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Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin <implementation@noos.fr> CNRS (National Scientific Research Center) Connection between public spaces and urban requalification. |
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List Affiliations: | Advisory Board Member for H-Urban |
Reviews: | untitled |
Interests: | American History / Studies Urban History / Studies |
Bio: Dr. Ghorra-Gobin has been H-Urban's Contributing Editor for France for the last two years, and has commissioned a substantial number of reviews in both French andEnglish. She is a French urban planner affiliated with the CNRS(National Scientific Research Center) in Paris, and a scholar whose research is located at the intersection of two different university traditions, having received a doctorat d'Etat from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA. Dr. Ghorra-Gobin is interested in exploring and explaining the impacts of economic, cultural and social changes on the urban sphere. Her empirical work deals mainly with the American context where she conducts interviews with local administrators, politicians and neighborhood associations. She has been in charge of two seminars from 1991 to 2001. The first dealt with the theory of urban planning and social changes and took place at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. The second dealt with local politics in American cities and took place at the Institute of Political Studies (Paris).Dr. Ghorra-Gobin is past-president (1998-2000) of the SENA (Society for North American Studies). She has been a consultant for OECD in 1991, and contributed to the territorial review of Canada. As an IFUW member (International Federation of Women), Dr. Gobin works with UNESCO's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the preparation and follow-up of international meetings such as Habitat II (city summit), HabitatII+5, and Johannesburg. She received the France-Amériques award for her book, Los Angeles, _Le Mythe Américain Inachevé_ (_The Unfinished American Myth_). Her book _The United States Between Local and Global_, published in 2000 by the Presses de Sciences-Po, is an analysis of the metropolitanization process. It is based on American historiography as well as on interviews with people involved in the implementation of social reform in Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota. After emphasizing the role of metropoles as main loci of transnational exchanges, her book focuses on spatial disparities and the need for reinventing a political framework at the scale of the urban region.In 1999, she was a visiting professor at Politecnico di Milano, teaching about the differences between the European and American conceptions of the city (based on her book The American City published in 1998, Nathan). She organized two symposiums at the Sorbonne, What Makes the City (1994, L'harmattan) and Reinventing the City: the role of public spaces (L'Harmattan) and edited these two books. The second was international and based on a comparative analysis of national experiences, thanks to the participation of foreign researchers with two scholars coming from American universities, Dolores Hayden (YaleUniversity) and Marcelo Cruz (University of Wisconsin).Given the current global context, Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin believes in adopting a comparative perspective in social science research. The purpose of such a perspective allows for a better explanation of the differences in any given context between the variables dependent on the capitalistic logic and the variables which are part of some other ideology (general welfare) framed by the political game and its actors. |