Happening to a City Near You

Land of Opportunity - Trailer from JoLu on Vimeo.

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY asks the question: What kind of cities do we want to inhabit in the 21st century? Through the eyes of urban planners, displaced residents, immigrant workers, developers, community activists, artists and public housing residents this question is asked, answered and asked again. But this is not just a situation that is happening somewhere else and to someone else, as our tagline points out: it’s “happening to a city near you”. As cities all over the world struggle to recover from disaster, whether economic, natural or man-made, we believe that the lessons of post-Katrina New Orleans have only become more urgent. We want to utilize the diverse stories we’ve captured to galvanize and educate urban America around the core urban issues of urban redevelopment, immigration, and affordable housing. We aim to inspire nuanced discussions and support the work of organizations that cut across single-issue frameworks to build a broad-based and multi-racial movement for urban spatial justice.

New Land of Opportunity

For society as a whole, the benefits of making developing-world cities livable are enormous because those cities can offer a pathway out of poverty for billions.

So writes Edward Glaeser in an article in Forbes Magazine. He begins with the statistic

If you are alive today, there is a one-in-eight chance that you are living in a slum in the developing world, desperately--often successfully--trying to improve your lot.

...read Glaeser's article and learn why he is optimistc about large cities being the new land of opportunity. Don't miss page 3, which gives short stories about urban micropreneurs around the world who have migrated to large cities.

China, land of opportunity

When Da Chen wrote his memoirs of growing up in Communist China and of immigrating to the US as a young man, he put a decidedly empathetic face on a foreign culture and inadvertently became a personable ambassador for both countries. Now living and raising a family in Highland, he enjoys the best of both worlds.


Read this article about the Chinese immigrant whose books are now on the curriculum of Yale, Vassar and many high schools and middle schools in the US. And see why he thinks that China is now a land of opportunity, even though he left there to migrate to the US.