We welcome you to New York City! You are almost certainly familiar with New York, but we hope the conference is an opportunity to understand the city more thoroughly, and perhaps in different ways, than you might have before you arrived. And even if you’ve been in New York many times, one of the city’s great qualities is that it is constantly changing – even those of us who live here often lose track of all the different things going on!
Aside from the usual variety of papers on the most important urban issues in our time, the conference offers attendees the ability to get to the know the city better. The local plenary session (Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses: Fulfilling The Promise? The Migrant Crisis in New York City) is focused on the local politics and policies on immigration. We are, and always have been, an immigrant city, but that does not make immigration necessarily less contentious here. The tours on Saturday get conference goers out of midtown (which is, frankly, the least interesting part of the city, but it’s where the hotels are) and allow people the ability to walk around different neighborhoods and listen to local experts talk about the issues transforming communities.
Finally, while we are excited for the tours we have set up, we could only pick three out of a plethora of choices. We urge you to spend time before or after the conference to get out and explore. We all learn a lot from reading and listening to our colleagues’ work. But there is no substitute for hopping on the subway and then wandering around the neighborhoods and exploring the density, vibrancy, and often chaotic energy of the city and its people.
