The CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities

Events & Activities

Through workshops, seminars, lectures, and discussions featuring prominent members of the environmental community, we reach out to a broad student audience, seeking to change the way people think about the environment. The Institute has a wide variety of resources available for students, professors, instructors, and researchers, and our outreach activities will assess the needs of our audiences and find the best way to deliver our resources and information to them.

The Humane Metropolis

RESCHEDULED for Friday May 9th

Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation's sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world's population for the first time is now classified as "urban."As metropolitan regions become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable - in short, more "humane".The talk will draw on themes from the 2006 book edited by Dr. Platt: The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City( University of Massachusetts Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy). Dr. Platt's work is in part inspired by and a tribute to the work of Distinguished Professor William "Holly" Whyte, a prominent Urban Sociologist and former faculty member of Hunter College . Whyte's famous observations and film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City made him achampion defender of the value of small public spaces.

Click here [PDF] for more information.

Sustainability Research Poster Contest

The CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities (CISC) presents the 2008 Governors Island Sustainable CUNY/Sustainable NYC Research Poster Contest. This summer marks our 3rd Science Exhibition and Lecture Series on Governors Island. Though we have showcased CUNY research in the past, this year we are making a particular effort to applaud and publicize the important research that CUNY students are doing. To that end, we are sponsoring our first student research poster contest for the science exhibition!

Click here for more information, including rules and regulations.

2008 Art for Sustainability Contest

The CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities (CISC) is proud to present our inaugural Governors Island Art for Sustainability Contest. Powerful social movements have traditionally been reflected in parallel movements of artistic expression, movements that reveal the underlying tensions inherent in social transformation. The Art for Sustainability Contest challenges student artists to bring forward their interpretations of urban sustainability in its many forms.

Click here for more information, including rules and regulations.

CUNY Student Empowerment Project

CUNY Sustainability Coalition Meeting co-sponsored by CISC
Following the Nature, Ecology, and Society Colloquium, CISC sponsored a dinner for CUNY Students interested in student-led environmental initiatives on various CUNY campuses. Representatives from 4 schools were there: Hunter College, The Graduate Center, Queens College, and Baruch. The purpose of the meeting was to not only share information about different projects on each campus but to also establish the best ways for CISC to facilitate and support the work of environmental and sustainability groups across the various CUNY campuses. It was decided that the meetings will occur on the first Fridays of every month at different CUNY schools. The next meeting will be Friday April 4th at Hunter College. The following one in May will be held at Queens College.