New York Governor Kathy Hochul put a halt to the hotly debated congestion pricing plan this week, indefinitely shelving the MTA’s plan to charge drivers up to $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. 

The governor said she feared the tolling program, slated to start June 30, would “create another obstacle to our economic recovery.”

Fordham Now checked in with Annika Hinze, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, about the impact of the 11th-hour decision. 

“Congestion pricing was always going to be an imperfect scheme, but it was also an attempt to reduce traffic in the city, as well as channel money to the MTA, which it desperately needs,” she said. 

“Now policymakers are signaling that the environmental implications of this aren’t as important as the economic implications. But in 25 years, they will have become the prime economic issues of the day.”

Shifting people from cars and trucks to public transportation is a key component to New York City’s economic health and livability, she said, as well as efforts to fight climate change. Doing that requires both a carrot—improved mass transit—as well as a stick—a tax for driving into the most congested areas of a city.

In New York City, the law that authorized congestion pricing requires it to generate $1 billion annually, which the MTA would use to finance transit construction projects. Governor Hochul said the state will pursue other ways to fund the MTA, possibly in the form of a tax on city businesses.

Hinze noted that the plan had some quirks that had not been addressed well (or at all), so there was some understandable frustration among residents. 

“A congestion pricing scheme would have been much more justifiable in a metro area with a sophisticated and broadly accessible public transit system with trains, light rail, and buses,” she said.

“But even [in a city]with such a transit system in place, like London, congestion pricing was always going to be unpopular with some. It is inconvenient for some commuters to have such a system in place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the ‘wrong’ thing to do,” she said.

“It would’ve been a big signal to say, ‘We’re going to prioritize this, even if it’s unpopular because it’s the right thing to do.”

“It would have signaled, ‘We’re going to invest in and expand public transit infrastructure.”

Many have criticized the governor’s sudden reversal, noting that as recently as two weeks ago she said congestion pricing was critical to “making cities more livable.” Hinze said she thinks Hochul’s motivations to end the program were political. 

“It’s an election year. I assume that she looked at the polling and said, ‘Look, this is not the right time to push for this,’” she said, noting that a Siena College poll from April found that 72% of New York suburban residents opposed congestion pricing. 

That includes House districts that Democrats lost in the 2022 elections. Shelving the plan potentially helps Democrats win those races and win back the House of Representatives in November. 

“In a lot of districts down-ballot, Republicans are doing quite well, in particular on Long Island where congestion pricing is particularly unpopular,” Hinze said.  

Hinze thinks the program may not be dead for good.  The program has already been authorized by the New York State Legislature, and the MTA has already spent $555 million on the infrastructure for the program.

“My hope is that maybe it will not be indefinitely postponed. After the election, we can revisit it; maybe there will be better proposals, and some of the snags will be resolved, so we can pass something that’s better,” she said.

But on that day, German leadership agreed to double its defense budget, to 84 billion Euros (roughly $91 billion), and it also authorized a one-time expenditure of 100 billion Euros to modernize its armed forces, signifying that if NATO countries were to get involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Germany would be ready.

In another first, the country also sent weapons to Ukraine and authorized other countries to send German-made weapons there as well.

For Annika Hinze, Ph.D. an associate professor of political science, the director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, and a native of Germany, the change of heart couldn’t come soon enough.

Q: Were you surprised that Putin decided to invade Ukraine?

A: No, I don’t think I was. Especially in the last few weeks leading up to it, I think the West was completely asleep and quite frankly, I was really angry. I was angry to see the way that especially German foreign policy was dealing with this. There’s a German phrase Wandel durch Handel, which means “peace through trade.” It’s based on this old but very flawed theory that countries that are engaged in trade relations don’t go to war with each other. But I think all of that is out of the window now.

The German foreign minister said on Thursday, when Putin marched into Ukraine with a full-scale invasion, that she was outraged that Putin had lied to her face and had lied to the face of the German chancellor. Really, are you really surprised? How many times has he lied before?

Q: Do you think Europeans want Germany to get involved?

A: It’s the largest scale conflict on European soil since the end of World War II. All of European policy has tried to work toward preventing any sort of conflict in the European theater again, especially on that scale.

This is different because it’s a full-scale invasion by a former superpower of a sovereign, outspokenly pro-Western democracy. But when we talk about countries like Hungary and Poland, there’s that old ghost of Russia. There are still people alive who remember the Soviets very forcefully overthrowing uprisings for democracy in Eastern bloc countries and, suppressing public opinion and freedom of expression.

As someone from a former aggressor nation, I know my grandma’s stories about World War II. It’s something that’s very vivid still in a lot of Europeans, and especially for Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians, who were invaded by the Nazis, then invaded by the Soviets. And now they’re once again being invaded, by the Russians.

Q: Why do you think Germany has been slow to respond, and what impact does that have on Europe and NATO countries?

A: It’s been very frustrating to see German silence on so many issues. It doesn’t just concern Russia; it’s so many conflicts around the world, or in front of the German doorstep. I think that the European Union should have spoken more forcefully toward violations of human rights and freedom of expression in Hungary, for instance, where we’ve seen a rapid progression towards authoritarianism.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, [the magazine]Foreign Policy had an article on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel could replace any American leader as the leader of the free world. It became quite clear that Germany could not fill that position, even though it’s one of the strongest economies in the world. It could not fill that void because the German military is basically defunct right now. They have a lot of work to do before they get back to even a basic defense army.

This was for good reason, of course. The Western allies and the Soviets really didn’t want a strong Germany at the center of Europe again [after World War II], and Germany had to prove its peaceful intentions. But Germans have been too successfully taught not to be aggressors anymore.

Q: How deeply embedded in the German psyche is this importance of not getting involved in war or military conflict?

A: It’s part of our school system. We talk about the Holocaust, we visit concentration camps. There’s been a serious effort to confront in the collective memory what has happened and what Germany did specifically, not just in terms of two wars of aggression, but also in terms of mass genocide at the heart of Europe. That’s allowed a lot of Germans to say, ‘OK, we’re smarter than that now. We’ll never go to war anymore because war is unnecessary and we’re all pacifists.’ But you can’t really be a pacifist without weapons. And that sounds horrible, but I think in today’s world, that is just the truth. If you don’t have any weapons for collective defense, then you can’t keep the peace, especially not against aggressors like Putin.

Q: Do you feel like Putin’s aggression has spurred Germany to take on a leadership role in the world militarily?

A: It’s really too early to say where it will go. But I think the fact that they will then sit on a military that is going to be considerable on a world scale will put them in a position where they’re going to have to make decisions like that. It’s quite amazing that the German Bundestag made its announcement last Sunday, and in response, almost 500,000 people staged a protest against Putin in downtown Berlin. They did it to say we support what has just been decided.

That was really mind-blowing because very suddenly, there’s not just been a turn just in politics, but a turn in public opinion. Suddenly German political leadership has public opinion behind it on this, which has really never had happened since the end of World War II.

For many years, NATO did not admit Ukraine or Georgia to its ranks because its members were afraid that Russia would retaliate by invading Ukraine and other countries, said John Davenport, Ph.D., philosophy professor and director of Fordham’s minor in peace and justice studies. But the effort to placate President Vladimir Putin has gotten us nowhere—except for a war that will result in millions of refugees, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage in Ukraine, and possibly a worldwide recession, he said. 

“What we should be doing now is matching him tit for tat … We [should]admit Georgia next year. And as soon as this war is over in Ukraine, we’ll admit Ukraine as well. We’re going to stand up for a no-fly zone. If he takes further aggressive actions, maybe we’ll get rid of the puppet regime that [he’s] supporting in Venezuela. We’re in a new cold war here,” Davenport said. “Putin is doing this partly because he thinks we’re weak-willed, right? That countries in the NATO alliance don’t have the will to fight. If we don’t show him that’s not true, we’re going to end up—by the end of this century—with a world perhaps completely ruled by dictators.” 

In the virtual panel on March 4, Davenport and Olena Nikolayenko, Ph.D., a Ukraine native and chair and professor of Fordham’s political science department, explained how Western foreign policy led to the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and offered ways that the U.S. can alleviate the conflict. 

A Mission to Revive the Soviet Union

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent state. For Putin, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century,” said Nikolayenko. 

“He’s on a mission to reset Russian greatness and revive the Soviet Union,” said Nikolayenko, who is originally from Ukraine and has held prestigious positions in several U.S. universities. “This year marks the centennial of the establishment of the Soviet Union, which was set up in 1922. So to some extent, maybe it’s not an accident that he decided to launch this military campaign in order to rewrite history.” 

Since Putin came to power in 2000, he has successfully seized territory from Russia’s neighbors—Georgia and Ukraine—and supported dictatorships across the world, including the Assad regime in Syria, said the professors. Now he has started “the largest ground war in Europe since World War II,” said Nikolayenko. 

Years of Assumptions and Appeasement

There are several factors that emboldened Russia, particularly Western foreign policy, said Nikolayenko. U.S. presidential administrations often downplayed Russia’s belligerent behavior, she said. They expressed concern and implemented soft sanctions to signal disapproval of Russia’s actions, but they continued to maintain diplomatic relations and trade and purchase energy resources from Russia, which inadvertently provided financing for Russia’s military, she said. 

“Over the past decade or more, Western governments tried to appease Russia. They assumed that if Russia takes over just one piece of land—a piece of Moldova, a piece of Georgia, a piece of Ukraine—then the incumbent government in Russia can be appeased and the West can continue to have economic, political, and cultural relations with Russia,” Nikolayenko said. “But of course, as we can see now, this policy might not work very well.”

Finding Solutions: Aid, Trade, and a NATO No-Fly Zone

Nikolayenko said that countries can help Ukraine by providing humanitarian assistance for refugees and military aid for the Ukrainian army. She shared several resources with panel attendees, including a list of charity organizations and upcoming anti-war protests worldwide.

She said that countries can also stop trading with Russia, especially in the oil and gas industries, which would significantly undercut Russia’s ability to finance the war. Davenport added that it will be difficult to make Europe independent of Russian energy, but it’s possible within the next decade. 

“In the long run, it would take a huge investment—maybe five, 10 years at least,” Davenport said. “We could [massively increase]shipping natural gas … There are other countries that could do the same. This could be the beginning of a big push in Europe to try to become free of Russian energy dependence.” 

The U.S. and Western states can also introduce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would reduce deaths and overall destruction in Ukraine, said Nikolayenko. However, audience member Annika Hinze, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and director of the urban studies program, pointed out a potential conflict.

“NATO allies are concerned that if they established and policed a no-fly zone over Ukraine, Russia would not respect it and start shooting down NATO fighter jets, putting NATO at a direct confrontation with Russia, and essentially escalating the war into a Great War (and potentially a nuclear conflict),” Hinze typed into a Zoom chat box. “As an expert, do you think these concerns are warranted?”

Nikolayenko said that she didn’t see how, militarily, the Ukrainian army could stop the bombardment of its cities without a no-fly zone. 

“The United States and Western states have the military capacity to confront Russia, but they are reluctant to do it,” Nikolayenko said, adding that these countries are worried about further escalating the war. “And this is a source of frustration for many people in Ukraine because the world is watching and not willing to go that far.”

This event was sponsored by Fordham’s Pi Sigma Alpha chapter. Watch a full recording of the lecture below:

“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

“As with racial justice, as with climate change, when it comes to public health crises, cities tend to be on the frontlines,” said Nestor Davidson, the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law and faculty director at the Urban Law Center.

Davidson said that one set of questions the Urban Law Center looks at, particularly in times of crisis like this, are those of authority and power.

“Who can act? Who is prevented from acting? What levels of government take responsibility for what kinds of things?” he said. “Even though it’s still early, one of the emerging lessons from the pandemic is that we have a system of federalism that isn’t necessarily as well-suited as it could be to responding to this kind of a crisis. We’ve had an incredibly fragmented response.”

Even though cities are often the first to grapple with “an issue like a pandemic, and it’s often where the effects of crises like this are felt most deeply,” Davidson said city leaders are sometimes challenged when it comes to their authority to act.

“We’ve had conflicts where cities have wanted to take more aggressive steps to protect public health, and you’ve had some states preventing that, and some states reversing course now,” he said.

Overcrowding vs. Density

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., director of Urban Studies at Fordham, said that while there’s no question New York City in particular was dramatically impacted by the pandemic, neighborhoods with overcrowding, or a high number of people per household, bore the brunt of the crisis more than those that are simply considered densely populated areas, containing high-rise, residential buildings.

Using data collected by the Furman Center at New York University, Hinze was able to analyze how different neighborhoods were impacted by the pandemic as well as the impact on certain demographic groups, such as those determined by race and economic status. She found that those in overcrowded situations, likemultiple people living in tight quarters, had higher rates of infection than those living in densely populated areas where overcrowding is not as common.

“The neighborhoods with the highest density in New York City had almost half of the infection rate of those with lower densities, meaning that Manhattan, which is the densest borough in the city, had the lowest infection rates of all five boroughs, and that the outer boroughs, especially Queens and the Bronx, had severely higher infection rates than Manhattan,” she said. “So housing density seems to not be the culprit with COVID-19 infection rates; it was overcrowding.”

Hinze has been working to analyze how overcrowding has contributed to the virus’s spread in other areas of the country. She’s been collecting data from Finney and Ford counties in Kansas, which are home to meatpacking plants, as well as data from Tulare and Kern counties in California, which are home to many agricultural workers. While she’s still collecting the Kansas data, the California data has shown that areas where workers live in tight quarters also have higher rates of infection.

“There was definitely a correlation between overcrowding in the census data and COVID-19 infection rates. Tulare and Kern counties, they’re among the most rural counties in California, yet they were as of June, number 8 and 11 respectively in the state for COVID-19 infections,” she said.

Social Distancing: ‘A Luxury Good’

One of the reasons why parts of cities with overcrowding have seen higher rates, according to Hinze, is because some of the best measures to combat COVID-19, including social distancing and easy access to hand washing, hand sanitizer, and other cleaning products, aren’t possible.

“I think social distancing in many ways is a luxury good, and maybe we’ve been talking about this too little as a country,” she said. “If we look at the numbers for New York City, [the highest number of cases]are in many poor and immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and in the Bronx where people don’t have, essentially, the luxury of social distancing.”

By contrast, some of the wealthiest city dwellers were able to take social distancing measures a step further and move out of the urban areas, at least temporarily, Davidson pointed out.

“Cities are great engines of growth and innovation and economic power and that’s become increasingly true as our society has kind of shifted in a post-industrial way,” he said. “At the same time, they’re places of great inequality, and again, something like a pandemic shines a very bright light on pre-existing inequality … certainly in a time when statistics show that, over time, more than 400,000 New Yorkers have left the city.”

The Cost of Leaving

Hugh Kelly, Ph.D., CRE, the chair of the Fordham Real Estate Institute, cautioned against people seeking “long-term” solutions, like moving, to “short-term” problems.

“If it made sense pre-COVID, then why wouldn’t you have done it pre-COVID?” he said.

While Kelly said that he expected the real estate market, particularly in cities, to take a hit in the near future due to social distancing and other public health guidance, he didn’t expect those trends to continue long-term.

“In the near-term, it’s clear that things like density, mass transit dependence, high-rise building forms are disadvantageous in the midst of the height of the pandemic,” he said. “For the short-term, metropolitan areas that are more sprawling, more low-rise, automobile-dependent, and have the ability to have the built-in equivalent of social distancing have the advantage and that’s probably the case for the next 12 months or so.”

Premature Predictions of the “Death of Cities”

But Kelly said that he believes that after we’ve adjusted to living with social distancing measures, or once effective treatments and vaccinations are available, the characteristics of cities that made them appealing in the first place will still be thee.

“The elements that have made for the most vibrant and the most successful cities … are going to reassert themselves,” he said. ‘The vibrancy that comes with businesses and people interacting with each other—that’s what promotes innovation. Innovation produces productivity and productivity produces profits and that’s what attracts businesses and people to places to work.”

Both Davidson and Kelly said they’ve seen the predictions that this will be the “death of cities” before, including after the 9/11 terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center.

This same round of articles was written after 9/11, Davidson said, noting that after the city rebounded, there were also conversations about too many people wanting to live there. And those are really problems as well. We have to think about housing affordability, and we have to think about unequal access to opportunity, and all the real challenges in cities that are successful.”

Looking Toward a Better Future

Cities won’t look exactly the same as they did before the pandemic, the professors said, as they tend to take something from each of the crises they endured.

Hinze said she hopes that policy makers see how crowded dwellings and other symptoms of inequality have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and that they look to address them in the future.

“It’s most important,” she said, to “make sure that people do not live in these conditions and to sort of provide them with enough of a social safety net so they can live in conditions that are safe,” she said.

Other aspects of life in the city will also likely see some major changes. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, announced on Aug. 3 that the Open Restaurants initiative, which allows restaurants to take over certain streets and sidewalks for outdoor dining, will return next summer.

“You think about ways in which cities are repurposing public space, and taking advantage of a moment where cars haven’t been as dominant a part of the landscape at the local level. Maybe that means we’re going to have more walkable cities, maybe that means we’re going to have a greater embrace of the importance of public space,” Davidson said.

Kelly said from a real estate perspective, he could see offices refitting themselves to allow more space per employee, as well as apartments getting reconfigured to allow for some type of work-from-home model.

“There’s a sea change in that the square footage per employee, which has been going down for about 25 years, begins to reverse itself and becomes a larger space allocation,” he said.

He added that shared office spaces like WeWork will probably no longer appeal to people because social distancing would be too complicated.

Kelly pointed to one major sign he’s looking for to know that New York City has fully re-emerged—food trucks.

“When the food trucks are back on the street, people are coming back,” he said. “It means two things. That there are enough people coming into the central areas to support those food trucks and, even more, the food truck operators feel that they can do so safely.”

Such is the crux of the urban experience, circa 2019, according to speakers at “The Global Metropolis: Power and Policy in the 21st Century,” a panel held at Fordham’s School of Law on Feb. 6.

The discussion, part of the Maloney Library’s Behind the Book series, featured the Urban Law Center’s faculty director, Nestor Davidson, and associate director, Geeta Tewari, co-editors of Global Perspectives in Urban Law: The Legal Power of Cities (Routledge, 2018), as well as Annika Hinze, Ph.D., director of the Urban Studies program and co-author of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 10th Edition (Routledge, 2018). David J. Goodwin, GSAS’ 12, the author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street (Fordham University Press, 2017), creator of the three-year-old series, and assistant director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, moderated the panel.

Small But Significant Victories

An issue that often brings this divide to light is immigration. One way that cities can assert their positions, said Davidson, is through the courts. Municipalities that had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants have gained a small degree of power through recent legal victories, he said. The court battles came as the Trump administration has tried to punish cities for refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents by withholding unrelated funds.

“The targeting of the current administration so specifically against cities was such an indefensible overreach from a legal perspective. Whatever you think of the policy, half a dozen courts have looked at it and struck it down as unconstitutional,” said Davidson, who is also the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at the Law School.

“So that has given cities a toehold, legally, for a certain level of more political power.”

He also noted that although it’s been nearly a generation since the mayor of a major city has ascended to a level of national elected office, they have influenced major policy areas nonetheless.

“Think about what Bloomberg did here in New York when it comes to public health. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has adopted a lot of the measures that were pioneered here with obesity and sugary drinks. We were that classic laboratory of experimentalism,” he said.

Where Partisanship is Unwelcome

That experimentalism cuts across ideological lines. Tewari, who also publishes fiction, said that when she and Davidson edited Global Perspectives, they were careful to give the eleven papers included in the book an unbiased take.

“In my fiction, my characters are partisan, and have certain political and social views [they express], whereas in our work at the urban law center and in our volumes, we strive to take into account all sides of arguments. Our goal is to get to the heart of the issue in a focused way,” she said.

The notion that urban politics in the United States is constantly evolving as a dynamic interaction between governmental power, private actors, and a politics of identity, is a key aspect of City Politics, which was originally published in 1994. For Hinze, an associate professor of political science, editing the latest edition had extra resonance. The first author, Dennis R. Judd, Ph.D., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a mentor of hers in graduate school. In addition to revising data, she added sections related to the 2016 presidential election, race, and violence.

“It was certainly different because I knew there was another name on the cover that was carrying half the reputation of this book, so it was some extra pressure not to screw up. At first, it was intimidating, but then there was a lot of freedom to say ‘Well, this is something I really want to bring out,’” she said.

Tackling Big Problems Together

During the Q&A part of the discussion, one audience member wondered if, perhaps the federal government had an interest in preventing cities from defying it on big issues. Hinze said she thought it did, but noted it would be difficult to do so without undermining local democracy. And in any case, she said, cities are actually well suited to tackle big problems through groups like the Global Parliament of Mayors, a coalition of mayors from around the globe. Immigration becomes a more pressing concern for mayors, for instance, when members of immigrant communities fear they may be deported and are thus less likely to work with the police to solve crimes.

“Cities are not in a legal position to rival federal or national governments, but at the same time, they can have this really useful cross-fertilization process, where mayors get together and they talk. We’re seeing the bike share program right now that’s taking off in cities all over the world. That was a Dutch program that just took off just by being disseminated and shared by mayors.”

Davidson said a bigger cause for concern is that urban dwellers forget their suburban and rural brethren who are not benefitting from the renaissance that cities are experiencing today.

“We’re at a point in globalization where people who live in Singapore and Johannesburg and London have more in common with people who live in Manhattan than perhaps people who live in Manhattan have with people who live in upstate, rural New York,” he said.

These divides can be seen on a global scale as well. Both Brexit and the 2016 United States presidential election exposed stark ideological differences along geographical lines within one nation.

“There is a risk of exacerbating the traditional urban/rural conflict,” he said.

“When that goes global, there are some real challenges.”

This past May, Fordham took a big step toward embracing this new world, as 14 members of the faculty and administration traveled to Sophia University in Japan as part of the first Fordham Faculty Research Abroad program.

The delegation, which was led by Fordham’s provost, the late Stephen M. Freedman, Ph.D., hailed from fields as varied as political science, economics, biological sciences, education, social service, and art history. The theme of the trip was comparative urban studies.

George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs, said the trip was the result of Fordham’s Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP) process, which the University began in 2015.

In the CUSP process, four areas were given high priority: Interdisciplinary research, sponsored research, global research, and faculty-student research collaborations. This trip fulfilled all of those priorities by bringing Fordham researchers into contact with peers in Japan who are pursuing research on many topics within that field. It also established an exchange program for faculty and students between the two schools.

Collaborating on Food Justice

One of those connections was between Garrett Broad, Ph.D., assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies and James Farrer, Ph.D., a professor of sociology and global studies at Sophia University. Farrer has been researching food entrepreneurship in Tokyo and the role that small vendors play in local economies, a topic of interest to Broad, who penned More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016).

“We’re talking about setting up a workshop here in New York at some point next year where we bring together a group of scholars who are exploring issues related to food, society, globalization and local food economies,” Broad said.

“The hope for this enterprise is it’s not a one off, where we had this nice trip to Tokyo, made some friends and that’s that. We want to continue and build some partnerships, and since there’s only so much you can do in just a few days, a workshop is a way we can keep the momentum going.”

Broad also took the opportunity to visit and interview scientists at a Tokyo organization that is experimenting with “cellular agriculture.” The technology, which Broad had already been researching for an upcoming project, involves growing meat in a laboratory, negating the need to slaughter animals. To help him overcome language and cultural barriers, he recruited Sophia University undergraduate students to accompany him.

Making Personal Connections in the Field

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s urban studies program, came away from the trip deeply affected by potential collaborations. While one group from Fordham was given a tour related to sustainability and environmental issues, she attended a tour centered on social issues that was led by Nanako Inaba, a professor in Sophia’s department of global studies.

Of particular interest to Hinze was a public park that had recently been partially sold to private interests, including Nike. A sizable homeless population still calls the park home, and Hinze interviewed one of them to get a sense of how his presence was actually a form of protest.

“I’m a field researcher first and foremost, and in order to understand places, it’s vital to actually visit them and get to know them a little bit. The initial connections you make with people can be the jumping point for creating meaningful research partnerships,” she said.

“The walking tours were amazing, because they were done by people who are academics who are researching social or sustainability issues and who really know the environment.”

Global Partnerships Critical to Funded Research

Connections such as these are crucial to solving challenges, Hong said. They’re also often a prerequisite for researchers who wants to get their projects funded by some external sources.

“More and more American foundations are requiring global partnership as precondition for applications. If you don’t have an international partner, you are out,” he said.

On that front, the trip was also a success, as Fordham faculty identified 27 researchers in Japan who are ready to collaborate on joint grant proposals, research projects, and research papers. Hong and his team also identified more than 40 funding opportunities to support these research projects. Several faculty members are working on joint proposals, he said, and one has already submitted one. He expects that there will be opportunities for Fordham students to assist in future studies as well.

Hong noted that a byproduct of Fordham faculty traveling together was also an increase in collaborations amongst themselves. Next summer, a group of them will travel to Europe, where the theme will be “digital scholarship.”

“They immediately picked up some ideas and learned from each other. It was the same subject, urban studies, but different disciplines, education, social service, the sciences, history, social sciences, humanities, natural science,” he said.

In addition to prearranged meetings, there were serendipitous meetings at Sophia University as well. Takehiro Watanabe, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at Sophia whose research touches on participatory community environmental processes, led the Fordham contingent on a tour of a river revitalization project and chaired a panel discussion that Broad participated in.

“Afterward, he saw some things in my presentation that connected to some of the subjects that he’s interested in, such as participatory science and citizen science,” Broad said.

“The more time you’re able to spend, and the more people you’re able to meet, you realize you have more in common.”

That was one of the conclusions of “Global Migration and Cities: Urban Governance, Migration, and the Refugee Crisis,” a panel discussion held Friday, Feb. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The panel, which was part of conference organized by the Fordham Urban Consortium, featured

-Els de Graauw, P.D., associate professor of political science, at Baruch College

-Jennifer Gordon, professor of law at Fordham Law School

-Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies program at Fordham

Judy Benjamin, Ph.D, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, moderated the panel, which touched upon everything from the plight of Syrian war refugees to the estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in New York City.

Hinze noted that although refugees are no longer confined to camps, and immigrants in the United States no longer only settle in “gateway” cities such as New York City, cities still offer a level of integration that a nation states can’t offer.

“There are already communities in place that provide immigrants with an intermediary, rather than being plunged into a new national context with different customs,” she said.

She said it’s also important to remember that immigrants are also settling in places like Alabama and North Carolina.

“This is an important conversation to have, because in a way, it takes away this dichotomy between the large metropolis and rural areas, because rural areas are increasingly feeding immigration,” she said.

De Graauw agreed, noting that immigrant affairs offices are springing up around the country.

“Ten to 15 years ago, you could probably count on one or maybe two hands how many cities had those offices. Today, we have over 40 of them, and they’re not just in the expected places like New York City. They’re also found in much smaller places, like Memphis,” she said.

“Cities are trying to figure out what they can do, because they are responsible for creating productive, healthy and stable communities. They know all too well that if you alienate or drive underground big segments of your population, it’s going to have ripple effects in many different ways.”

Local context is still important, as a place like Detroit is more amenable to the notion that immigrants are a demographic lifeline than say Atlanta, which de Graauw said is seeing greater immigrant population growth in the suburbs. But issues such as municipal I.D. cards, which New Haven first unveiled in 2007, bring together cities into groups such as Cities for Action, which a coalition of over 150 mayors and municipal leaders.

Gordon said Amman, Jordan, is a good example of how a city can ally itself with an international non-governmental organization to push its national government in a progressive direction. The European Union and the United Nations promised aid to Jordan if it agreed to make it possible for 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally. In August, the national government agreed, but it restricted that employment to specific work, such as that in garment factories, and it set aside 20 desirable occupations to Jordanians. Amman officials have pushed back hard though, and have tentatively received exceptions for jobs in construction.

“That to me is a potential positive story about cities, and international human rights organizations combining to successfully put pressure on the national government,” Gordon said.

To find out why Annika Hinze, assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s urban studies program, refers to large cities as “strange animals,” check out her podcast.

Listen here:

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel, and today I am speaking with Annika Hinze, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Urban Studies Program here at Fordham.

The summer of hell has officially ended for New Yorkers, who rely on subways and commuter trains to get around. But while the summer part is fading fast, the hell part seems like it’s going to be with us for a very long time, thanks to neglected infrastructure. Now so much of this seems to be the result of a transit system that exclusively serves the New York City Metropolitan area, but which is controlled by the State of New York. How unusual is this?

Annika Hinze: Actually, those types of arrangements are quite common. They are really quite common actually across the entire United States, and quite pervasive when it comes to urban development. They are not a new structure, but an interesting structure that allows informal bargaining between urban city and state actors. The MTA itself is actually a public benefits corporation, which means that its board consists basically of private actors who are appointed by state and city government. So in a way, they allow a bargaining process between city and state actors, but through a private board, an appointed board.

One of the problems with that, is of course that this board doesn’t have any democratic accountability. If you’re appointed, you can hold the elected officials accountable for appointing someone who is incompetent, but you can’t really actually hold the boards themselves accountable. For a long time, the federal government hasn’t given any sort of money directly to cities. It’s always channeled through the states and is always allocated to the states, and that is often a problem because of course in a state legislature, the representatives from Schenectady and the representatives from Albany will be interested in public infrastructure projects for Schenectady and Albany, and not for New York City. One of the things that urban scholars specifically talk about in that connection is that cities are chronically under-represented.

Patrick Verel: Aside from transportation, what other areas can you think of that are affected by this kind of city/state conflict?

Annika Hinze: Well, a lot of development projects are. You know, if you think of large-scale development projects like the Barkley Center, they often involve private actors too. The case of New York City, we have the Empire State Development Corporation, which is very similarly structured to the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Patrick Verel: I know one of the things that makes this area different is that we have three states, so you have a lot of different actors all competing with each other and trying to work together. Can New York learn anything from other cities around the country?

Annika Hinze: Well in terms of our public transit system, I think we’re certainly unique. No other city in the United States has a transit system this extensive. Maybe we get used to the existence of the MTA and the broad, vast, subway network in the city, but you know, having moved here from Chicago for instance, I really appreciated this network, and the way it runs because it doesn’t, of course it has lots of problems, but as far as big cities in this country go, it’s quite unprecedented. And for how old it is, it actually works fairly well. It’s often really surprising to me, because clearly it is extremely under-maintained, and when I have visitors from abroad I often have them comment on how all the trains look like they’re from the 1970s, and then I also have to respond, “Well they are!”

It may also be a unique issue to maintain that in a way. You know, well actually keep it working. I think what we’re lacking here is often a national consensus about that important, because Americans love their cars. And so it’s much easier to convince a state legislature or the federal government to provide funding for, you know, a new highway or for road maintenance, than it is for public transit infrastructure. And that’s a huge problem. It serves a population that often cannot rely on cars. I mean, we hear stories all the time about the working poor, and increasingly they’re displaced from urban areas because it’s become very, very expensive to live in cities, especially in this city. So once they get, you know, people are forced to move to the first-string suburbs, especially the older first-string suburbs. They often become isolated from a good public transit infrastructure, and it puts them in a really tough place. We’ve seen this with the summer of hell, right? There was the one story about this several-hour delay one day that was caused by a power failure, and people started weeping on the trains and buses because they thought they might lose their jobs.

Patrick Verel: The U.S. Constitution provides the legal basis for states to exist, like New York, and Connecticut, and New Jersey. But not cities. Is this a uniquely American phenomenon?

Annika Hinze: American urban scholars always like to think that is very unique to the United States, but I can honestly say that it’s not. I think, especially big cities tend to be underfunded almost everywhere, and they’ve sort of become these strange animals. They’re loved, equally loved and hated because they provide some sort of excitement, right? People could talk about them, people can visit them, maybe people will even see their children move there for a while because it’s an exciting life, until kind of get it out of your system and move somewhere else. Settle into a quieter routine.

But they’re not often taken serious as places where people live everyday, and cope with everyday issues like transit. And then in addition, there’s always the question of how responsible does the federal government feel, and the federal government in most federal democracies does not feel very responsible for cities and urban infrastructure. You know, Berlin came out because of a banking crisis. About $80 million in debt, and the federal government, even though Berlin is the capital, the federal government said, “Well we don’t care. You’re going to have to resolve this problem by yourself.” It sort of reminded me of “Ford To City: Drop Dead” in the 1970s when then-President Ford talked about New York City’s debt crisis.

I think in most federal democracies there’s still this idea of not necessarily pastoral life, but of smaller cities, more manageable life. Not the big cities. There are also just tough projects for the federal government to maintain. If you actually, as a federal government, wanted the care about all the services that cities provide, you would have to make a huge commitment, a huge financial commitment.

Patrick Verel: Growing up in New York, you sort of think everything is unique to you. It’s kind of comforting to hear that no, in fact that this sort of animosity exists in other places as well.

Annika Hinze: My husband and I will fight about this all the time, because he’s from Canada and he’s a huge hockey fan. But he lived in Chicago for a long time before he moved to New York City, and he hates the Rangers. He supports his hometown team, which are the Winnipeg Jets, and he will support the Chicago Blackhawks. But not the Rangers, because the Rangers are too big, and they’re the New York City team. Everybody knows them, and they have too much money, and all the fans are so cocky, and it’s just not, you know, you just can’t love the Rangers.

That always pushes my buttons because I’m from Berlin, which is the biggest city in Germany. And I feel like I’ve seen this so many times where people from smaller towns move to Berlin and they will not support the local teams, but they will support their own small-town team. And I always feel like, “You can’t live here and manipulate our sports teams. It’s not okay. If you come here and benefit from everything we have to offer, you have to root for our team.”

And so maybe that’s the problem with the federal government, or with people in the state legislatures. They just don’t want to root for the big-city team.

Annika Hinze is researching the best practices for making cities just, fair, and equitable for all.

Hinze, an assistant professor of political science and the new head of Fordham’s urban studies program, is working on a book examining the effects of three large-scale, finished or nearly finished urban developments: Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus extension, a housing project in Vancouver, and an arena in Berlin.

Two of the cases have personal resonance for Hinze, as she was born and raised in Berlin, and, until just recently, called Manhttanville home. She decided to include a third project, in Canada, because like the other two, it took place in a federalized democracy with a lot of political fragmentation and a lot of emphasis on local decision-making.

The Berlin arena is part of a larger entertainment area. The Vancouver housing project exists on the site of a former department store that closed in 1992, was overtaken by squatters, and was acquired by the city. The local government originally proposed developing it into affordable housing, but has instead settled for a building with 80 percent market rate apartments, and 20 percent public housing.

Both projects generated more vociferous opposition than any projects in New York City, she said. Her interests include the processes that led up to their construction and implementation, what democratic deliberations were held, and to what extent the community was involved.

In New York, the state government resorted to eminent domain to move the Manhattanville project forward, whereas no such actions were necessary in Berlin or Vancouver.

Hinze said she’s not advocating for direct democracy, but rather trying to tease out practical implications from the projects.

“A lot of literature has involved complaining, but with very few practical conclusions about what can be done. I want to know who are the actors are, what are they’re doing now, and what they should they be doing [for the future of cities],” she said.

Hinze said she’s also very interested in how local residents are displaced by such projects. Changes that accompany large-scale urban redevelopment projects are often dubbed “gentrification,” but displacement complicates the concept, she said.

“If you go into communities and interview people who live in what we call gentrifying communities, a lot of them welcome the changes in the neighborhood,” she said. “Everybody wants to live in a nice neighborhood, with good infrastructure, and good schools that come with gentrification. It’s just that the residents want to stay in the neighborhood once it turns.”

Some displaced residents are moving to the suburbs, while suburbanites decamp for the city, in what is sometimes known as the “great inversion.” But again, it’s complicated, as one can nowadays find pockets of socioeconomic and racial segregation in both cities and suburbs.

“I think we’re increasingly looking at a metropolitan mosaic in terms of the ways that communities live, income levels, and racial and ethnic makeup,” she said.

Because cities are growing in importance around the globe, Hinze said she’s eager to continue partnerships with institutions in Pretoria, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and recruit more international students to study in New York. Closer to home, courses like The Urban Lab, which is being co-taught this semester by former urban studies director Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history, and Fordham Law’s Sheila Foster, exemplify the way the urban studies degree is truly interdisciplinary.

“That’s very important because you can’t just say, ‘I’m interested in gentrification, but I’m only going to study it by means of this particular literature.’ It’s also a legal issue, a sociological issue, a political issue, and potentially an economic one,” she said.

“So the fact that we have faculty with expertise in all these different areas gives us a lot of strength in terms of how we teach.”

Researching her book, teaching political science, taking over a program, and raising her 3-year-old daughter has kept Hinze busy—but not so much that she couldn’t fit a 26.2 mile run into her schedule. On Nov. 6, Hinze ran the New York City marathon, finishing in 4:17. As part of the race, she raised $2,500 for Bronx Works, a charity in the South Bronx’s Mott-Haven area that helps residents improve their economic and social well-being.

“I live and work in the Bronx, and I feel like the urban studies program’s mission is to be involved in the Bronx communities, especially those around Rose Hill,” she said.

Training for the race required hitting the streets for long runs before sunrise, but Hinze said it balanced out the days when she had to sit through meetings. She was also grateful when, during the Marathon run, she saw staff members of Bronx Works cheering her on just past mile 20.

“It made me really happy that I could support them,” she said.