Welcome

The 2007 Sagan National Colloquium
Cities and Suburbs: Life in a Metropolitan World

Click here for a photo gallery from the 2007 Sagan National Colloquium events.

Co-Directors: Dr. Craig Ramsay, Professor of Politics and Government
and Dr. Richard Fusch, Professor of Geography and Director, Urban Studies Program

EACH YEAR the Ohio Wesleyan University Sagan National Colloquium spotlights an issue of enduring and powerful social concern. Through a series of presentations and discussions led by national and internationally recognized experts, the Ohio Wesleyan Community is engaged in an exploration of the selected topic and its impact on society. The 2007 topic is “Cities and Suburbs: Life in a Metropolitan World.”

Sometime in 2008 more than one-half the people on the planet—approximately 3.2 billion people—will live in cities. In addition, over 50 million people—equivalent to the population of France—are added to cities each year. And, much of this population is following the “leadership” of America: it is suburbanizing. (Worldwatch Institute: State of the World, 2007).

The world—and globalization—are increasingly dominated by huge Mega-Cities (World Cities) from New York to Shanghai to Mexico City to Sao Paolo to Mumbai. Historically and to the present-day, cities have been the fonts of massive local and global cultural change and of human creativity. Urban places are the centers of artistic creation, architectural grandeur and innovation in popular culture from music (Jazz, rock and roll, and hip-hop) to fashion. The so-called computer revolution was born in metropolitan regions like Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California. The American automobile “culture” was born in Detroit, Michigan. The skyscraper, the building which epitomizes “being a big city” was invented in Chicago and is now the symbol of world urbanity.

Cities are also the center of some of the world’s most abject poverty and are the source of most of the world’s resource problems and pollution. They present the world with a massive set of problems from increasing pollution of our biosphere to large scale ethnic and racial tensions. Urban sprawl in cities of North America and Europe is paving over large tracts of rural land and contributing to global warming, while massive squatter settlements and slums in Third World cities become the breeding ground for possible pandemics, alienation, religious extremism and global insecurity.

As one very prominent urban public official has noted: “…the twenty-first century will be the century of cities. It is in the cities that decisive battles for the quality of life will be fought, and their outcomes will have a defining effect on the planet’s environment and on human relations.” (Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitbia, Brazil in Worldwatch Institute: State of the World, 2007). The 2007 Sagan National Colloquium will explore these challenging developments from the perspectives of many disciplines and real world practitioners.