05/09: Panel Discussion on Samuel Stein’s Capital City

Panel Discussion on Samuel Stein’s Capital City

Thursday May 9th

5:30-7:30

Room 4102

CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Ave, NY, NY 10016

This colloquium brings together Samuel Stein, EES geography PhD Candidate and author of the new book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, 2019), with a panel of eminent scholar-activists working at the intersection of planning and gentrification. In his book, Stein theorizes “the rise of the real estate state” and the ways that global concentration of capital into urban land and buildings has altered the profession of urban planning. After Stein summarizes his key points, the respondents will discuss the book and apply it to their own work. The panelists include: Tom Angotti (professor emeritus, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center); Hillary Caldwell (PhD candidate, Environmental Psychology); Monxo López (co-founder, South Bronx United); and Rob Robinson (co-founder, Take Back the Land).

Tom Angotti is Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was the founder and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. His recent books include Zoned Out! Race, Displacement and City Planning in New York City, Urban Latin America: Inequalities and Neoliberal Reforms, The New Century of the MetropolisNew York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, which won the Davidoff Book Award, and Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths. He is an editor of progressivecity.net and Participating Editor for Latin American Perspectives and Local Environment. He is active in community and environmental issues in New York City.

Hillary Caldwell is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Psychology and the Women’s Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on grassroots, anti-racist, counter-capitalist struggles over spaces and conditions of social reproduction; in particular, how processes of critical, collective inquiry and popular education inform community organizing and social movements around land and housing in New York City. She has explored these ideas in collaboration with Picture the Homeless and Morris Justice: A Public Science Project; and on an ongoing basis with theNYC Community Land Trust Learning Exchange  and the NYC Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI).Hillary is also the Assistant Director and Adjunct Instructor for the The Minor in Community Change Studies at City College of New York, CUNY.

Monxo López is a political scientist, cartographer, musician/composer and South Bronx-based environmental activist. He teaches Latino and ethnic politics at Hunter College; Monxo is also a founding member of South Bronx Unite, and a board member of the Mott Haven/Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the local Community Land Trust. He holds a Ph.D. from CUNY’s Graduate Center, and an MA from Université Laval in Québec, Canada. His academic research revolves around spatiality, mapping, social justice, political theory, and Latino communities. His cultural criticism has ranged in publications from Dia Art Foundation to 80Grados, his text/sound collaborative projects have been published by Bilingual Press and Ediciones Callejón, his political writings on spatial and social justice have been published in Salon.com LatinoRebels, and NACLA, among other media outlets; his activist work has been profiled by The New York TimesUrbanOmnibus, and Corriere della Sera.

Rob Robinson is a Special Adviser to the Campaign to Restore National Housing Rights. He is  co-founder of the Take Back the Land National Movement and a member of the US Human Rights Network. Rob spent two and a half years, homeless in Miami and ten months in a New York City homeless shelter. He eventually escaped his cycle of homelessness and has been in the housing movement in New York City since 2007. In the fall of 2009, Rob was chosen to be chairperson for the first ever official visit of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. Rob has worked with homeless populations in Budapest Hungary and Berlin Germany. He is connected with housing movements in South Africa and Brazil. He is a member of a social justice media collective which produces and airs a monthly radio show over WBAI in New York City called Global Movements Urban Struggles.

This event is co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at The Graduate Center. It is free and open to the public.