Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: Good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to New York City. Many of you have traveled thousands of miles to join us. We are so delighted that you did. I want to thank those who organized this conference, the many who have planned the logistics needed to bring the world together, and all those who continue to believe — as I do — in the deep value of international cooperation. And I want to acknowledge those who have convened us: C40 Cities, United Cities, UCLG and the Mayor’s Migrations Council.
I have been thinking these past days about the world gathering here in New York City; how no matter where you come from, you will find something here that feels like home. It is my favorite thing about New York — how it contains a million worlds in one.
Visitors from China can find food that tastes like what they grew up eating in not one but three Chinatowns. Visitors from Turkey or Korea can dip into baths that both remind them of Istanbul or Seoul and immediately cure jet lag. And if you are the Mayor of Manchester, you can stand shoulder to shoulder with New Yorkers in a crowded bar as your club — whichever one you support — puts in a performance markedly worse than Arsenal’s.
In all seriousness, I have been thinking too about how New York City seeks to understand these many worlds, how we display them, and how we share them with those we are so delighted to welcome to our city. In short, my friends, I have been thinking about the concept of the museum. Each of our cities have world-class museums that we are so proud of. Amsterdam has the Rijksmuseum. Jakarta has the Elephant Museum. Paris has Les Invalides.
New York is no exception. People travel thousands of miles to see the masterpieces housed at the Met, the incredible artifacts displayed at the New York Transit Museum, the history and fauna brought to life at the Museum of Natural History.
And yet I know that I am speaking to a collection of leaders devoted to a shared purpose: preserving the museum and the city as distinct concepts. All around us, there are enormous forces seeking to flatten the distance between the two.
There is the cost-of-living crisis, which we know is not constrained by borders. When New Yorkers cannot afford to send their children to childcare, when Barcelonians cannot afford a home in the city, when Torontonians cannot afford the cost of public transit, our cities no longer remain places that working people can live and shape, but museums that we observe from afar, great monuments to a once-joyful past that perhaps we can visit one weekend a month.
There is the growing impact of the climate crisis. When rising sea levels make flooding a regular occurrence in low-lying parts of the five boroughs; or when soaring temperatures push Freetown residents out of neighborhoods where they have lived for generations; or when you cannot endure a summer in Rome without air conditioning, the working people leave and all that remain are the wealthy who can afford these costs, and marble statues that do not sweat under the sun.
And we must each contend with a moment where authoritarianism and far-right movements are ascendant, when anti-democratic sentiment is on the rise. When leaders both in the United States and overseas make it their mission to demonize and terrorize immigrants, when they seek to accumulate political capital by targeting our LGBTQIA+ neighbors, when they roll back the freedoms that have been hard-won by the press or those fighting for reproductive and civil rights, our cities become darker, lonelier places and our monuments to the progress of the past come to possess a cruel irony.
We cannot allow this to come to pass. The work of making our cities belong to everyone, no matter how much they earn or where they come from, is a shared purpose we are all so fortunate to hold.
From Konya to Copenhagen, Milan to Mexico City, what an immense opportunity we possess to expand freedom to as many people as possible, to prove that democracy does not live only in the ballot box but in material improvements we deliver to our constituents’ lives. And to show that good governance is not an abstract idea, but rather a force felt each time a bus runs faster, each time a roof does not leak when it rains and each time someone can afford a dignified life in the city they love.
I am so grateful that we are together for the next few days to discuss this work because what we are all trying to achieve is deeply interconnected. Solidarity is not just a slogan, it is a practice; and as we hold panels, conversations and plenary sessions, my sincere hope is that this conference marks only the beginning of a new era of cooperation and emulation.
Let us learn what succeeded and failed from the initiatives those in this room have led. Let us ask questions — and then take what we learned back to our cities. Let the relationships we form here endure for years to come and let us lean on one another in times of success and adversity alike.
The people of the world look to our cities for greatness. They expect it in the art we create, the architectural marvels we build, the coexistence across cultures that exists with unparalleled harmony in the urban centers we lead.
Together, we can create a new expectation of public greatness from our cities. When the world is straining to find a way to overcome inequality, to defeat authoritarianism, to chart a future of progress, let them look to our cities for proof of all that is possible.
After all, the global challenges we face cannot be solved in isolation. Our cities can and must be laboratories of innovation — places where new initiatives are tested, developed and then expanded at larger scale. Places that set new standards in how to serve the people of the world.
It is an enormous privilege to welcome you to New York City and to do this work together. Thank you.
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