State & Local

Why Are U.S. Mayors Missing Habitat III, Arguably the World's Most Important Meeting for Urbanism?

Governing: When he was mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke often looked abroad for ideas he could use at home. Schmoke was active in Baltimore’s sister city initiatives and traveled internationally whenever he could to learn what other cities were doing. On a trip to Israel, he visited two cities that transformed his thinking about public housing. It was part of what led him to initiate a broad program of tearing down high-rise towers and rebuilding them as low-rise neighborhoods.

So Schmoke did not need much persuading when Henry Cisneros -- then the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) -- asked him to fly to Istanbul in 1996 to attend a major United Nations conference on cities. The convening was called Habitat II. Schmoke joined a U.S. delegation that included more than a dozen mayors. He found the experience enriching. “Habitat really reinforced my view that there is value in international exchange of ideas,” says Schmoke, who now is president of the University of Baltimore. “We were in Istanbul listening to local officials talk about problems that could have been from Indianapolis -- that was inspiring and gave you some hope that we could maybe unite around common problems.”

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