Dream works

How two mayors broke the mold to rejuvenate their cities

The Harvard Kennedy School hosted two iconoclastic mayors on Monday (Jan. 25), both of whom entered government in their countries as a second career and changed their cities by shaking up politics as usual.

The discussion involved the visionary urban landscapes of Edi Rama, a former artist and mayor of Tirana, Albania, and Antanas Mockus, once an academic and a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. Addressing an overflow audience, the former mayors outlined the offbeat methods by which they helped to transform their cities, in a discussion titled “Dialogue in Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Transformation.”

“We see ourselves as moral subjects, but others as legal subjects. We obey for positive reasons, but we think others obey for negative reasons,” Mockus said.................

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/01/dream-works/