Thursday, March 24th, 2016

6:30 to 8 pm

Elebash Recital Hall

In recent years, New York’s small retail — the local shops, cafés and restaurants that make neighborhood shopping streets both familiar and distinctive — has struggled to survive, increasingly competing with chain stores and online shopping. Owners often cannot pay rising rents and taxes, and are forced to move or shut down when their building is sold, demolished or transformed into expensive new condos. While immigrants have brought old shopping streets to life by opening new kinds of small businesses, they too face “commercial gentrification” and displacement. How can the city support revitalization without killing local shops? Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer joins Graduate Center sociologists Sharon Zukin and Philip Kasinitz, and their research partners Xiangming Chen and Takashi Machimura, to explore this question in a local and global context — in conjunction with the publication of the scholars’ new book, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai.