Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry on Tuesday received two honors — both of them for promoting Albuquerque on the world stage and for advancing citizen diplomacy. The first award was from Global Ties ABQ on behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The award recognizes Berry’s “extraordinary commitment to encourage citizen diplomacy and to foster commercial, educational, and cultural exchange between Albuquerque and nations from all over the world.”

Dabeet, who serves on Sister Cities International — an organization dedicated to promoting citizen diplomacy among nations — wants to build “bridges of peace and understanding among nations.” He is particularly interested in building some bridges between the United States and his native Palestine and serves on Sister Cities International in a capacity that allows him to do exactly that.

Esri, the global leader in spatial analytics, announced today that Smart Dubai, the government agency leading Dubai's smart city transformation, has signed an enterprise agreement (EA) providing ArcGIS technology to 44 entities across the government. The EA will be used by Smart Dubai for its smart city platform, called Dubai Pulse, to integrate and map data for better decision-making.

Cities are the primary building block of organized human existence. The concept of civilization – as its etymology suggests – rests on the phenomenon of the city and its distinctiveness from life lived beyond its walls. There has always been a powerful identification between a city and an individual inhabitant. It is the oldest bond in organized politics and hence appropriate that the term “citizen” should have been shared with the larger scale polities as they have emerged.