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Cities, Citizenship, and Modernity
M. Anne Pitcher, Director
 Cities have been contested sites for the embrace and rejection of
modernity and the creation and destruction of citizenship. In
2005-2006, the Center for Ethics and World Societies at Colgate University
explores the tensions and complementarities among cities, citizenship, and
modernity. It examines ancient conceptions of the city as the arena in
which citizens voiced their opinions and negotiated political difference.
It looks at how cities from the eighteenth century until the present have
become the loci in which the public shapes nationalism and
extra-nationalism, inclusion and exclusion, power and rights. Cities
have assumed various roles not only because they have developed alongside
industrial transformations, but also because they have been influenced by
changes in our ideas regarding belonging and modernity. Equally, the built
environment of cities forces a re-negotiation of private and public space.
In the twenty-first century, these spatial re-arrangements affect the
social, racial, and political character of cities. They are at once dynamic
and creative, fluid and segregated, tolerant and violent. This phenomenon
can be examined transnationally from New York to São Paulo, and from Paris
to Bombay. |
