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Professor calls for collectivization of efforts to tackle cities’ environmental challenges
Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd professor of sociology at Columbia University, has revealed some of the biggest challenges currently facing cities and their potential consequences.
Professor Sassen spoke to Salzburg Global during the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association 2013 symposium on ‘Sustainability and the City: America and the Urban World’.She visited the symposium to provide a lecture on 'Bringing Cities into the Global Environmental Debate'.
In the first of a series of podcasts stemming from the session, Professor Sassen outlines how cities are capable of finding solutions within the destruction of the environment.She describes how cities make matters far more urgent, and how mayors are far more engaged in facing environmental struggles than national governments.
Nevertheless, Professor Sassen advocates for change to happen at a local and national level and for people’s efforts to be collectivized.This leads into the final part of the discussion as we ask Professor Sassen what we can expect cities to look like in the future, where she provides us with two contrasting scenarios.