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This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each other from cynicism and despair. Placing these experiences and dialogues in conversation with the existing literature on mentoring, we address the ways that mentoring can both reproduce and transform the neoliberal university, while simultaneously exploring the tensions these possibilities produce in the context of mid-career feminist mentoring. We discuss particular challenges associated with mid-career mentoring, focusing primarily on our roles as feminist, anti-racist mentors to non-traditional students and junior faculty. While recognizing that there is no clear solution to the challenges of feminist mentoring and institutional change, we examine various models of mentoring, highlighting both the potential and limitations of informal mentoring in producing institutional change. Our intention is that this dialogical piece of writing allows us to support each other as we share our own reflections, while offering mentoring advice for colleagues at different career stages. While mentoring can open up the possibility for minor disruptions and is an essential coping mechanism, it is just one small part of the struggle to challenge the structural inequality of the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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While sustainability and green urbanism have become buzzwords in urban policy circles, too little analysis has focused on who gets to decide what green looks like. Many visions of the green city seem to have room only for park space, waterfront cafes, and luxury LEED-certified buildings, prompting concern that there is no place in the “sustainable” city for industrial uses and the working class. We will use the case study of Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, New York, to explore how different visions for the green city are enacted through activism and policy-making. Neighbourhood residents and business owners seem to be advocating a strategy we call “just green enough”, in order to achieve environmental remediation without environmental gentrification. Following the crash of both the financial and real estate markets, attempts to construct a sustainable city that is economically diverse and socially just seem to be taking hold. We interrogate how urban sustainability can be used to open up a space for diversity and democracy in the neoliberal city and argue that there is space for interventions that challenge the presumed inevitability of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the organizers of an event on women in the global city, we wanted to create a forum exploring the intersections of class, gender and other forms of inequality that fracture 'global Chicago'. In the panelists' discussion of the intersections of struggles relating to housing, education and environmental justice in Chicago's particular version of the global city, we found evidence of lives disrupted by neoliberal trends, as well as possible sites to contest these disruptions. These struggles reverberate to shape a new urban vision, as the academics and activists assembled for our panel aim not just to work on the local issues of specific women, but to create a city in which work is well compensated, housing is affordable for everyone, schools educate all children well, all neighborhoods are safe both from crime and environmental pollutants, and everyone has the time to fully engage as active citizens of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects of gentrification on industrial displacement. Although urban manufacturing centres are not as central to the urban economy as they once were, they still house a vibrant and varied manufacturing sector that serves urban niche markets and provides employment for a less-educated and largely immigrant and minority workforce. As urban neighbourhoods gentrify, these manufacturers are faced with displacement because their space has become attractive to developers who convert lofts into residences. This paper looks at the process of gentrification and the experience of industrial displacement in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in order to challenge existing theories on the impacts of gentrification and thus help to make clear the processes and interests at work. Through buy-outs, lease refusals, zoning changes and increasing rents, small manufacturers are being actively displaced, endangering the diversity of the economy and the employment outcomes of unskilled and immigrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We hypothesize that as the "global city" label becomes ever more central to a city's identity, local urban government policy increasingly supports those economic sectors that city leaders see as being congruent with the global and increasingly undermines sectors that serve primarily local markets. Through an in-depth study of small-scale manufacturers in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in New York City, we examine the extent to which and the ways in which local policy undermines otherwise healthy locally oriented businesses. We find that the City's assumption that urban manufacturing is a dying breed becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, largely via the City's own treatment of its manufacturing businesses. Through a lack of enforcement of zoning codes, zoning variances and rezoning initiatives, and more quotidian policies of harassment over noise and other quality of life complaints, the City is making it more difficult to do business for small-scale manufacturers. These policies then create a conventional wisdom that sees the City as a difficult place to start and grow a business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the effect gentrification on industrial employment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Consequences of the lack of appreciation for quantitative techniques in academic and policy circles; Contribution of immigrants to city administration and development; Discussion on urban ecology.