Tag Archives: Urban Studies

Home, Labor Studies, Urban Studies

Video Seminars: Organizing Responses to the Pandemic

The Departments of Urban Studies and Labor Studies/CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies invites you to join us for the following video seminars to discuss some of the organizing responses to the pandemic:

Tuesday, April 14, 7-9 pm: “Urban Warfare: Housing Justice Under a Global Pandemic” with Raquel Rolnik (University of São Paulo, former UN Rapporteur on Adequate Housing), Daniel Aldana Cohen (University of Pennsylvania), and Cea Weaver (Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance). Co-sponsored by NYU Urban Democracy Lab, NYC-DSA, Verso Books, and Departments of Labor and Urban Studies, School of Labor and Urban Studies/CUNY. RSVP HERE​

Thursday, April 16, 6:30-8pm: “Labor Justice” with Mohamed Attia (Street Vendor Project) and Ilana Berger (Hand in Hand Domestic Employers Network); Member of Amazonians United; Frontline healthcare worker. Co-sponsored by NYU Urban Democracy Lab and the Departments of Labor and Urban Studies, School of Labor and Urban Studies/CUNY. RSVP HERE

Stay tuned for a confirmed date for “Justice for Immigrants” with Aamnah Khan (DRUM: Desis Rising Up and Moving and Arts & Democracy), Victor Monterossa, Jr. (Covenant House, New Jersey and Immigrant Workers for a Just Response) and Paula Chakravartty (NYU Gallatin and New Sanctuary Coalition). Co-sponsored by the NYU Urban Democracy Lab and Departments of Labor and Urban Studies, School of Labor and Urban Studies/CUNY.

Questions: Please contact Stephanie Luce, stephanie[dot]luce[at]slu[dot]cuny[dot]edu

Photo via flickr by Dan Nguyen (cc-by-nc)

Home, Murphy News

CUNY SLU Appoints Deepak Bhargava as Distinguished Lecturer of Urban Studies

Starting this fall, CUNY SLU will have another long-time social justice leader in its ranks: Deepak Bhargava has been appointed to serve as Distinguished Lecturer of Urban Studies, filling one of the school’s rotating Distinguished Lecturer positions.

Mr. Bhargava brings more than 25 years of experience in public policy, campaign building, social justice advocacy, and non-profit management. For 16 years, he served as President and Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, one of the country’s pre-eminent centers for grassroots community organizing in low-income communities of color. 

“I am incredibly excited to work with the CUNY SLU students and faculty,” said Mr. Bhargava. “This is a community that is deeply committed to labor rights and community issues, and it is an honor to be able to learn from and work with such talented and committed people. As a long-time non-profit leader and social justice campaigner, I look forward to contributing to this growing community of thinkers and doers, and to helping to develop the people and ideas that will power a new era of social change.”

As a frontline activist, Mr. Bhargava has played a major role in several national efforts to bring about change through collective action. He has strengthened the field of community organizing in the U.S., nurtured the modern immigrant rights movement; helped launch national coalitions to fight for health care reform, reduce poverty and advance immigrant rights; and trained thousands of young leaders and activists.

 “Deepak Bhargava brings an immense amount of knowledge and real-world practice to the classroom,” explains SLU Founding Dean Gregory Mantsios. “His commitment to uplifting underserved communities exemplifies the CUNY SLU belief that with concerted efforts we can make our City, State and nation a better place for all.”

Mr.  Bhargava currently serves on the boards of the Open Society Foundations (US), JPB Foundation, Bauman Foundation, as well as the editorial board of The Nation magazine. He has written extensively about community organizing, public policy related to poverty and economic justice, progressive strategy, civic engagement and racial justice among many other topics. 

This coming semester, Mr. Bhargava will lecture both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, teaching courses in “Public Issues” and “Social and Economic Policy in the U.S.”

“We are thrilled to have Mr. Bhargava join the SLU faculty,” explains Urban Studies Department Chair Steve London. “Our students will greatly benefit from his years of social justice advocacy, activism, policy expertise, and experience in campaign building and grassroots organizing.  Our faculty looks forward to collaborating with Mr. Bhargava on important research topics such as immigrant rights, and I have no doubt that his contributions to the SLU community will help us fulfill our social justice and workers’ rights mission.”

Events, Home, Urban Studies

Event: Rights In Transit: Public Transportation & the Right to the City (3/8)

Date: Friday, March 8th, 2019
Time: 6pm-8pm
Location: CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
25 West 43rd Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10036

RSVP HERE

Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably “yes” to both. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself.

Rights in Transit offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity. Rather than focusing on civil rights alone, Rights in Transit argues for engaging the more radical notion of the right to the city.

Join us as Professor Kafui Attoh of the CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies and author of RIGHTS IN TRANSIT, discusses these topics with Eric Goldwyn of NYU’s Marron Institute.

Professor Attoh will sign copies of his recently published book, and special guest artist Jimmy James Greene will display his artwork, featured in Attoh’s book.

Faculty Writing, Home, Urban Studies

How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All

This post originally appeared on the London School of Economics Policy Blog.

For more on the public transit crisis, join us for our October 13th forum “Getting Back on Track: The New York Transit Crisis.“

By Kafui Attoh

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848

There is perhaps nothing more idiotic than a city with poor public transit. The typical North American city may, in this sense, be the paragon of idiocy. As many have long noted, the US remains rather unique amongst developed nations in the reluctance of its citizens to board anything resembling – gasp!—a public bus.  In 2012, only 7 percent of all US residents used public transit on a daily basis. A whopping 51 percent reported never using public transit at all.  For many, of course, the reasons are clear enough. Beyond the “absurd primacy of the automobile in American life,” public transit in the US suffers the same underfunded fate as so much else that is “public” in this country. To quote John Kenneth Galbraith we remain a society that is “privately rich and publicly poor” and nowhere is this more evident than in the sorry state of urban mass transit.

Only this past summer, malfunctions with New York City’s century old signaling system drew national headlines after millions of subways riders complained of excessive delays, overcrowding, and of being stranded at their respective stops. In the previous summer a spate of track fires in Washington DC’s metro not only led to service delays, and the launch of the semi-ironic website “ismetroonfire.com” but several hospitalizations from smoke inhalation. Where this is the reality in two of our most transit-dependent cities, it is undoubtedly worse in smaller cities where transit often remains the domicile of the poor and where suburban sprawl makes commuting via bus slow and inconvenient. Continue reading How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All →

Home, Murphy News, Urban Studies

Event: Getting Back on Track: The New York Transit Crisis (10/13)

Friday, October 13th, 2017
8:30am-11:30am
Murphy Institute, 25 W. 43rd St., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10036

RSVP HERE

This forum will explore the nature and causes of the current mass transit crisis, and will focus on solutions that will enable New York to sustain itself as a world-class city. During the course of two panels, speakers will offer strategies to modernize and maintain the City’s transit systems, with responses from local elected leaders on the crisis and policies to remedy it.

  • Andrew Bata, Regional Manager North America, International Association of Public Transport (UITP)
  • Robert Paaswell, Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, City College of New York and Director Emeritus, University Transportation Research Center (UTRC)
  • John Samuelsen, President, TWU International
  • City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, Chair of the Committee on Transportation
  • City Council Member I. Daneek Miller, Chair of the Committee on Civil Service and Labor
  • Kafui Attoh, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, Murphy Institute

Additional speakers to be announced.

Photo by Timothy Vogel via flickr (CC BY-NC)

Home, Labor Studies, Murphy News, Urban Studies

Prof. Penny Lewis Releases New Book: The City is the Factory

This month marks the release of The City Is The Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age, edited by Murphy Prof. Penny Lewis and Miriam Greenberg.

Urban public spaces, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, have become the emblematic sites of contentious politics in the twenty-first century. As the contributors to The City Is the Factory argue, this resurgent politics of the square is itself part of a broader shift in the primary locations and targets of popular protest from the workplace to the city. This shift is due to an array of intersecting developments: the concentration of people, profit, and social inequality in growing urban areas; the attacks on and precarity faced by unions and workers’ movements; and the sense of possibility and actual leverage afforded by local politics and the tactical use of urban space. Thus, “the city”—from the town square to the banlieu—is becoming like the factory of old: a site of production and profit-making as well as new forms of solidarity, resistance, and social reimagining.

We see examples of the city as factory in new place-based political alliances, as workers and the unemployed find common cause with “right to the city” struggles. Demands for jobs with justice are linked with demands for the urban commons—from affordable housing to a healthy environment, from immigrant rights to “urban citizenship” and the right to streets free from both violence and racially biased policing. The case studies and essays in The City Is the Factory provide descriptions and analysis of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles.

Contributors:
Melissa Checker, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania; Els de Graauw, Baruch College, City University of New York; Kathleen Dunn, Loyola University Chicago
Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University; Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz; Alejandro Grimson, Universidad de San Martín (Argentina); Andrew Herod, University of Georgia; Penny Lewis, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Stephanie Luce, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Lize Mogel, artist and coeditor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography; Gretchen Purser, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

Learn more or purchase a copy here.