Social Science Space

In the wake of him earning the UAA-SAGE Marilyn Gittell Award for Activist Scholars, we present Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.’s discussion of how he got involved in chronicling Cuba and what his time in Havana taught him about his home of Buffalo and about other American cities.

The University at Buffalo’s Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.’s’s role as an activist, as a scholar (“I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist”), an urban planner and an historian, are explored in the wake of him receiving the Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association.

Nico Calavita is, by his own admission, a sort of accidental activist scholar. Now, after a career in which he’s become a recognized expert on the tools and provision of affordable housing, Calavita has been honored with the Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award, sponsored by the Urban Affairs Association and SAGE Publishing.

In this interview, David Satterthwaite, editor of the journal ‘Environment & Urbanization,’ discusses the state of the ‘new’ urban agenda and what we can expect from the upcoming global conference on sustainable urban development.

Politicizing infrastructure — literally making inert materials into arenas in which they could claim and assert political power– creates a shared set of actions that constitute an expression of what Kyle Shelton calls ‘infrastructural citizenship,’ which he argues has been a key component in how modern cities have developed.