Barber was a renowned international political theorist and an author of many groundbreaking books. As the inaugural distinguished senior fellow of the Fordham Urban Consortium, Barber worked with consortium founder and Urban Law Center faculty co-director Sheila R. Foster and other consortium faculty to launch his brainchild, the Global Parliament of Mayors.

The GPM was launched in September 2016, bringing together mayors from all over the world to promote collective city decision–making across borders. The GPM is now an independent governance body that will continue to advance the rights of cities to lead on global problems that affect them.

“Dr. Barber was not only a brilliant political theorist but also a tremendous force in the global city rights movement,” said Foster.

“In addition to his matchless intellectual gifts and passion for democracy, he was a truly kind and caring human being who brought joy and light to individuals the world over. It was my honor to work with him. I will miss him greatly.”

Barber also founded the Interdependence Movement and served as its president. Much of his advocacy and policy work grew out of his scholarship, including his book If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale University Press, 2013), which proposed the formation of the Global Parliament of Mayors. Earlier works include Strong Democracy (University of California Press, 1984) and the international bestseller Jihad vs. McWorld (Ballantine, 1996). In all, he published 18 books, the most recent of which is Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming (Yale University Press, 2017).

Among Barber’s many accolades are a knighthood from the French government, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Dewey Award. He was also awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Social Science Research fellowships as well as honorary doctorates from Grinnell College, Monmouth University, and Connecticut College.

He held the chair of American civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and served as Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Rutgers University.

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.

The discussion, which takes places from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Mertz Library Reading Room, is being presented by the garden’s Humanities Institute, which was established in the spring of 2014 as a way to bridge the divide between the arts and sciences, and bring together scholarship relating to nature, landscape, and the built environment.

It will feature:

J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of conservation biology, who will detail how he uses radar, acoustic recordings, and flight tunnels to explore bird migration through urban landscapes in a talk titled, “Bird Migration Through Urban Landscapes;”

Sheila Foster, Albert A. Walsh Professor of Law and Faculty, and co-director of the Urban Law Center at Fordham School of Law, who will explore the urban commons framework as a concept for developing cities that are both revitalized and inclusive in a talk titled “The City as a Common Good;” and

Roger Panetta, visiting professor of history, who will detail how the renewal of the Brooklyn waterfront has caught the attention of politicians, planners and the public here and abroad, and drawn a remarkable concentration of civic energy to the water’s edge, in a talk titled “Whose Waterfront?”

Vanessa Bezemer Sellers, humanities research program coordinator at the NYGB, said the topic is important because the natural environment of cities is being damaged in a myriad of ways in the service of economic interests.

“If a neighboring building is demolished, and it becomes a temporary green spot or a community garden, it’s nilly-willy just taken away for development. Money is always still number one, and that becomes a very serious issue because there’s simply too little space and too much stress [on]human dignity,” she said.

This is the first time a Fordham contingent will speak at the institute. The University and the NYBG pledged to work together more closely in 2012, when both joined the Bronx Science Consortium.

Sellers said she hoped the colloquium, which will consist of panelists speaking for 10 minutes followed by 90 minutes of open discussion, might inspire Rose Hill campus-based students to cross Southern Boulevard more often.

“I see students [jog]around the perimeter here. I thought well, if they run here, it would be nice to have them come on a regular basis and build a rapport with the professors, so that our green environment becomes a regular part of the program of incoming students,” she said.

To RSVP for the colloquium, visit the Humanities Institute’s event page.

“Without question, Sheila is an outstanding scholar-professor and an extraordinarily gifted administrator, and this appointment is a fitting recognition of her contributions to our School,” said Fordham Law Dean Michael M. Martin. “Since assuming the mantle of academic affairs, Sheila has provided principled and effective leadership that has strengthened our curriculum and our centers, institutes, and programs. She also is a fierce advocate for our faculty and students, as well as a champion for our alumni.”

Foster joined Fordham Law in 2002 after visiting the prior year from her post on the tenured faculty at Rutgers Law. A graduate of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Berkeley Law at the University of California, and a former associate at Morrison & Foerster, she is an expert on the intersection of land use and environmental law, particularly in urban settings. Her authoritative work on environmental justice and urban land use led to her appointment as the inaugural holder of the Albert A. Walsh ’54 Chair in Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law in 2005. She also serves as a co-director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics and has served as faculty moderator of the Fordham Urban Law Journal. In 2008, she was appointed Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Foster is the author of numerous publications on land use, environmental law, and antidiscrimination law. She is the co-author, with Luke Cole, of From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (N.Y.U. Press, 2001) and co-editor, with Michael Gerrard, of the 2nd edition of The Law of Environmental Justice (ABA, 2009). She has consulted with many community-based groups in New Jersey and New York on environmental justice issues. She has also received two Ford Foundation grants for projects related to her work on environmental justice and urban development.

Her most recent work explores and challenges the legal and theoretical frameworks in which land use decisions are made, especially in the urban context. These works include Collective Action and the Urban Commons (Notre Dame Law Review, 2011), Urban Informality as a Commons Dilemma (U. Miami Inter-American Law Review, 2009), Integrative Lawyering: Navigating the Political Economy of Urban Development (California Law Review, 2007), andThe City as an Ecological Space: Social Capital and Urban Land Use (Notre Dame Law Review, 2006).