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Saskia Sassen
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Saskia Sassen

1947

Dutch-American sociologist who identified the cities where the world economy is directed, and the price they pay inside.

Sassen coined «global city» on noticing that the more production disperses across the planet, the more its direction concentrates in a few places. New York, London and Tokyo stand out not for manufacturing but for housing the finance, the legal and accounting services and the decisions that order everything else.

Her second contribution is what happens inside those cities. The same economy that fills the office towers needs them cleaned, guarded and fed by precarious labour. Hence her idea of «expulsions»: people who are not outside the system, but have been thrown out of it.

Born in The Hague in 1947, raised in Buenos Aires and trained in France, Italy and the United States, Sassen is professor of sociology at Columbia University and was previously at Chicago. The Mobility of Labor and Capital (1988) studied how foreign investment produces the migrations that later reach rich cities, and The Global City (1991) formulated the thesis that made her famous: the more production disperses across the world, the more the command functions, finance and advanced services that coordinate it concentrate in a few cities, New York, London and Tokyo.

Cities in a World Economy (1994) summarised that thesis for a wide public and Expulsions (2014) took it further: advanced globalisation no longer only incorporates but expels people, firms and territories out of the system. Territory, Authority, Rights (2006) is her major theoretical work. Awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences in 2013, she has been criticised for her emphasis on Northern cities, against which Jennifer Robinson set ordinary cities; her concept still structures the field.

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