NY Food 20/20: Vision, Research, and Recommendations During COVID-19 and Beyond

The public health and economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic to the New York City (NYC) food system have been tremendous. In the six months since March 2020, when the pandemic reached NYC’s 5 boroughs, the number of food-insecure individuals has nearly doubled from 1.2 million to 2 million;1 diet quality for many individuals has decreased;2 the local food workforce has lost more than two-thirds of its workers;3 and more than 1,000 NYC restaurants and food retail outlets have closed,4 some never to re-open. Too often the impacts of a crisis such as COVID-19 are not measured until long after the opportunity to implement policy and programmatic solutions has passed. In this report, researchers from three of NYC’s leading food policy and research institutions analyze COVID-19’s impact on NYC’s food system during the first six months of the pandemic. Our goal is to provide research-based recommendations for policies and programs that support food security, retail, quality, and the food workforce as the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold

Towards a plurilingual habitus: engendering interlinguality in urban spaces

This article focuses on the potential of the multilingual city to create spaces in which monolingual hegemonies may be challenged, inclusive, intercultural values may be nurtured, and plurilingualism may be valorised. Following a contextualisation of linguistic diversity in theories of globalisation and superdiversity, discourses of deficit and power are addressed, arguing that the problematisation of multilingualism and pathologisation of plurilingualism reflect a monolingual habitus. Bringing about a shift towards a plurilingual habitus requires a Deep Approach, as it involves a critical revaluing of deep-seated dispositions. It suggests that the city offers spaces, which can engender interlinguality, a construct that includes interculturality, criticality and a commitment to creative and flexible use of other languages in shared, pluralistic spaces. It then proposes critical, participatory and ethnographic research in three multidimensional spaces: the urban school and a potential interlingual curriculum; networks, lobbying for inclusive policy and organising celebratory events in public spaces; and grass roots-level local spaces, some created by linguistic communities to exercise agency and maintain their languages and cultures, and some emerging as linguistically hybrid spaces for convivial encounter

New East Manchester: urban renaissance or urban opportunism?

In this paper we ask how a shrinking city responds when faced with a perforated urban fabric. Drawing on Manchester’s response to its perforated eastern flank - and informed by a parallel study of Leipzig - we use the city’s current approach to critique urban regeneration policy in England. Urban renaissance holds out the promise of delivering more sustainable - that is more compact, more inclusive and more equitable - cities. However, the Manchester study demonstrated that the attempt to stem population loss from the city is at best fragile, despite a raft of policies now in place to support urban renaissance in England. It is argued here that Manchester like Leipzig is likely to face an ongoing battle to attract residents back from their suburban hinterlands. This is especially true of the family market that we identify as being an important element for long-term sustainable population growth in both cities. We use the case of New East Manchester to consider how discourses linked to urban renaissance – particularly those that link urbanism with greater densities - rule out some of the options available to Leipzig, namely, managing the long-term perforation of the city. We demonstrate that while Manchester is inevitably committed to the urban renaissance agenda, in practice New East Manchester demonstrates a far more pragmatic – but equally unavoidable – approach. This we attribute to the gap between renaissance and regeneration described by Amin et al (2000) who define the former as urbanism for the middle class and the latter as urbanism for the working class. While this opportunistic approach may ultimately succeed in producing development on the ground, it will not address the fundamental, and chronic, problem; the combination of push and pull that sees families relocating to suburban areas. Thus, if existing communities in East Manchester are to have their area buoyed up – or sustained - by incomers, and especially families, with greater levels of social capital and higher incomes urban policy in England will have to be challenged

Urban Education Center: Eight Years Revisited

Urban Education Center, Center for Urban and Regional Development, University of Minnesot

Cultural encounters: enhancing students’ learning from a stay abroad

Students at the Department of Human Geography & Spatial Planning at Utrecht University leave their classroom to learn abroad: they go on exchange for a semester in Malaga, embark upon a fieldtrip to Stockholm for 6 days, or do a 3-month fieldwork in Africa. Learning outside the own classroom is an essential element of the training of geographers. Well-developed intercultural competences are vital to reap the benefits of such stay abroad, and, later on, to work in an increasingly internationalized labor market. However, immersion in a different cultural setting does not itself assure intercultural learning: an active learning environment is needed to achieve this (Trede et al., 2014; Brendel 2014). Thus far, for several reasons, the stay abroad was a rather isolated component in our students’ educational programmes. Upon return, exchange students often point to the immense impact of the period abroad on their academic and personal development, but they can hardly articulate their advances in specific intercultural skills and attitudes. This is strongly related to the fact that upon departure, students do not know what to expect regarding intercultural differences in the field. Furthermore, they are not stimulated to reflect on their intercultural experiences during their stay abroad. As a consequence, the learning of fieldwork abroad is not optimized. Previous experiences and literature call for an approach that confronts students with their own expectations and world views, that stimulate reflection and provoke discussion. Against that background, we developed two projects to prepare students better for a stay abroad, and to train their intercultural competences, using a three-step approach: before, during and after the stay abroad. This paper first introduces the topic and the literature on enhancing the learning outcomes of a stay abroad. Then, we will introduce our projects, one dealing with Master’s students that do their fieldwork in Africa, Asia or Latin America, a second one dealing with undergraduate students that go on exchange. Next, we will present our preliminary findings on the impact of these projects on students’ learning. We conclude with the observation that reflection as a skill deserves more attention in our curricula

Opleving en verval in Scheveningen

Scheveningen was ooit de meest succesvolle toeristische bestemming in de wijde regio. De eens zo statige badplaats beweegt echter al een halve eeuw tussen verval en opleving. Met een mix van nostalgie en dromen op betere tijden wordt er steeds weer publieke wilskracht en (lokaal) privaat kapitaal gevonden om de bestemming van de ondergang te behoeden, maar voor hoe lang nog