2014 Urban Affairs Association Conference

Politics in America is, invoking Orwell, in a bad way.  America remains politically trapped in a liberal-conservative/red-blue/left-right/Democrat-Republican vortex.  To say this about American politics is also to say it about urban American politics, for increasingly they are one in the same.  Additionally, one significant result of this political quagmire is that the social problems of America – which are, for the most part, the urban problems of America – continue to fester.  Problems of employment, living standards, schooling, housing, criminal justice, and – perhaps most fundamental to all of these – economic and racial inequality all grow deeper and deeper in absence of the political conditions necessary to address them in a serious way.

So, if we need a new American politics, how might it come about? Where are the openings to forge new political alliances, including those that might help us break free from the current ideological vortex? What might a restructured (and reconstituted) American politics look like? What sort of policy/institutional design agendas might help facilitate the development of this new politics? What might its ideological (idea-based) appeal be? Where might its material basis be located?  What are its overall prospects and possibilities to serve as the foundation for the kind of social change necessary to address in a serious way the urban problems of America?                   

The presenters for this colloquy will engage these (and related) questions with an eye to generating broader discussion and debate about how to begin to engage the most important American urban issues of our time.