New York University will host an international conference of major-city mayors and urban scholars from Spain, Latin America and the U.S. to discuss the emerging importance of cities in global issues including finance, immigration, environment and security and the new difficulties facing the mayors of “international” cities such as New York, Barcelona, and Mexico City.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York, Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cardenas of Mexico City, and Mayor Sila Calderón of San Juan, Puerto Rico will be among the XX mayors and XX scholars participating in “De Urbe et Orbe: The Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization for Cities in Spain, Latin America and the United States.”
The conference which was organized by Pasqual Maragall i Mira, the long-time Mayor of Barcelona will be held Friday, April 3 - Saturday, April 4, 1998 at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South. The event is free and open to the public.
Mr. Maragall said, “More and more, cities are emerging as international political entities in their own right. How cities relate to their own citizens, to their own countries, and to other countries and cities around the world are issues that many mayors are truly having to confront for the first time only now. As the millenium approaches, mayors have been transformed from local officials worried about police, fire and sanitation to international figures worried about trade, terrorism and the environment.
“That is why this conference at NYU is so important. The big-city mayors share ideas, programs, issues, problems, and burdens that do far more to connect them than their national boundaries do to divide them today. What the Mayor of New York and the Mayor of Barcelona have to say to each other about relations between Americans and Spanish citizens may ultimately turn out to be just as important as what the President of the U.S. and the Prime Minister of Spain have to say to one another.”
Funding for the conference was provided by the Coca-Cola Foundation, the Inter-American Development Bank, Morgan Stanley & Co, Merrill Lynch and the Tourist Office of Spain.
The event is sponsored and organized by NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center and NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies and the Spanish Institute.