United Nations diplomats weren't getting parking tickets because of diplomatic immunity, leading New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to propose filling the void with his own "local foreign policies." Newspapers parodied the mayor, labeling him a dictator. Only with the disintegration of geographic boundaries in the late 1990s could such an unusual incident occur, according to Rutgers University Professor Neil Smith. The case illustrates the "New Globalism, New Urbanism" trend that Smith spoke about yesterday in the Urban Studies Program's 14th annual Public Lecture. During the 1 1/2-hour speech in Logan Hall, Smith told several dozen audience members of the futility of making any "assumptions of social and political normality" during enormous globalization and geographic restructurings. The annual lecture, a highlight of Penn's Urban Studies Program, features a speaker chosen by majors during their junior year. The Urban Studies seniors had read Smith's book, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, studying his work as a model of urban research. The talk was preceded by a seminar in which the students met informally with the professor. Smith is a geography professor and senior fellow at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers' main campus in New Brunswick, N.J. He spent one year at Penn as a Robert Lincoln McNeil Scholar during the 1970's. It was in Philadelphia's Society Hill section where Smith developed an interest in gentrification. Opening with the topic of "new urbanism," Smith detailed how the process of gentrification has changed since the 1970s. Initially, gentrification consisted just of the "upper-class remodeling of old houses." The trend of gentrification moved cyclically with the economy and culminated in larger urban restructurings such as Walt Disney Co.'s investment in New York's Times Square and "city apartments for lawyers, academics, investors, and Web designers." According to Smith, this new urbanism was generated by the new globalism -- the breaking down of traditional geographic boundaries. Smith, a critic of global capitalism, lamented the fact that business schools -- including Penn's own Wharton School -- emphasize that "globalization spells the end of geography." College senior Bill Lester, an Urban Studies major, said he was pleased with the speech and the seminar, adding that "it was a great opportunity, especially since I'm doing my senior research project on gentrification."
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