Urban Law Center

07/02/2018

5th Annual Fordham International & Urban Law Conference, sponsored by the Urban Law Center, UN-Habitat, Mackenzie Presbyterian University and MackCidade in São Paulo, Brazil

05/24/2018

05/17/2018

Applications due 5/20

SEEKING URBAN LAW STUDENT FELLOWS! The Urban Law Center is seeking paid student research fellows—for summer and term-time projects—to focus on a range of pressing urban law issues and collaboration with partners including UN-Habitat Local Solutions Support Center University of Groningen Pending ...

05/09/2018

https://t.e2ma.net/webview/y1t7l/ba83bacbc8f2dfc2b87cbb75a91ed276

SEEKING URBAN LAW STUDENT FELLOWS!

SEEKING URBAN LAW STUDENT FELLOWS! The Urban Law Center is seeking paid student research fellows—for summer and term-time projects—to focus on a range of pressing urban law issues and collaboration with partners including UN-Habitat Local Solutions Support Center University of Groningen Pending ...

03/12/2018

Registar Today: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/urban-law-curriculum-lunch-tickets-43858310387?utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=new_event_email&utm_term=viewmyevent_button

01/03/2018

Save The Date: February 9th, 2018

01/03/2018

Happy New Year Everyone! Stay tune for some exciting programs in 2018, Including our 5th International Comparative Urban Law Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

10/18/2017

“The public discourse about immigrants became more negative, but this was not driven by people changing their mind about immigrants: It was driven by people changing the way they acted. Anti-immigrant users tweeted more as a result of the law,” Flores said. “Scholars and journalists were saying there’s more harassment and name-calling of immigrants, and they weren’t wrong about that. But the shift was behavioral, not attitudinal.”

Before a border wall became a budget bargaining chip, before the presidential pardon of a controversial sheriff and before federal policies were announced on social media, there was Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the “show me your papers” law.

10/17/2017

"Initially, the appearance of forward-looking architecture along the High Line was heralded as a boon, a miraculous transformation of stodgy old Manhattan. But the thrill soon faded, at least for some critics. As Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street Books, 2017), wrote in a 2012 New York Times op-ed: the High Line has been “a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history.”
..Having unwittingly helped transform an industrial relic into an overheated engine for gentrification, Hammond is now doing his best to use the lessons he learned for the greater good. In June of this year, Hammond convened the High Line Network. “Joshua David and I had met with hundreds of these projects over more than a decade. And we were trying to figure out how we could be helpful over the long term,” he says. “That’s when we came up with the idea of a network. Let’s learn from each other."

Can a group of urban park projects around the country inspire equitable development instead of displacement?

10/10/2017

"In an effort to prevent future white nationalist rallies and allow the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville, the city will create a task force and push for local and state legislation, according to a statement released by the city Sunday evening.

The announcement came a day after dozens of white nationalists and supremacists, led by University of Virginia graduate Richard Spencer, gathered with torches in Emancipation Park. The rally elicited fear and anger from the Charlottesville community.

“It is unconscionable that Mr. Spencer and his allies would return to our city to intimidate and spread fear, especially after their morally reprehensible invasion of the city on August 12th,” the city’s statement said.

According to the statement, the city hopes “to prevent future reoccurrences” of the rallies and develop proactive legal, policing, regulatory, outreach and communications strategies.

The statement also said the Charlottesville Police Department is working with the commonwealth’s attorney’s office to pursue legal action, something Mayor Mike Signer and City Councilor Wes Bellamy suggested in tweets on Saturday.

Police said Saturday’s torch-lit rally attracted between 40 and 50 people near the city’s statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Emancipation Park. According to Charlottesville’s current special events ordinance, demonstrations involving 50 or fewer people can take place without a permit."

Moves come a day after torch-lit demonstration at Lee statue

09/25/2017

"Nadia lives in a large provincial city that, similarly to other cities in Russia, suffers from a shortage of daycare facilities, which often contradicts the official state rhetoric encouraging women to have multiple children. Although this issue has been at the centre of national and regional politics, municipal and regional governments find it hard to keep pace with the growing demand for daycare. Nadia’s older daughter is in municipal daycare already. After she was born, Nadia took maternity leave and stayed at home for 18 months. Less than a year after resuming work, she got pregnant again and took maternity leave again. Nadia can, of course, stay at home until Alesha turns three, she told me, but it is hard on the family financially (as only the first year and a half are paid) and she was actually eager to go back to work. I asked Nadia if she was considering private daycare or a nanny. “No,” she replies without much hesitation. “It’s either municipal daycare or babushka [grandmother]. I don’t trust anyone else when it comes to caring for my kids.”

Nadia’s story is only one of many I heard during the year I spent in a large provincial city in the Urals, where I was conducting an ethnographic study of Russia’s so-called “demographic crisis.”

While encouraging young families to have more children, the state fails to provide them with adequate childcare support. Thus, freshly baked parents turn to babushkas as a means to navigate their lives in a new economic and political environment - but grandmothers are not as readily available as one may expect them to be."

Expectations of babushki taking care of their grandchildren, shaped by the Soviet history of family and economic policies, are hard to implement in a radically different post-socialist context.

09/21/2017

"The encyclopedia-like entries can be browsed randomly, but the book also suggests a few “tours.” If you’re interested in understanding why cities are still segregated 50 years after the Fair Housing Act passed, for example, you can read about older practices like racial zoning and freeways that cut off black neighborhoods, along with a list of newer practices, such as a law passed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that restricted rentals in a predominately white neighborhood to blood relatives.

Other “weapons” listed in the book are more subtle. Armrests on park benches are often in place not for comfort, but to ensure that homeless people can’t lie down. Fake parks have been used to keep s*x offenders away. (In California, where state law prohibits s*x offenders from living within 2,000 feet of parks or schools, L.A. has built tiny parks specifically to force offenders out of some neighborhoods.) Some businesses use speakers blasting classical music to deter skateboarders. In the mostly white community of Springfield, New Jersey, a basketball court was dismantled and replaced by a street hockey rink to make the park less attractive to black visitors.

“This kind of tactical reactionism is interesting to us,” says D’Oca. “These things are hiding in plain sight, and are all the more sinister for their banality.”

A new book, The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion, examines the fascinating techniques used to keep people out–and bring people in–to different areas of our cities.