Abstract
Two features of cities organize this essay. One is that the global city is a strategic frontier zone that enables those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, and discriminated minorities. They can gain presence in such cities in a way they cannot in many other settings. Becoming present to power and to each other can enable them to hack power and hack the differences of origin, religion, phenotype among diverse disadvantaged groups, whether immigrants or locals. The second feature is the strategic importance of the city today for shaping new orders. The city can bring together multiple very diverse struggles and engender a larger, more encompassing push for a new normative order.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is the movement from centripetal nation state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages, where one of many examples might be the transborder networks of specific types of struggles, enactments, art, and so on.
- 3.
The emergent landscape I am describing promotes a multiplication of diverse spatiotemporal framings and diverse normative mini-orders, where once the dominant logic was toward producing grand unitary national spatial, temporal, and normative framings (See Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008 Chaps. 8 and 9).
- 4.
See Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, op. cit: Chaps. 6 and 8.
- 5.
See, for example, Marcuse (2002).
- 6.
See, for example, Smith and Favell. The Human Face of Global Mobility: International Highly Skilled Migration in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific. Special Issue of Comparative Urban and Community Research Vol. 8. 2006.
- 7.
See Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, Chap. 6; see also Chaps. 4 and 5 for a diversity of other domains besides immigration where this holds.
- 8.
- 9.
See Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens, op.cit.; for a more general discussion, see Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
References
Marcuse, P. (2002). Urban form and globalization after september 11th: The view from New York. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(3), 596–606.
Sassen, S. (1999). Guests and Aliens: Europe’s immigrants, refugees and colonists. New York: New Press.
Sassen, S. (2007). A sociology of globalization. New York: W. W. Norton.
Sassen, S. (2008). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sassen, S. (2013). Does the city have speech? Public Culture, 25(2, 70), 209–221.
Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Smith, M. P., & Favell, A. (Eds.). (2006). The human face of global mobility: International highly skilled migration in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
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Sassen, S. (2017). Cities Help Us Hack Formal Power Systems. In: Manuela Mendes, M., Sá, T., Cabral, J. (eds) Architecture and the Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53477-0_1
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