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Previous Talks

October 16, 2020 from 12 – 1:30 PM

Back to the Future: Inequality, Austerity, and the Political Economy of New York City

Presented by Richard McGahey, Visiting IST Faculty and Senior Fellow at the New School for Social Research

New York City faces a severe budget crisis driven by the Covid recession. But the pandemic and recession are illuminating long-standing inequalities in the city’s economy, in spite of decades of policy aimed at supporting private sector development and restraining city spending and investment. The city’s situation and future prospects are shaped by underlying forces including industry changes, federal and state policy, a politically fragmented region, and structural racism. Like others in the U.S., New York cannot solve these problems on its own. It also lacks a progressive movement with a unified approach to economic development, complicating its future prospects.

Rick McGahey (Ph.D, Economics, New School) is visiting with the Institute for Social Transformation, and writing a book on cities and inequality for Columbia University Press. He has extensive experience in public policy and philanthropy, including serving as Executive Director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Labor. He also has worked at the Ford Foundation as a Program Officer in Economic Development and as the Foundation’s first Director of Impact Assessment.

May 15, 2020

The Housing/Habitat Project: Tracing Impacts of the Affordability Crisis in the Wildlands of Exurban California

Presented by Professor Miriam Greenberg, UC Santa Cruz

The increase in California wildfires has raised awareness of the dangerous spread of housing development in the Wildlands Urban Interface [WUI]. Yet little research exists on what’s driving this development, or its complex socio-environmental impacts beyond fire. Interdisciplinary researchers at UCSC have begun to study these dynamics and a little-understood driver of them: California’s affordable housing crisis, which pushes people from cities to remote exurbs. We trace the socio-environmental impacts of this shift: habitat fragmentation for mountain lions; infringement on lands stewarded by Amah Mutsun tribes; and environmental justice implications for “extreme commuters” on the urban fringe.  In short, the project looks at how crises for ‘housing and habitat’ co-evolved and may now be interacting with each other.

March 6, 2020

The Democratic Foundations of Decarbonization: Mapping Accountability at the Interface of Urban and Global Climate Governance

Presented by Professor Adam Millard-Ball, UC Santa Cruz

The width of street rights-of-way is normally determined by traffic engineering and urban design conventions, without considering the immense value of the underlying land. In Santa Clara County, California alone, land worth up to $140 billion – $222,000 per household – is locked up in excess street rights-of-way. Planning for autonomous vehicles highlights the overprovision of streets in urban areas. Because they can evade municipal anti-camping restrictions, autonomous camper vans have the ability to blur the distinction between land for housing and land for streets. Planners should consider land value when determining the widths of streets in new development, and also turn excess right-of-way into housing and other productive urban uses.

November 22, 2019

The Democratic Foundations of Decarbonization: Mapping Accountability at the Interface of Urban and Global Climate Governance

Presented by Professor David Gordon, UC Santa Cruz

Does the path to global decarbonization run through cities? Mobilized by a potent combination of imperatives, opportunism, and ideals, cities have staked out a claim to leading the global climate response. Professor David Gordon explores how we might assess and evaluate the political durability of city climate governance using descriptive analytics drawn from a newly developed dataset that tracks global and local practices of city accountability. The presentation illustrates the variable ways that cities are measuring, disclosing, and reporting to external audiences while at the same time making their actions and accomplishments visible to local citizens and stakeholders. The presentation situates these patterns within the contours of a larger project that aims to understand how cities respond to the twin imperatives of global and local climate accountability, and more broadly the political legitimacy on which their global leadership rests.

October 11, 2019

Global Problems, City Solutions: A mixed-methods analysis of local climate adaptation plans

Presented by Professor Hilary Angelo, UC Santa Cruz, and Professor David Wachsmuth, McGill University

As cities have become leading protagonists in the fight against climate change, the sustainability efforts of high-profile “best practice” cities are increasingly well-documented and replicated. Much less is known, however, about the urban sustainability efforts outside the superstar cities dominating global public discourse. This presentation discusses a cross-disciplinary, collaborative project attempting to address this knowledge gap through a mixed methods analysis of local climate action plans across the State of California. First, we discuss the results of policy analysis of these plans, which identified an increase in the number of plans incorporating social equity into urban climate planning, and found that the presence of equity language correlates with more systemic solutions, such as affordable housing, being proposed in CAPs. Second, we outline our work-in-progress to apply machine learning techniques to large-scale textual analysis of climate plans and associated public discourse.