Joshua Yates is Executive Director of the Ormond Center for Thriving Congregations and Communities at Duke Divinity School. A former Research Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Yates was Research Director of the Thriving Cities Lab and director of the Thriving Cities Project.
Taking a hard look at the smart city requires that we ask not only where it might fail to live up to the promises of its boosters, but also where it is successful and how it might nonetheless still fail us as citizens and as human beings.
There seems to be little agreement on what it is that needs sustaining, let alone how we should go about it in practice.
Cosmopolitanism commits you to a global conversation, or a set of global conversations, about the things that matter.
“Risk is a very ambivalent concept.”
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the idiom of cultural pluralism became a positive program in its own right.