Fonna Forman

• University of California, San Diego

We discuss the results of a multi-dimensional learning process (expert surveys, community workshops) addressing water challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border. The grand institutional and political framework of the international border, and the tensions and gaps in it, dominates the water literature and expert concerns. However, social inequality and s...

FUTURE/PRESENT brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today's most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America. The volume builds upon five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that...

To pursue just, inclusive, and participatory climate adaptation planning and policy, it is important to understand both regional climate trends and the ecological services that reduce vulnerability and exposure to climate risks at the community level. Rapidly growing cities like Tijuana and San Diego are doubly exposed to climate change because the...

Contributions by urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, and landscape architects on the role and scope of urban design in creating more just and inclusive cities. Scholars who write about justice and the city rarely consider the practices and processes of urban design, while discourses on urban design often neglect concerns abou...

This paper develops the concept of flood problem framing to understand decision-makers’ priorities in flood risk management in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region in California (LA Metro). Problem frames shape an individual’s preferences for particular management strategies and their future behaviors. While flooding is a complex, multifaceted probl...

Flood risks in the United States have historically been underestimated, particularly with respect to human well-being and within low-wealth and marginalized communities. Here, we characterize a fuller range of risks in Los Angeles, California, using a quantitative framework that intersects flood hazards from rainfall, streamflow and storm tides wit...

This edited volume argues that democracy is broader and more diverse than the dominant state-centered, modern representative democracies, to which other modes of democracy are either presumed subordinate or ignored. The contributors seek to overcome the standard opposition of democracy from below (participatory) and democracy from above (representa...

Today we confront planetary crises at a time when our structures of governance are characterised by ‘dysfunctionality’, ‘hollowing out’, ‘gridlock’ and democratic governance faces ‘antagonistic self-destruction’, ‘authoritarian supersession’, or ‘death of democracy’. How should we address this predicament? This paper proposes an approach grounded i...

This edited volume argues that democracy is broader and more diverse than the dominant state-centered, modern representative democracies, to which other modes of democracy are either presumed subordinate or ignored. The contributors seek to overcome the standard opposition of democracy from below (participatory) and democracy from above (representa...

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political t...

Ravaged by war, persecution and poverty immigrants have immediate needs of food and water, medicine and shelter. Responding to these needs is the appropriate response of an ethical society. But needs become more complex over time, and hospitality is no longer adequate for building an inclusive society. We need to transform the city into an infrastr...

This chapter reflects on the disproportionate impact of climate change on the most vulnerable people, but argues that the language of “climate justice” may not be the most effective language for communicating the urgency to the general public, and changing attitudes and behaviors around climate change. Drawing on theories of human motivation in the...

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman are professors at the University of California, San Diego. Here they discuss their practice investigations of the border conditions between Mexico and the US, proposing a Cross‐Border Commons of political coalitions, ecological zones and new forms of citizenship.

What can political theory teach us about architecture, and what can it learn from paying closer attention to architecture? The essays assembled in this volume begin from a common postulate: that architecture is not merely a backdrop to political life but a political force in its own right. Each essay aims to give countenance to that claim, and to s...

With unchecked emissions of pollutants, global warming is projected to increase to 1.5 ⁰ C within 15 years; to 2 ⁰ C within 35 years and 4 ⁰ C by 2100. These projections are central values with a small (<5%) probability that warming by 2100 can exceed 6 ⁰ C with potentially catastrophic impacts on every human being, living and yet unborn. Climate i...

The world is witnessing a rapid rise in the number of victims of human trafficking and of migrants—voluntary and involuntary, internal and international, authorized and unauthorized. In the first two decades of this century alone, more than 65 million people have been forced to escape home into the unknown. The slow-motion disintegration of failing...

The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. By Margaret Kohn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 280p. $105.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Volume 16 Issue 4 - Fonna Forman

Climate change is projected to cause widespread and serious harm to public health and the environment upon which life depends, unraveling many of the health and social gains of the last century. The burden of harm will fall disproportionately on the poorest communities, both in the U.S. and globally, raising urgent issues of “climate justice”. In c...

We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 50 billion tons a year and rising steadily. If continued unabated, the world is on target to warm by about 2 °C in less than 40 years, pushing the climate to a regime unlike any that has been witnessed in the last million years. Nonetheless,...

Adam Smith’s contribution to economics is well-recognised, but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review is a rigorously refereed annual review that provides a unique forum for interdisciplinary debate on all aspects of Adam Smith’s works, his place in history, and the signifi...

Fonna Forman-Barzilai: Amartya Sen is ThomasW. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, and a Fellow and former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Best known for his work on social choice theory and development economics, his work over 50 years has spanned a great variety of subjects in economi...

This 2010 text pursues Adam Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law both in historical context and through a twenty-first-century cosmopolitan lens, making this a major contribution not only to Smith studies but also to the history of cosmopolitan thought and to contemporary cosmopolitan discours...

In Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron (1771) Voltaire wrote this about the Jews: They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least surprised if these people would not someday become deadly to the human race. Among the many things Voltaire famously...

-

In this essay the author explores the relation between sympathy and proximity in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The essay proceeds in two parts. First, the author demonstrates that Smith’s description of our various attachments and affections, and the inevitable conflicts among them, draws us into the rich spatial texture of sympathetic r...

In this article, I address Rousseau's evolution as a political thinker between the years 1750 and 1753, during which time his critics challenged him to square the radical implications of his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) with the realities of eighteenth-century European life. It was in the course of replying to his critics that Rouss...

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observed that we live in a fundamentally conflictual world. Although he held that we are creatures who sympathize, he also observed that our sympathy seems to be constrained by geographical limits. Accordingly, traditional theories of cosmopolitanism were implausible; yet, as a moral philosopher, Smith...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, 2001. Includes bibliographical references.