Students in classroom at desks

Urban Studies

Times Square Street Scene - LG

Designed as an interdisciplinary program, Urban Studies offers a broad introduction to the city and the urban environment.

Students combine course work and urban issues with hands-on experience in New York City. A dedicated faculty offer courses ranging from urban politics and community, architecture and the built environment, urban history, immigration and class relations, to literary representations of urban space.

Learn More About:


2024 Trinity Fellowships

Congratulations Olivia Griffin and Christine Rong!

Recipients of the 2024/25 Trinity Financial Fellowship

The Trinity Financial Fellowship supports the academic research of outstanding Urban Studies undergraduate majors at Fordham University as they complete their senior internship and thesis.

Participants in the Trinity Financial Fellowship produce senior theses related to social and economic concerns, community and cultural initiatives, the built environment and environmental justice.

Current Fellow Insights

Olivia Griffin

Olivia Griffin
Thank you so much, I'm so honored! Hi, I’m Olivia! I am a senior Urban Studies major, with an English minor, at Fordham College Rose Hill in the Honors Program. I grew up in Oklahoma City, OK and am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I am interested in strengthening connections between communities and their environment. Therefore, I intend on interning with Water Alliance, a non-profit seeking to build, protect, and revitalize accessible waterfronts across NYC. For my thesis, I aim to study a specific neighborhood in the Bronx and their relationship with the waterfront. Using a case study will allow me to analyze broader topics of sustainability, urban development and gentrification, and accessibility in design through a narrower scope. Additionally, I hope to review current urban formations in that area and apply my knowledge of the waterfront, from the internship, to predict future waterfront design patterns and their subsequent social impacts. As NYC implements their “Comprehensive Waterfront Plan,” there will be major social, economic, and health impacts on urban communities in the near future, and I hope to clarify the path forward through my research.”

Christine Rong

Christine Rong
Thank you for this opportunity! I am eternally grateful. My name is Christine Rong, and I am a senior at FCLC studying Urban Studies with a minor in Business Administration. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. In my senior thesis, I will explore the connection between free speech and urban spaces, specifically public-private partnerships, and how the parties involved significantly impact the narratives of social movements. I plan to explore major social movements that began and took place in the New York Metropolitan Area and how the physical spaces they took place in affected their overall impact.”

Vojislava Cordes at Columbia University

Vojislava Cordes

Best Wishes to Prof. Cordes who resumes her role in Comparative Urban Policy at Columbia University SIPA.

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning, with concentrations in Sociology and Political Science, from Columbia University. She was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College and a Research Associate to the late Dr. Benjamin Barber at Urban Consortium, Fordham University. She is the author of New York in Cinematic Imagination: The Agitated City (Routledge: London and New York, July 2020) and is currently completing a forthcoming participant-observation and theoretical research study on The Politics of Sanctuary.


New York Universities, It’s Time to Tear Down That Wall

By Brian Martindale, Fordham Urban Studies

from Gotham Gazette: 

“New York universities are walling people out. Major private institutions across the city are surrounded by gates, but not because they are in the most dangerous neighborhoods. Rather, it appears that largely white student bodies are being walled off from their surrounding communities because of unfounded fear of racial others.

Columbia University, in a neighborhood adjacent to Central Harlem, is blockaded on every side with a security force keeping watch on all who enter its narrow gates. St. John’s University, in Queens’ Hillcrest neighborhood, is peppered with turnstiles, gated parking lots, and signs marking it as “Private Property.” Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx is similarly locked-down, separated from the surrounding community by wrought iron and chain link fences, at places with barbed wire and stone walls. The only way in, with few exceptions, is by scanning a school ID past a staffed security booth or full-height turnstiles.

Standing in contrast is New York University, located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. NYU is a decidedly urban campus, built into the fabric of the city, with the public Washington Square Park serving as its primary quad.

What makes NYU different? Gut instinct might suggest NYU is in a safer neighborhood so it doesn’t need a gate. But it turns out the universities that believe they need to wall out crime are actually in safer communities.”

Read the full article by Brian Martindale at Gotham Gazette.


Annika Hinze

Annika Hinze Appointed as New IPSR Editor

from ipsa.org:

Annika Marlen Hinze, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, has been appointed as co-editor of the International Political Science Review (IPSR).

Dr. Hinze's research and teaching focus on urban politics, immigration policy, democratic theory, and qualitative and mixed methods research. Hinze is also interested in housing, transportation, and sustainability policy in cities. Her first book, Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), compares integration policy and lived integration of second-generation Turk-German women in two Berlin neighborhoods. She is also the co-author (with Dennis R. Judd) of the 10th edition of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge 2018), as well as the 11th edition, newly entitled City Politics: Cities and Suburbs in 21st Century America (Routledge 2022), and co-editor (with James M. Smith) of the forthcoming 8th edition of American Urban Politics in a Global Age (Routledge, forthcoming). Hinze has published articles in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, PS: Political Science & Politics, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, and co-edited a special issue on “North American Urban Politics” in the journal Urban Research and Practice (2013). Her current research focuses on gender equality in academia, the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities in policy framing and practice, sustainability policy and planning in American cities, urban neighborhood change, and democratic institutions. Dr. Hinze has done field research in Canada, Germany, Turkey, and the United States and is an Associated Researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at TU Berlin.

Read the announcement at ipsa.org.


City Politics: Cities and Suburbs in 21st Century America

annika m. hinze | dennis r. judd
City Politics, Eleventh Edition

9781032006352
Routledge
July 12, 2022

from the publisher:

City Politics has received praise for the clarity of its writing, careful research, and distinctive theme – that urban politics in the United States has evolved as a dynamic interaction between governmental power, private actors, and a politics of identity.

The book’s enduring appeal lies in its persuasive explanation, careful attention to historical detail, and accessible and elegant way of teaching the complexity and breadth of urban and regional politics which unfold at the intersection of spatial, cultural, economic, and policy dynamics. This 11th edition has been thoroughly updated while retaining the popular structure of past editions.


Four Dream Conversations in Urban History

from globalurbanhistory.org

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed academic conversation, likely forever. This last June, several dozen GUHP members from across the world gathered to envision new ways to fulfill the Project's mission as we go forward. Instead of thinking about location or formats of new events, we decided that online some form of hybrid events were actually to GUHP's advantage, since they allowed relatively simple and chap ways to bring the membership together over long distances.

What are our "Dream Conversations"? Read more at globalurbanhistory.org.


The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

AI graphic

from fordham news: 

The concept of artificial intelligence has been with us since 1955, when a group of researchers first proposed a study of “the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines.” At the same time, it seems like not a day goes by without news about some development, making it feel very futuristic.

It’s also the purview of professors from a variety of fields at Fordham, such as Damian Lyons, Ph.D., a professor of computer science, R.P. Raghupathi Ph.D., a professor of information, technology and operations at Gabelli School of Business, and Lauri Goldkind, Ph.D., a professor at the Graduate School of Social Service.

Listen to the podcast by Fordham Urban Studies alumnus Patrick Verel:

Read the full transcript at Fordham News.


STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY AND COMMITMENT TO JUSTICE

Fordham’s Urban Studies Program stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and all the protesters demanding racial justice and an end to police brutality towards minorities across the country. We firmly believe that in a society, in which all are not free from oppression and injustice, no one is truly free. Therefore, we must all recognize our responsibility to work towards pointing out systemic inequality and racism throughout our country, and our institutions, as a first step toward ending and overcoming it.

Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.(Ella’s Song, Bernice Johnson Reagon)

We strongly believe in the importance of confronting the past (and the present) for building a better and more equitable future, and we are committed to confronting existing racial injustice in our teaching and research.



A New York Legislator's Take on the Protests

Zellnor Myrie on protests

from wync | the brian lehrer show:

Fordham Urban Studies alumnus Zellnor Myrie, New York State Senator (D-20), talks about his experience getting pepper sprayed at a protest last weekend, and discusses laws he hopes to pass that would help change the justice system and reform policing.

Listen on wync.org The Brian Lehrer Show.


Prof. Greer talks Politics and Protest

Christina Greer

from wync | the brian lehrer show:

Dr. Jason Johnson, professor at Morgan State University, political contributor at MSNBC, contributor to The Grio and Sirius XM, and Christina Greer, political science professor at Fordham University, host of the podcast FAQNYC, politics editor at The Grio and the host of The Aftermath on OZY , talk about the uprisings happening across the country, and the political ramifications.

Listen on wync.org The Brian Lehrer Show.


Built Heritage special issue on Shanghai

Built Heritage Shanghai cover

A new special issue of Built Heritage, “Shanghai: Heritage at the Crossroads of Culture,” is edited by Fordham Professor of History Rosemary Wakeman. The journal is published by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai.

from wakeman's introduction: 

Shanghai is among the most dynamic global cities of both the 20th and 21st centuries. The city is China’s gateway to the world and its aspirations for the future. With more than 24 million people, 40 percent of whom are migrants, it is a global crossroads and one of the most multicultural cities in the world. It has more skyscrapers than New York and a public transport system that overtakes most global cities. Shanghai is a trading city, an entrepot of commodities. It exports electronic information products, automobiles, petrochemicals, fine steel, equipment, and biomedicine. It has the highest GDP of any city in China’s mainland and has become one of the leading financial sectors in East Asia, with major Western banks flocking to its new financial centre. With well over 500 multinational companies, the city attracts more foreign investment flows than most developing countries. Along with them has come a highly-skilled workforce from all over the world. Shanghai’s urban middle-class has fuelled China’s consumer revolution and a property boom. Sleek skyscrapers and glamorous malls, its brilliant skyline, dominate the global image of Shanghai and beckon tourists to its shores.

 Rosemary Wakeman, “Shanghai and New York: Mid-Century Urban Avant-Gardes

Read more at Built Heritage.


Mapping Conference Tackles Justice Issues from a Geographic Perspective

Mapping Injustice

from fordham news:

In a three-day symposium titled “Mapping (In)Justice,” dozens of scholars came to Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus from Nov. 7 to Nov. 9 to examine how digital mapping is being used by academics as a methodology to study justice and injustice, particularly when researching underserved communities.

Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and co-founder of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, organized the conference with department chair Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D.

“Spatial media have politics, these are not neutral things,” said Donovan, who teaches a course of the same name as the conference for the Masters in Public Media. “We need to look at how our subjects are using digital mapping in their own lives and not just use this technology to study them from afar, like a scientist with a clipboard.”

Read the full article by Tom Stoelker at Fordham News.

from m(i)j project gallery: 


Congratulations NYS Sen. Zellnor Myrie, District 20

Zellnor Myrie inauguration

from bklyner: 

Urban Studies alumnus Zellnor Myrie celebrated his inauguration in East Flatbush on Monday, February 11, 2019, before a host of electeds and constituents where everyone spoke to a new senatorial district 20.

After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, the 32-year-old attended Fordham University and then Cornell Law School. He was joined on stage by his mother, Marcelina Cummings, who was a staunch supporter of the lawmaker’s senatorial bid. Cummings came to the states from Costa Rica and worked as a factory worker initially.

“We must follow the command to be courageous,” said Myrie. “The problems that are facing our communities cannot be solved with the same solutions of yesterday. They require us to be courageous in our aspirations.”

“We will be bold in our actions and we will be bold on how we attack them,” said Myrie on how he’s looking to tackle the issues plaguing the community, including housing and homelessness.”

“Think about what he’s already accomplished,” said NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer who was also in attendance. “Early voting, early voting—the consolidation of state and local primaries — I’ll give you a fact as comptroller— that’s a savings of $50 million that can go to education and healthcare and housing. That’s what he did”.

Read the full story at Bklyner.


Practicing Utopia

from fordham newsProfessor Calls for Return to Regional Planning’s Utopian Age 

 


Mark Street

Mark Street Defends the Art of Street Photography in Filmmaker Magazine

Mark Street, writer, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Film in the Visual Arts Program at Fordham, defends his craft in an article for Filmmaker Magazine: "In Defense of Street Photography in an iPhone Age."

“Oddly, as filming in one medium (the cellphone) has become ubiquitous, people seem to fear the semi-professional more and more. A professional film shoot ascribes to standards — releases are signed, tacit agreements are made, those filmed understand the scope of the project. As someone who works alone (without a crew that creates a kind of picture a passerby might be able to understand) I often find myself at pains to explain myself.”

Read the full article at Filmmaker Magazine