, he prepared housing sector assessments of 11 Latin America and Caribbean countries for the IDB and the World Bank. In 2012, he published Planet of Cities.
Vanessa Léon is Assistant Clinical Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service and Director of the Urban Planning program at NYU Wagner. Dr. Léon’s research and practice centers on the political economy of disasters, primarily in small island developing states. For about a decade, she undertook an in-depth analysis of Haiti’s institutional development over the past 30 years in order to evaluate the country’s post-earthquake capacity for improved local governance and public service delivery. In light of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Léon is conducting a comparative analysis of the institutional, economic, and social arrangements pre- and post-disaster that contribute to increased risks as well as to the resulting state-level responses in their aftermath. Additionally, in the face of rising instances of natural hazards – coupled with the long-term economic challenges resulting from this pandemic – her work endeavors to explore how Caribbean nations might better position themselves to maintain the wellbeing of their citizens, economies and their physical landscapes in order to mitigate current and imminent disaster threats. She received a Quick Response Research Grant from the Natural Hazards Center, with the support of the National Science Foundation, to engage in this work.
Kimberley Johnson is a professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. Johnson’s research focuses on urban and metropolitan politics, federalism and intergovernmental relations, race and ethnic politics, and American political development, particularly the intersection between state and society. Kimberley is the author of numerous articles as well as two books, Governing the American State (Princeton University Press) and Reforming Jim Crow (Oxford University Press). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Dark Concrete, which explores American urban political development during the 20th Century with a focus on Oakland, California, and Newark, New Jersey. Before joining NYU, Johnson was the EBH Chair in Urban Studies and Political Science at Barnard College, as well as the Director of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program.
Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.