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2. Innovators
- Author:
- Kate Brick, Mari Hayman, and Rebecca Bintrim
- Publication Date:
- 05-2015
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Some of our hemisphere's emerging leaders in politics, business, civil society, and the arts.
- Political Geography:
- New York
3. The Rising Global Thermostat: What business can do to lower the temperature
- Author:
- Ban Ki-moon
- Publication Date:
- 04-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- The private sector has long been a key partner for the United Nations on advancing sustainable development initiatives throughout the world. Today, climate change presents one of the most urgent global challenges to sustainable development, and it will demand the support and engagement of the private sector to confront it effectively. Investing in green energy is not only the right thing to do morally, but also, for companies who take it up, benefits the bottom line.
- Topic:
- Environment
- Political Geography:
- New York and United Nations
4. Eco-friendly mining in Colombia — Latinos in Nevada — A network for Puerto Rico's diaspora — Engaging artists in New York City
- Publication Date:
- 04-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Business Innovator: Felipe Arango, Colombia The Chocó region in western Colombia is one of the most mineral-rich places in the hemisphere. It is also ecologically rich, boasting species of flora thought to be unique to Chocó. But due to years of commercial gold and platinum mining that have leached mercury and cyanide into local rivers, the Chocó region has also become one of the most threatened natural areas in the world. Felipe Arango has been working to change that. Arango, 34, is CEO of Oro Verde—an NGO based in Medellín, Colombia, that empowers local miners to use more ecologically friendly artisanal mining techniques. Founded in 2003, the organization purchases gold produced by certified artisanal miners, many of them Afro-Colombian, and sells it to socially conscious jewelers around the world. Oro Verde takes a 2 percent cut to fund its operations and administration, and contributes its profits and reinvested premiums to the protection of 11,120 acres (4,500 hectares) of tropical rainforest. Oro Verde's gold certification process, meanwhile, has influenced the development of a global “fair-trade, fair-mined” gold certification process.
- Topic:
- Economics, Government, and Human Rights
- Political Geography:
- New York and Colombia
5. Celebrating Germany in Brazil — Dominica hosts the World Creole Festival — Tackling Mexico City's traffic jams —10 Things to Do in Antigua
- Publication Date:
- 04-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Prost, Brazil! Grab a stein-full of caipirinha and stroll down to Ipanema beach in your lederhosen—it's Germany-Brazil Year in Brazil. The yearlong festival, aimed at deepening German-Brazilian relations, kicked off in May with the opening of the German-Brazilian Economic Forum in São Paulo. “Brazil is one of the most successful new centers of power in the world,” says Guido Westerwelle, Germany's foreign minister. “We want to intensify cooperation with Brazil, not only economically but also culturally.” It's no surprise that Brazil, the sixth-largest economy in the world, has caught the attention of Europe's financial powerhouse. Brazil is Germany's most important trading partner in Latin America, accounting for $14.2 billion in imports in 2012. With some 1,600 German companies in Brazil providing 250,000 jobs and 17 percent of industrial GDP, it's an economic relationship that clearly has mutual benefits.
- Topic:
- Security, Economics, and Environment
- Political Geography:
- United States, New York, Europe, Brazil, Germany, and Mexico
6. Extreme Sustainable City Makeover: New York
- Author:
- Michael Sorkin
- Publication Date:
- 05-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Most of us are familiar with the concept of the "ecological footprint." Originally developed by Canadian academics Matthis Wackernagel and William Rees, the idea embodies a series of algorithms (numerous versions are available on the web) that convert a wide variety of consumption inputs into a single quantity: area. Using this model, one can compare how much of the Earth's surface is required to build a car, heat a house, produce a meal, sink the carbon from a coal-burning power plant, etc.
- Political Geography:
- New York and Canada
7. How Do We Make Sustainable Cities Sustainable Policies?
- Author:
- Hannah Thonet
- Publication Date:
- 05-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Several of the region's high-profile mayors who championed sustainability during their administrations have recently left—or will soon leave—office. This raises an important question: what will happen to the policies and programs they left behind?
- Political Geography:
- New York
8. Celebrating Afro-Peruvian culture through dance — Bringing essential services to Detroit — Creating a global market for Guatemalan weavers — Bringing education to Chile's Indigenous people
- Publication Date:
- 05-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Arts Innovator: Luis Antonio Vilchez, Peru Watch a video of Luis Antonio Vilchez dancing in Times Square below. Passing through New York's Times Square one winter day in 2010, Lima native Luis Antonio Vilchez noticed a group of street percussionists playing a familiar Afro-Peruvian rhythm—and immediately decided to join them. Soon, a large crowd gathered as Vilchez, wearing a button-down shirt and a winter coat, burst into a dance performance that was so impressive even the drummers watched in awe. The same kind of impromptu creativity dominates Adú Proyecto Universal (Adú Universal Project), a nonprofit arts organization Vilchez founded four years ago to re-imagine Peruvian identity through dance, theater and percussion. Financed by money the group earns from its performances, Adú (which means “friend” in limeña slang) encourages its 20 members—all dancers—to combine different dance and music genres, crossing back and forth between tradition and modernity.
- Topic:
- Economics, Education, Government, and Politics
- Political Geography:
- United States and New York
9. Celebrating Chinese New Year in Cuba — 10 Things to Do in Valparaíso — Mezcal goes upscale in Mexico—Graphicanos.
- Author:
- Richard André
- Publication Date:
- 05-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Graphicanos View a slideshow of Graphicanos prints below. Indiana is better known for the Indy 500 and sports teams than for a thriving art culture, so most art lovers would be surprised to stumble upon the cutting-edge exhibit of serigraphic prints—a contemporary art form that uses block-size ink stencils to print images onto canvas—on display this winter at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Charles Shepard, the museum's executive director and curator of the groundbreaking exhibit—Graphicanos: Contemporary Latino Prints from the Serie Project—likes to point out that there is a thriving art world beyond the traditional centers of New York and San Francisco. And he believes presenting often-ignored contributions of Latino artists in the American “heartland”—not usually seen as a center of Latino culture—reflects the rich diversity of U.S. society today. “Every part of our diverse culture is making art in some form,” Shepard says. “And as a museum, we should be looking at that.” The museum hosts an annual Día de los Muertos celebration every November, which attracts about 2,000 visitors from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The event became so popular that it inspired him to collaborate with the late Sam Coronado, a Mexican-American serigraphic print artist, for the Graphicanos exhibit.
- Topic:
- Agriculture
- Political Geography:
- New York, Cuba, and Mexico
10. Helping tech startups in Buenos Aires — Tearing down cultural walls in Cuba — Battling Colombia's corrupt politicians — Promoting HIV awareness.
- Publication Date:
- 03-2014
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Business Innovator: Lisa Besserman Lisa Besserman could be at home anywhere in the world; but last year, the Queens, New York, native put down roots in Argentina to launch Startup Buenos Aires, to motivate, support and connect startups across the globe. The 29-year-old tech entrepreneur, named one of the “100 Most Influential Tech Women on Twitter” by Business Insider Australia in May, says that her goal is to put Buenos Aires “on the map of global startup ecosystems.” Her clients seem to agree. A year after its launch, her organization—which helps local startups find employees and funding, and connects local tech talent to projects and employers—has attracted some 4,000 members, including foreign firms. Besserman is a successful example of a new class of global workers that could be called “tech nomads.” In November 2012, feeling constrained by corporate culture in New York City, Besserman left her job as director of operations at AirKast Inc., a mobile app development startup, and looked at a map to determine where she'd begin her next business venture. The only requirement: the city had to have a similar time zone to the East Coast to make doing business easier.
- Political Geography:
- New York, Colombia, and Cuba
11. The Americas Go Glocal
- Author:
- Saskia Sassen
- Publication Date:
- 06-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- There is little doubt that the North-South axis remains dominant for Latin America's geopolitical positioning. But new relations are emerging and deepening at subnational levels, in turn creating new intercity geographies and challenging that geopolitical notion. These relations are a direct product of economic and cultural globalization. Some examples are the shift of migration from Ecuador and Colombia toward Spain rather than the U.S., the growing economic relations between Chinese businesses and organizations and São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and the emergent relations between these cities and Johannesburg, South Africa. The Internet has allowed a rapidly growing number of people to become a part of diverse networks that crisscross the world. And nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from various parts of the world are establishing active connections over social struggles in Latin America. In other words, beneath the still-dominant North-South geopolitics, transversal geographies are growing in bits and pieces. One trend is the formation of intercity geographies as the number of global cities has expanded since the 1990s. These subnational circuits cut across the world in many directions. A second trend is the growth of civil society organizations and individuals who are connecting around the world in ways that, again, often do not follow the patterns of traditional geopolitics. The New, Multiple Circuits There is no such entity as the global economy. It is more correct to say there are global formations, such as electronic financial markets and firms that operate globally. But what defines the current era is the creation of numerous, highly particular, global circuits—some specialized and some not—interlacing across the world and connecting specific areas, most of which are cities. While many of these global circuits have long existed, they began to proliferate and establish increasingly complex organizational and financial foundations in the 1980s. These emergent intercity geographies function as an infrastructure for globalization, and have led to the increased urbanization of global networks. Different circuits contain different groups of countries and cities. For instance, Mumbai today is part of a global circuit for real estate development that includes investors from cities as diverse as London and Bogotá. Coffee is mostly produced in Brazil, Kenya and Indonesia, but the main place for trading its future is on Wall Street. The specialized circuits in gold, coffee, oil and other commodities each involve particular countries and cities, which will vary depending on whether they are production, trading or financial circuits. If, for example, we track the global circuits of gold as a financial instrument, it is London, New York, Chicago, and Zurich that dominate. But the wholesale trade in the metal brings São Paulo, Johannesburg and Sydney into the circuit, while trade in the commodity, much of it aimed at the retail level, adds Mumbai and Dubai. And then there are the types of circuits a firm such as Wal-Mart needs to outsource the production of vast amounts of goods—circuits that include manufacturing, trading, and financial and insurance services. The 250,000 multinationals in the world, together with their over 1 million affiliates and partnership arrangements worldwide, have created a new pattern of relations that combine global dispersal with the spatial concentration of certain functions often while retaining headquarters in their home countries. The same is true of the 100 top global advanced-services firms that together have operations in 350 cities outside their home base. While financial services can be bought everywhere electronically, the headquarters of leading global financial services firms tend to be concentrated in a limited number of cities. Each of these financial centers specializes in specific segments of global finance, even as they engage in routine types of transactions executed by all financial centers. It's not just global economic forces that feed this proliferation of circuits. Forces such as migration and cultural exchange, along with civil society struggles to protect human rights, preserve the environment and promote social justice, which also contribute to circuit formation and development. NGOs fighting for the protection of the rainforest function in circuits that include Brazil and Indonesia as homes of the major rainforests, the global media centers of New York and London, and the places where the key forestry companies selling and buying wood are headquartered—notably Oslo, London and Tokyo. There are even music circuits that connect specific areas of India with London, New York, Chicago, and Johannesburg. Adopting the perspective of one of these cities reveals the diversity and specificity of its location on some or many of these circuits, which is determined by its unique capabilities. Ultimately, being a global firm or market means entering the specificities and particularities of national economies. This explains why global firms and markets need more and more global cities as they expand their operations across the world. While there is competition among cities, there is far less of it than is usually assumed. A global firm does not want one global city, but many. Moreover, given the variable level of specialization of globalized firms, their preferred cities will vary. Firms thrive on the specialized differences of cities, and it is those differences that give a city its particular advantage in the global economy. Thus, the economic history of a place matters for the type of knowledge economy that a city or city-region ends up developing. This goes against the common view that globalization homogenizes economies. Globalization homogenizes standards—for managing, accounting, building state-of-the-art office districts, and so on. But it needs diverse specialized economic capabilities. Latin America on the Circuit This allows many of Latin America's cities to become part of global circuits. Some, such as São Paulo and Buenos Aires, are located on hundreds of such circuits, others just on a few. Regardless of the case, these cities are not necessarily competing with one other. The growing number of global cities, each specialized, signals a shift to a multipolar world. Clearly, the major Latin American cities have circuits that connect them directly to destinations across the world. What is perhaps most surprising is the intensity of connections with Asia and Europe. Traditional geopolitics would lead one to think that Latin America connects, above all, with North America. There is a strong tendency for global money flows to generate partial geographies. This becomes clear, for example, when we consider foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America, a disproportionate share of which goes to a handful of countries. In 2008, for example (a relative peak of FDI), FDI flows into Latin America were topped by Brazil at $45.1 billion, followed at a distance by Mexico at $23.7 billion, Chile at $15.2 billion, and Argentina with $9.7 billion. On average, between 1991–1996 and 2003–2008, FDI in Brazil increased more than five-fold while tripling in Chile and Mexico. Among the countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region receiving the lowest levels of foreign investment in 2008 were Haiti, at $30 million; Guyana, at $178 million; and Paraguay, at $109 million. Globalization and the new information and communication technologies have enabled a variety of local activists and organizations to enter international arenas that were once the exclusive domain of national states. Going global has also been partly facilitated and conditioned by the infrastructure of the global economy…
- Topic:
- Economics, Government, and Non-Governmental Organization
- Political Geography:
- United States, New York, America, South Africa, London, Colombia, Latin America, Mumbai, Sydney, Ecuador, Dubai, and Chicago
12. Logistics: Shipping on the Panama Canal
- Author:
- Liliana Rivera and Yossi Sheffi
- Publication Date:
- 06-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- The Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP), launched in September 2007 and scheduled for completion in 2014, is expected by its proponents to have the greatest impact on global shipping of any project underway today. Once completed, the $5.5 billion project will roughly triple the size of vessels that can pass through the Canal, from the current maximum of 4,400 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) to 12,600 TEU. In a December 2010 article, The New York Times echoed the general consensus that the project will lead to “the biggest shift in the freight business since the 1950s, when sea-faring ships began carrying goods in uniform metal containers.” Nevertheless, at the midpoint of the project's timeline, there are important questions about what has been achieved to date, and in particular, about how effectively ports outside Panama will be able to handle the larger ships and the associated increased volume of traffic.
- Political Geography:
- New York and Panama
13. Baseball's Recruitment Abuses
- Author:
- Rob Ruck
- Publication Date:
- 06-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Americas Quarterly
- Institution:
- Council of the Americas
- Abstract:
- Unscrupulous agents prey on young Dominican players. It's time to clean up their mess.
- Topic:
- Development
- Political Geography:
- United States, New York, Latin America, and Caribbean