Urban areas are currently home to 55% of the world’s population, according to the United Nations, and that’s predicted to increase to 68% by 2050.

Cities and Climate Change, a course being offered as part of Fordham’s M.A. in Urban Studies program, aims to provide students with the tools and knowledge to implement those solutions.

“It’s about how climate change is going to impact urban life, but also how cities can transform the crisis into something that’s really valuable in terms of sustaining existence,” said Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., who will teach the course again next spring.

Wakeman, a professor of history and the former director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, created the course last year, knowing that students whose future work lies in government, urban planning, and architecture will need to take into account rising sea levels, utilities strained by extreme heat, and poor air quality during their careers.

“It’s very practical in trying to set out a framework to help people make decisions.”

New Yorkers learned during Super Storm Sandy how vulnerable cities along coastlines are, Wakeman said. In the class, Wakeman explores how these cities are coping with the problem, including Indonesia’s plan to move its rapidly sinking capital from Jakarta to the island of Borneo by 2045.

“If you look at cities and urban regions internationally, you find a whole range of solutions that are being tried. Some of them, like Jakarta, are very radical, and then you get possibilities that are much more a step-by-step approach,” she said. 

Cities’ vulnerability to storms and flooding has inspired their municipal governments to succeed where national governments have failed. 

“Most researchers have argued that looking at national governments for answers to climate change has been an unmitigated failure,” Wakeman said. 

“Despite the U.N. efforts and the various conferences that have been held, the carbon footprint is getting larger, and very little is being done in terms of coping with sea level rise. You have to look at cities in urban regions to find out how successful various strategies have been.”

Nisa Hafeez, GSAS ’23, an urban studies master’s graduate who took the class last spring, is now working on transportation issues as a mobility analyst for sustainable design, engineering, and consulting firm Arcadis IBI Group. 

She said the class resonated deeply with her, having experienced the effects of climate change personally. When she was a child growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, winter temperatures dropped into the 40s, but now they rarely drop below the 60s, and in the summers, there are noticeably longer stretches when the mercury tops 100 degrees. Pakistan is no anomaly either, as the past nine years have been the warmest years on the planet since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.

In some ways, the course gave Hafeez hope because she learned about how many governments are actively working to address the problem.

“It’s an important topic for young people because we are the ones who can actually have a voice in really promoting change,” she said. 

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.

According to Louie Dean Valencia García, it was no coincidence that the system there has stood the test of time since 1978—even as countries such as Iraq and Egypt have foundered in their attempts at democracy. What he found was that the Spanish people had been “creating pluralistic or democratic spaces even in the 1960s.”

“[Democracy] was something that was already happening,” said Valencia García, who today is earning a doctorate in history from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “Franco’s death just allowed for it to be done more so in the open.”

Beyond the tightly controlled media and textbooks of the Franco era, the youth were imagining a better world through comic books, said Valencia García. As part of his doctoral research, he traveled to Spain on grants from the Spanish national government, Santander University, and the U.S. Library of Congress to see notes that Franco’s censors attached to copies of Superman comics. He published his findings in his dissertation, Making a Scene: Comic Books, Punk Rock, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture, and Creating Democratic Spaces in Franco’s Spain, 1955-1984.

“Lois Lane was a woman who had a job, wore pants, and told Superman what to do, and Superman was dangerous because he had a double identity,” said Valencia García. “He often rejected Lois Lane’s advancements and was represented as an asexual character, so he was queer in some way.”

“Fascism is about masculinity. It’s about women producing for the country. So men who bow down to women and who are not necessarily adhering to the norms of the dictatorship, and women who are also transgressing them―these behaviors are anti-fascist.”

Valencia García has been reading comic books regularly since he was 11, thanks in part to his mother, who took him to the store every week and who never imagined he’d continue to read them as an adult. He credits the late Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Magis Distinguished Professor of History at Fordham and his adviser, for encouraging him to research them for his dissertation.

“People will say, ‘You study comic books? That’s a little weird.’ But it’s studying questions about mass production, technology, capitalism, and American culture abroad that’s operating under a dictatorship,” he said, “and what it means to be a young person in a global society.”

Indeed, if it’s a trivial topic, Harvard University missed the message. In July, Valencia García will begin a three-year term as lecturer in the school’s department of history and literature. He’ll teach one or two classes a semester of his own design (he’s leaning toward a class about graphic novels in the 20th century in Europe) to about 10 students. He’ll also mentor two to three students who have an interest in youth culture movements like Occupy Wall Street.

“It gives me time to do research and gives me time to turn my dissertation into a book,” said Valencia García, to whom Fordham has been a supportive home for seven years. “It’s phenomenal.”

When Schmidt-Nowara (who’d moved on to Tufts University but still remained Valencia Garcia’s adviser) died suddenly in 2015, Valencia García said he was overwhelmed by the support he received from all corners of the University. History professor and chair of the urban studies program Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, stepped in to replace Schmidt-Nowara as Valencia García’s adviser.

“Literally everybody in the history department backed me up immediately, and they’ve been there the whole time,” he said.

That decision, said Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, professor of history, exemplifies the issue between city and state boundaries when it comes to regional planning. “Boundaries create a politically immobile region where people cannot make easy decisions,” she said. This can affect regional transportation, education, social welfare, and access to health care for communities.

And while the city of New York holds 8.5 million people, the metropolitan region contains over 20 million, many of them living in so-called suburbs.

“From an urban studies point of view, we would like to stop using the term ‘city’ and ‘suburb’ because it no longer functions for what we have in front of us in terms of large-scale metropolitan regions,” said Wakeman, director of the urban studies program. “We think that both terms are vocabulary from the past, and we have to start building in a different direction.”

Wakeman’s new book, Practicing Utopia: an Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examines that past. The book looks at a period when planners thought regionally and imagined “full-bodied programs of infrastructure.” The period, which stretches from the 1950s to the 1970s, spurred the growth of “new towns,” or self-contained communities spread throughout existing metropolitan regions.

Many of the new towns, such as Irvine, California, Columbia, Maryland, and Milton Keynes, Great Britain, were very successful–much different than the post-war tract housing community developed just outside of New York City and Philadelphia known as Levittown, which Wakeman characterized as “suburban sprawl.” Levittown was a residential development; new towns were “literally entirely composed towns” with commercial, civic, residential, and commercial areas. The ones that have thrived have done so because of continued investment and continued involvement by the population. Milton Keynes’ parks trust, for example, supports its community’s green spaces through ownership of commercial properties.

“These new towns were better conceived,” she said. “They had employment options, parks, schools, the works. Planners, designers, and urban theorists had to sit down and think about what makes a city, and what makes it sustainable over time.”

It’s the sort of forward-thinking exercise that’s desperately needed once again in the United States, she said.

Today’s metropolitan regions are “multi-nodal” and more akin to a patchwork of communities than one singular entity, said Wakeman. There are pockets of tremendous poverty in Camden, New Jersey, for example, that are just as troubling as they are in the South Bronx, New York. But while the South Bronx shares in tax dollars collected on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Camden and poor towns like it do not necessarily reap similar benefits.

“We have to get away from the idea that it’s simply the South Bronx that’s underserved. Wealth and poverty are just as concentrated, and just as segregated, in New Jersey and Connecticut as they are in New York. Some of the worst islands of deep poverty are in New Jersey, but they are certainly within the New York metropolitan region,” she said. “The poverty of the suburbs is well-hidden so we have to work from a more complicated understanding of metropolitan regions than the idea of the classic city and suburb.”

Wakeman noted that immigrant communities, traditionally associated with big cities like New York, have skipped beyond them and settled into suburban enclaves—though much of the services for immigrants still remain in large urban centers.

“So for today, the term ‘suburb’ just doesn’t get it,” she said. “Political boundaries and divisions make it extremely difficult to create any kind of regional policy that takes into account this much more complicated picture.”

She noted that there are many regions around the world moving forward with groundbreaking infrastructure; for example, in Europe, many countries are well connected by high-speed rail.

The United States, and the New York metropolitan region in particular, are falling disastrously behind.

“That’s a real problem, and the question is can anything be done about it,” she said. “We talk about political corruption and incapacity in other places—like Brazil or India—but we really need to look at ourselves,” she said.

With this in mind, a new collaboration spanning four schools across Fordham will revitalize the way real estate education is delivered at the University.

“Real estate is one of the largest industries in the city and in the country overall,” said Nestor Davidson, associate dean for academic affairs at the law school and co-director of the Fordham Urban Law Center.

“To be a successful real estate professional today, you have to be able to navigate multiple aspects—marketing, management, finance, law, policy. As a university, we’re well-suited to build that platform.”

Building that very platform is at the heart of FIRE, Davidson said. Its first objective has been to spotlight each school’s approach to substantive and pedagogical questions concerning real estate, and to examine how these approaches might formulate a holistic real estate education.

“This gets into questions of housing, of inequality, of what it means to be a city today,” Davidson said. “As the Jesuit university of New York City, Fordham has always been in the city and of the city… And, as a university, we have an obligation to engage with these questions.”

Second, FIRE has been reaching out to alumni from law, business, and the humanities who work in real estate to serve as resources and mentors for current Fordham students seeking careers in the industry.

The alumni will also benefit from the initiative, said Kevin Mirabile, DPS, clinical assistant professor of finance and business economics at the Gabelli School. Ultimately, the members of FIRE hope to establish executive education opportunities for working professionals.

These opportunities would be cross-disciplinary—much the same as the real estate industry itself.

“Once alumni graduate from their respective schools, the lines get blurred in terms of the actual work they do,” Mirabile said. “Often, a person in this field is called upon to have some legal knowledge, an understanding of urban economy, of accounting, and more.

“There’s a whole universe of people who go on to operate in a field outside of their original academic discipline or who need to manage people across disciplines. We think that’s an audience that would like to come back to Fordham for lifelong learning opportunities,” he said.

FIRE’s goals to offer continuing education and to align the University’s diverse real estate pedagogies are pertinent as the world becomes increasingly urbanized, said Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, director of the urban studies program. Real estate professionals will need to be prepared to grapple with these manifold challenges.

“It’s not just the number of people coming into cities, but what happens to the building and real estate industries under the pressures of housing demands, gentrification, commercial development,” Wakeman said.

“These are not just industry questions. These are also social and cultural questions, and they’re important ones for everyone involved… It’s an industry you have to deal with from a wide variety of lenses.” 

The annual Bronx Summit on Technology Innovation and Start Ups explores the opportunities and challenges underlying the Bronx’s potential for technology-based innovation and startup activity. Sponsored by the Center for Digital Transformation, the summit—which is now in its fourth year—focuses on leveraging existing resources in the borough to promote economic development.

“Through these conferences, we want to build up the skills and the knowledge base we already have here to promote economic and technological development… and make it attractive for entrepreneurial and business activities.”

The summit is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

This year’s theme, “Opportunistic Growth for the Bronx in Technology: Next Step—Is the Bronx Up to the Challenge?”, pays special attention to health care technology. Speakers and panelists will discuss innovative solutions such as hosting health hackathons in which students and other programmers collaborate on building mobile applications.

Examples of what could arise from a health hackathon are remote monitoring for diabetics and “telemedicine” web conferencing for doctors and patients, Raghupathi said. But first the borough must tap into the brainpower within its borders.

“We have all these institutions, colleges, and this support from the borough president’s office as well as private entities,” he said, referencing Bronx Community College, St. Barnabas and Montefiore hospitals, the Bronx Science Consortium, and the South Bronx Development Corporation, among others. “We felt that we needed to act as an interface among these various stakeholders.”

Fordham presenters include Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, director of the urban studies program; Nisha Mistry, director of the Urban Law Center; and Carey Weiss, sustainability initiatives coordinator for the Social Innovation Collaboratory.

The summit is co-sponsored by Fordham’s urban studies program, the Urban Law Center, and the Bronx Technology Innovation Coalition (BITC).

For more information, contact Raghupathi or Center for Digital Transformation senior fellow Teresita Abay-Krueger.

The team of Inside Out, a project by the artist JR, parked a customized box truck and photo booth on West 60th Street. Project volunteers asked passersby if they wanted to have their picture taken for a larger-than-life photo that would be posted on the wall.

The project attracted a medley of characters: Residents of nearby buildings, members of the Fordham community, and teens walking from their school on Amsterdam Avenue to the nearby subway station lined up to be photographed.

Technical issues forced the team to print the portraits at its SoHo studio (and not in the truck, as planned), leading to a lag during which they were only able to take pictures. But once they began wheat-pasting photos to the wall, the event, which has taken place in cities internationally, began to take shape. The crew hung 28 portraits before rain forced them to return several days later to paste the rest of the approximately 100 portraits that were taken.

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Photos by Ryan Brenizer

That wish, he said in his acceptance speech, was to “stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we’ll turn the world inside out.” He said art is not supposed to change the world in practical ways, but to change perceptions. “What we see changes who we are. When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts.”

The project was brought to Fordham by the University’s urban studies program’s distinguished visitor series. The series is funded by a grant from the law firm Podell, Schwartz, Schechter & Banfield, of which Fordham alumnus Bill Banfield, FCRH ’74, is a partner.

JR was invited to be this year’s distinguished visitor, as part of the program’s focus this year on urban arts. Other events have included a visit by filmmaker Andrew Padilla and a screening of his film El Barrio Tours, and a conference on “Law, Space, and Artistic Expression.”

Mark Street, assistant professor of visual arts at Fordham, said he first encountered Inside Out in 2013, when the crew photographed 6,000 people over three weeks in Times Square. Photos have also been posted in North Dakota, Tunisia, the South Bronx, Tanzania, and the North Pole. He liked the project’s simplicity and accessibility to the public, so he approached the group on behalf of Fordham.

“This project takes street photography and makes it personal by taking literally anyone’s photograph and putting it on the wall,” he said. He also liked he fact that the project was open to those outside of the Fordham community because although Fordham is a private university, it shares a lot of space with the general public.

“The idea of Inside Out is to play with that liminal space of the public and the private a little bit,” he said. “At its best, this wall will be an amalgam of whoever happens to wander by.”

One random passerby was Jacqueline Gonzalez, who was walking with her 4-year-old daughter Mia back to their apartment. Mia, who proudly showed off her “funny face” for volunteers, had her picture taken. Mom was camera shy, but she loved the project.

“It’s really busy around here, and I don’t really stop that much. But now that there’s art here, maybe I’ll stop more often,” she said.

For Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, director of the Urban Studies program, JR’s focus on spontaneous public involvement made him especially attractive.

“JR’s project highlights urban art and public space and the ways in which the city acts as a collective canvas,” she said.

Victoria Monaco, a Fordham College Lincoln Center junior, found out about the project that morning and came by. She said street art is integral to New York City.

“I very much consider myself a part of the city, so to have my image physically be a part of the city as well, even if it is for a short period of time, is really cool,” she said.

Vincent DeCola, SJ, assistant dean of students at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, made sure Fordham administrators were represented on the wall. He counts himself a fan of public art, something he said the wall on West 60th Street sorely needed.

“Personally, I don’t like walking down a street with a big cement wall. I’ll often go down another block where there are stores or activities,” he said. “Its great to bring some life, and it’s sort of like the face of Fordham.”

—Patrick Verel is the assistant editor of Inside Fordham.

Watch a video of the project.

Like the Cold War, the wall, which severed Germany’s capital in half and was the sight of an estimated 136 deaths, is in many ways a distant memory. But sections of it survive, including a 0.8 mile-long section known as the East Side Gallery.

It features 105 paintings on the east side by artists from all over the world that were painted in 1990 as a memorial for freedom.

In 2012, students in the Department of Modern Languages visited Berlin to do a study tour, “Berlin Tales—Observation.” Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Kingsley Lasbrey’s project for the class, “Representations of Post-war Identity Through Art and Graffiti,” included a series of photos of the wall’s remains—now a worldwide symbol of freedom over tyranny.

Lasbrey said that when he first saw the wall it was “Like seeing history before me that I’d seen only in books.”

“I could see the impact it must have had on the people behind it, and you can see the remnants of the ‘death strip’ where they [used to]monitor East Berliners trying to escape over the wall.”

Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history, head of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, visits the city often, as the program does partnerships with several universities there. She said the wall is one of several “sites for memory” for Berliners, who have wrestled for years with questions of how much to preserve. Portions of it are crumbling, and last year, a section was briefly removed to make way for construction of condominiums.

“There’s a deep interest in preserving that history of the Cold War and a divided Berlin, and a tremendous battle over the memory of that epic, and what deserves to be saved and what does not,” she said.

“It implicates the Berlin Wall, and it also implicates Communist institutions of one kind or the next that represent very different things for different people.

She noted that even though Berlin was reunified a quarter century ago, the process of reknitting the metropolis together is still continuing. Even without a physical barrier, for instance, many East Berliners still feel very much like second-class citizens.

“The whole episode of the city’s division is still very much a living memory, and a very emotional realization of life that people are trying to live with,” she said.

And while plenty of historical sites have been preserved in West Berlin, landmarks that were constructed by the former Communist regime have not fared so well.

“Memories of the Second World War, whether it’s the Nazi regime or the bombing by the allies, or the Holocaust, are there, tend to be in West Berlin, whereas the question of what to preserve about the Communist period in East Berlin is not so easy. A lot of things have just been cast aside as not worthy of preservation,” she said.

Lasbrey for his part feels the murals and graffiti have given the wall a new purpose.

“It was something to be feared, not to go near. Now it is all about peace, freedom, love, and unity,” he said.

“I think those people who weren’t around 25 years ago can still get a sense for what the wall was back then, so it’s a reminder of where we came from. But it is about where we want to go. We don’t want to repeat the past. Its fall proves we had the hope and energy to reinvent ourselves and move forward.”

But make no mistake; the city has the ability to “hack” changes in ways that are unforeseeable, said Saskia Sassen, Ph.D.

Sassen, the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and the co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, spoke at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on May 11 at “Smart City Symposium: Building Sustainable Cities of the Future.”

Her talk was one in a series of presentations from government, academic and private sector speakers. Sassen pointed to the mis-match between  buildings with complex, closed, pre-programmed intelligent systems which tend to become obsolete fast, and cities, which are complex but incomplete systems.

“In the incompleteness of that complex system that is the city, lies its possibility of long life, over thousands of years—outliving empires, republics, multinational corporations,” she said.

“The city tells us what works. Are we capable of listening? That’s another matter.”

For example, a BMW car, made for speed, distance, and with aerodynamic-design, can handle just about any terrain. But when it arrives in the city center, it is reduced to a “crawling little thing.” Its original purpose has been changed. It has been “hacked” by the city.

Sassen said that these capabilities of cites are threatened by some of the major developments of our period: growing inequality, violence, domination by large corporate firms and vast megaprojects. She is particularly interested in the emerging  surveillance system, increasingly present in cities.

This expanded surveillance of everybody who is not doing the surveying –citizens, tourists, immigrants—takes on added meaning if we consider three other developments from the Department of Justice side. They are national security letters issued to individuals who can keep on living their lives but are informed that they will be under continuous surveillance, unlawful detention, which has swept up 300,000 immigrants in raids; and pre-trial solitary confinement, which has been used for as long as six years for one defendant.

The complex city is one space where we can keep on undermining and weakening the effectiveness of this new control system. She urged those in attendance to recover the capacity to understand the city’s voice –the city is a generous partner in our efforts to undermine control –whether of technical system or the new surveillance systems.

“Urban space is embedded not only with deep histories of place, but also with all kinds of logics and possibilities  that we have collectively produced,” she said.

“To what extent is the city one of the spaces where we can actually unsettle the logic of surveillance?” “My hypothesis is that the city can hack excessively controlling systems, and it hacks them in terms of the complex logics that constitute urban space,” she said.

An afternoon panel tackled issues ranging from the growing digital divide between cities around the world to the backlash that utilities sometimes face when they attempt to install smart energy readers, viewed by residents as a violation of their privacy.

Panelist Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history and director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, noted that many concepts being bandied about today are not new. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow, which was published in 1898, for instance, is an example of the sustainable city. As important as the concept of a “smart city” is one of a “smart democracy” that is inclusive from a social point of view.

“If we’re going to think about cities as the new sites of innovation and decision making, the reality is our legal and official rights as citizens come from the nation, and that is what is eroding,” she said.
The symposium, which was sponsored by the Fordham Schools of Business and the Center for Digital Transformation, also featured talks by representatives from IBM and the City of New York.

Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham College Lincoln Center, says that’s not so, and in The Heroic City, Paris, 1945-1958 (University of Chicago Press, 2009) she makes the case that in fact, in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the streets of Paris overflowed with ritual, drama, and spectacle.

The book, which Dr. Wakeman will be signing copies of at a book signing and reception on Wednesday, April 14, features analysis from a variety of perspectives. From urban planners and architects to filmmakers and intellectuals, Dr. Wakeman brings together residents from all walks of life The result is a portrait of a flamboyant and transformative moment in the life of the City of Light.

The book signing and reception will take place Wednesday from 5:30-7 p.m. at Rizzoli Bookstore, 31 West 57th Street, New York. For more information, call (800) 522-6657.