By Richard Platkin The Los Angeles Times (March 1 and March 14, 2010), Southern California’s rapidly shrinking, former newspaper of record, repeatedly complains that Los Angeles’s elected officials, primarily Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the fifteen members of the Los Angeles City Council, do not have a plan to guide them in their massive, highly selective cutbacks in municipal services, […]

By Aaron McKeon Last September, Time began a year of coverage of Detroit. Judging by the coverage in the September issue and subsequent installations online, the magazine’s angle is to present the nation’s eleventh largest city as all but a lost cause. Naturally, there is a lot of heart and guts in the city and plenty of determined people working for its survival, but Time seems to […]

By Peter Marcuse Two major world forums focused on urban issues—the U.N.-sponsored World Urban Forum (WUF) and a social-movement-sponsored Social Urban Forum (SUF)—took place in Rio de Janiero in the last week of March, 2010. The forums were extremely different, almost existing in two different worlds, but they tolerated each other; the contrasts and similarities were striking. In its own words, the World Urban Forum …was established by the United […]

By Richard Pithouse It’s often assumed that the international reach of big multinational institutions like the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), along with many of the NGOs allied to them, needs to be matched by a counter internationalism from below. In the richer parts of the world, where there is better access to transport and communication […]

By Nikhil Aziz (A shorter version of this article was published by CommonDreams.org on March 16, 2010.) Some of the advice for how Haiti ought to rebuild after the earthquake sounds hauntingly familiar, echoing the same bad development advice that Haiti has received for decades, even before the nation faced its current devastating situation. To avoid repeating the past failures, we […]