The American Assembly

Columbia University

PRESS RELEASE The 110th American Assembly, Defining a Future for Americas Cities
Experiencing Severe Population Loss will convene on April 14-17, 2011 at the Westin Book
Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, Michigan.

Speakers and panelists will include Mayors Dave Bing, City of Detroit; Jay Williams, City of
Youngstown; Dayne Walling, City of Flint; and William A. Johnson, City of Rochester. A panel
of British, Italian, and German officials and policy experts led by Gregory Lashutka, former
Mayor, City of Columbus, will compare American cities to their European counterparts. The
Hon. Henry Cisneros, former HUD Secretary, will open the Assembly with a keynote address.

Over several decades, the population of a number of American cities has diminished to the point
that governments are challenged to provide basic services, resulting in a vicious circle of further
decline. These include most of the cities in Ohio and upstate New York, several in Pennsylvania
and Michigan, and many others inside and outside the industrial heartland. For these cities, the
principal urban policy challenge is to manage contraction in ways that lead to reinvention rather
than continued declineto right size cities to reflect the new economic realities and to reset
their trajectories so that they are better positioned to prosper in the future. This American
Assembly is aimed at building stronger policy strategies and practitioner networks strategies to
assist these places.

The Assembly will convene about eighty participants from government, business, academia,
media, and nonprofit sector, representing a broad spectrum of views. The Assembly is built
around a process of structured discussions that lead to a report of findings and policy
recommendations, which is adopted at a final plenary session. The final report will be published
and distributed broadly as well as posted on The Assemblys web site,
www.americanassembly.org.

A set of papers that have been commissioned from leading national and international experts in
the field and edited by Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the National Housing Institute, the Center
for Community Progress, and the Metropolitan Policy Program of The Brookings Institution.
These papers will be published as a book in the summer of 2011.

Columbia Universitys American Assembly and Center for Sustainable Urban Development
(CSUD), as well as the Center for Community Progress (CCP), are the co-sponsors of the event.
Paul Brophy, Principal, Brophy & Reilly LLC and Elliott Sclar, Director, CSUD are the project
co-directors. Henry G. Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and Secretary of the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development and Gregory S. Lashutka, former mayor of
Columbus and Senior Consultant, Findley Davies, are serving as co-chairs of the project.

The 110
th
American Assembly is funded by The Ford Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Bank
of America, and Ally Financial.

For interviews, please contact Paul Brophy at 410-740-8745 or pbrophy@brophyreilly.com.
For additional information, please contact The American Assembly at 212-870-3500.