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On Cities and Democracy: Space, Place, and Race

This event features three authors of essays included in Democracy and the Life of Cities (to be published May 10) speaking about their ideas for generating and strengthening democratic practices that policymakers at the local, national, and international levels can implement.
 
In a world facing what some call a “democratic recession”, cities are attracting attention as an apparent exception to a trend toward democratic backsliding. They are standing against rising authoritarian leadership in North America and Europe. They are also skirting democratic gridlock and polarization at the national level to confront large-scale problems such as climate change, often coordinating with others through city-to-city networks. Many cities are working to strengthen democracy worldwide as articulated in the recent Global Declaration of Mayors for Democracy, which was signed by 207 mayors from 55 countries. The signatories include the mayors of Buenos Aires, Budapest, Kyiv, Taipei, and Warsaw.
 
What is it about cities that can make them unique democratic actors? What opportunities and pitfalls do cities face, and where can city leaders and residents make progress? Can cities fit the role projected onto them, that of bulwarks of democracy? Please join us for a discussion that seeks answers to these questions.

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Daniel E. Agbiboa is assistant professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, he was assistant professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House working on the research theme Global Shifts: Urbanization, Migration, and Climate Change. Agbiboa earned a PhD in international development from the University of Oxford (St. Anthony’s College) as a Queen Elizabeth House Scholar and a master's degree in development studies from the University of Cambridge (Magdalene College) as a Cecil Renaud Scholar. Agbiboa’s research and teaching focus on how state and nonstate forms of order and authority penetrate and shape each other, and the spatialization and materialization of mobility, power, and politics in contemporary African cities.

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Sheila Foster is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University. She was previously the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law at Fordham University. She also co-directed the Fordham Urban Law Center, was a founder of the Fordham University Urban Consortium, and served as associate dean and vice dean at Fordham Law School. Prior to joining Fordham, she was a professor of law at Rutgers University.

Foster has been involved in many aspects of urban policy. She is the chair of the advisory committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovation Working Group, an advisory board member of the Marron Institute for Urban Management at New York University, and she sits on the New York City Panel on Climate Change. As co-director of the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov), she is engaged in the “Co-Cities Project”, an applied research project on public policies and local projects in more than 100 cities worldwide.

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Julie Nelson is the senior vice president of Programs at Race Forward. She was the founding director of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), a joint project of Race Forward and the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, where she serves as a senior fellow.

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