Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Releases CARGC Paper 12 by Saskia Sassen
Sassen presents an analysis of cities as complex, diverse, and incomplete systems.
The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication is pleased to present CARGC Paper 12, “Cities Help Us Hack Formal Power Systems,” by the eminent scholar of cities and globalization, Saskia Sassen.
Initially delivered as the 2017 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 12 presents an analysis of cities as complex, diverse, and incomplete systems. For Sassen, it is precisely these features of urban forms – their complexity, diversity and incompleteness – that offer the possibility of a new type of politics, centered on new types of political actors. She is particularly interested in two features of global cities: their presence as strategic frontier zones where actors from different worlds can meet without clear rules of engagement and their strategic importance for hacking old orders.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015. She is a world-renowned scholar of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy. She has authored nine books and edited or co-edited three others. Her work is translated in over twenty languages. Her work focuses on the unexpected or counterintuitive to cut through established “truth,” whilst consistently foregrounding inequality, gendering, and digitization as key dimensions of globalized forms of power.
Read previous CARGC Papers at ScholarlyCommons.
