How can we revive our cities and suburbs to make them places that serve all residents, with thriving metropolitan areas, good schools, and reflective, sensitive, and humane communities?

In a Chats in the Stacks book talk, Bill Goldsmith, professor emeritus in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell, will present his new book Saving Our Cities (Cornell University Press, September 2016). Saving our Cities shows how urban centers can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. Goldsmith argues that America has been in the habit of abusing its cities and their poorest suburbs, always the first to be blamed for society's ills and the last to be helped. As federal and state budgets, regulations, and programs line up with the interests of giant corporations and privileged citizens, they impose austerity on cities, shortchange public schools, make it hard to get nutritious food, and inflict the drug war on unlucky neighborhoods.  His findings have some positive news―when more cities forcefully demand enlightened federal and state action on problems addressing inequality, schools, food, and the drug war, positive movement will occur in traditional urban planning as well.

Goldsmith received the 2016 ACSP Friedmann Book Award (2nd place, Honorable Mention) in October. The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) established the award to recognize books that best exemplify scholarship in the area of planning for sustainable development.

Light refreshments served and books available for purchase.

This event is sponsored by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, and the Fine Arts Library.