City Marketing

My article on city marketing was just published in the latest edition of the monumental International Encyclopedia of theSocial and Behavioral Sciences. Here is the abstract:

City marketing has grown in size and importance. A historical contextualization considers the selling of the frontier city, the resort, the suburb, and the industrial city. The article explores the symbolic reconstruction of cities through a discussion of strategies and tactics of city marketing. Marketing strategies include the promotion of the postindustrial city, the global city, the business city, the good city, the green city, the cosmopolitan city, and the city of culture. The tactics of city marketing include namings, slogans, logos, and the construction of iconic buildings. The article discusses what city marketing reveals about social power in cities.

Urban sustainability conference materials

Workshop reports and presentations, videos, photos, speeches and keynote addresses from the Forum on Urban Sustainability held at the French Embassy in DC in March are now available from their media library.  A version of my own keynote address is also available here.

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How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index

Click here to access my latest article in The Conversation, How green is your city: towards an urban sustainability index, that discusses metrics used to assess the ecological, carbon and water footprint of cities. As we transition into a more urban future, measuring, assessing and evaluating urban environmental impact of cities is of major importance. We are only just beginning the difficult task.  We need to refine these metrics, develop new ones and so create a standardized and easily understood index of city sustainability. With better data and a standard index, policies can be evaluated, targets set and institutions held to account. A robust city sustainability index would benchmark where we are now and provide a measure of progress in the future.  

A visualization of the daily carbon emissions of New York City. Each bubble represents one ton of CO2.

Forum on Urban Sustainability

I gave a keynote address, The New Imperative: Green Cities for an Urban World, at the French Embassy in Washington DC on 6 March 2015. The event was a forum  that brought together mayors from the US and France in a two day event to kick-start long-term and formal cooperation among officials and practitioners concerned with sustainable urban development in France and the United States. I learned a lot from  a great range of very interesting speakers from central and city governments, private companies and NGOs in France, USA and from around the world.  The forum is a lead up to the participation of cities in the December 2015 Paris Climate Conference.

Extreme weather exposes the vulnerability of our cities to climate change

I contributed an article to the website, The Conversation, that publishes accessible pieces about important topics by academic researchers. My article examines how extreme weather, such as the massive snowfalls in Boston, exposes the vulnerability of our cities. I explore why these extreme weather events, connected to global climate change, are not shifting public debates about making our cities more resilient through climate adaption. You can read the article here.

Crime in Cali, Colombia

My article on crime in Cali is just published. The English title is Crime and Its Discontents in Cali, translated into Spanish as La Inseguridad y el descontento de la poblacion en Cali.

It appears, in Spanish, in Calibrando, the informative and wonderfully illustrated publication of POLIS, the Urban Observatory of ICESI University in Cali, Colombia.

Click here to access the journal.