Bringing together faculty, students, activists, policymakers, and the public to foster dialogue and support research on the pressing issues of urban life, society, politics, and culture locally, nationally, and globally.
NYU Cities Collaborative-Mellon Summer Institute on Urbanism
The NYU Cities Collaborative held its second Summer Institute on Urbanism for Pre-dissertation Students In Madrid, Spain, from May 21-31, 2023, with support from the Mellon Foundation. Under the leadership of NYU Cities Collaborative director Thomas Sugrue and NYU Metropolitan Studies professor Sophie Gonick, this program provided opportunities for talented doctoral students to explore research topics and scholarship related to the theme of urbanism across disciplines, meet cutting-edge urbanists, and network with future leaders in urban studies. Ten fellows, chosen from an applicant pool of 200, met with important scholars such as urban sociologist and theorist Neil Brenner, architect and invited Venice Bienalle member Mabel O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Heather Thompson, and Brazlianist and feminist social movement scholar Keisha-Khan Perry, shared their work, and laid the groundwork for future innovative scholarship in urbanism across disciplines.
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LECTURES, SEMINARS AND WORKSHOPS
The NYU Cities Collaborative hosts an ongoing, interdisciplinary series of lectures, seminars, and reading groups on urban issues connecting NYU faculty with urbanists worldwide. Past speakers include Barcelona mayor Ada Colau on municipalism, scholars Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on race and housing policy, Simon Balto on urban policing, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz on Latino urbanism, Teresa Caldeira on culture in Brazilian favelas, Nayan Shah on Chinatowns and pandemics, Pulitzer Prize winner Marcia Chatelain on fast food and precarious work, French sociologist and filmmaker Quentin Ravelli on housing precarity, and many others. For upcoming lectures, seminars, and workshops, visit our events page.
FELLOWSHIPS
Graduate Urban Public Humanities Fellowships
Connecting the university and the city, the Cities Collaborative provides fellowships for NYU M.A. and Ph.D. students in partnership with leading cultural institutions with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Undergraduate Urban Humanities Research Fellowships
An innovative program funding students and their mentors conducting original research in the urban humanities across the university with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
CONFERENCES AND SYMPOSIA
NYU Cities Collaborative convenes scholars from around the world working on urban issues. We have hosted major conferences on cities and the financial crisis of 2008. Bringing together leading humanists and social scientists, we presented pathbreaking work on the past and present of cities in the Atlantic World. In collaboration with Public Books, the Cities Collaborative published a symposium on Crisis Cities, which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, with essays by major scholars grappling with the 2020 pandemic, protests, political and economic instability worldwide. The essays are the core of the book, The Long Year: A 2020 Reader, co-edited by NYU Cities Collaborative Director Thomas Sugrue and Professor Caitlin Zaloom.
PARTNERSHIPS
NYU Cities Collaborative forges partnerships globally. From 2015 to 2019, the Collaborative co-organized City/Cité, an international series of public events, performances, films, and debates about urban life in France and the United States, held in Paris, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis, in partnership with the Sorbonne, Métro-Univers-Cité and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, in collaboration with other partners in France and the United States. City/Cité brought together influential French and American scholars, activists, performers, policymakers, and non-profit leaders to engage in a public dialogue about immigration, diversity, integration, discrimination, inequality, and the future of the city.
In 2018, the Cities Collaborative and the Urban Democracy Lab co-hosted the Fearless Cities Summit in New York City, a gathering of hundreds of activists, mayors, city council members, academics, and NGO workers from the U.S. Canada, and Mexico to share ideas and form strategies to galvanize the growing network of municipalist movements in the region. Fearless Cities is part of a global movement based on a new vision of transnational cooperation and solidarity to build a more democratic, inclusive, and open city.
In 2019, the Cities Collaborative was one of the sponsors of Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism, a conference that brought together leading Native American historians to consider the vital history of Native and First Nations communities in the making of America’s cities. Papers presented at the conference were published as the book, Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization, co-edited by Cities Collaborative Executive Committee member Andrew Needham.
In 2023, with Cities Collaborative and NYU Urban Initiative sponsorship, NYU became the home of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP). An international initiative, the GUHP encourages the study of cities as creations and creators of large-scale or global historical phenomena. Spanning the globe and moving past the Eurocentric and U.S.-centric focus of field of urban history, the GUHP supports emerging scholars, provides opportunities for collaboration and dialogue among urbanists, and supports innovative scholarship in urban history across time periods. The GUHP team will be headed by history professor, Guy Ortolano.
