Saskia Sassen speaks with a formidable energy.

She engages her

audience with her extensive research as she takes you through the
architecture of globalization, the Global Street, cities and
financialization. You may not make all the right connections at once but
you are riveted. She was in Mumbai recently to inaugurate a workshop
on Subaltern Urbanism hosted by Columbia Universitys Mumbai Global
Centre, with Support from the Women Creating Change Project. She is
the Robert S Lynd professor of Sociology at Columbia University and co
chair of the Committee on Global Thought. Author of several path
breaking books on Globalisation, her five-year project with UNESCO on
sustainable human settlements was published as a volume in the
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.
In an interview to The Hindu, Prof Sassen spoke on wide ranging issues
related to her deep study of globalization, cities, the disconnect between
the Liberal state and the middle class, the movements that are taking
place in the world and the concept of the Global Street with which she
seeks to capture links between power and powerlessness in urban space.
The global corporate system has engaged in what she describes as a sort
of grand larceny through bailouts and other ways of accessing the
resources of states and peoples taxes. I think of it as grand larceny
because it goes well beyond the privileges enjoyed by rich firms and rich
families in all our countries. This partly explains why middle class people
everywhere, from Chile to Egypt to India were taking to the streets to
protest this in different ways. The protests are not just about the
particular issue that might ignite a street protest or an occupation but
about a larger mix of injustices, she says. She senses there is something
happening across countries that is mobilizing the modest middle classes
of all possible groups. Ironically it is the middle classes which potentially
execute the role of the revolutionary force. She says the middle classes
are the ones that have benefited the most from the modern state and its
support of public transport, public schools, public health, public housing
programs, public sector jobs. And this is falling apart.
Excerpts
How do you view the recent massive protests in New Delhi? What is
your view of this- vis a vis the Global Street. How would you
interpret this?
In reality, these kinds of protests are happening all over the world, around
specific issues in each country. It becomes the occasion for actually
enacting a much larger project than is indicated by whatever issue is the
immediately visible complaint in a city, a country. For instance in Tel
Aviv, the starting point was the high prices of apartments. About 100,000
people set up tents in central areas to protest- the first time this happened
in Israel. The second point to make here is that there is a lot of suffering
and impoverishment and degradation of conditions of life today that is
invisible. The people might be living in the same houses, but inside the
houses there is growing poverty and impoverishment. If you are on the
outside, literally, you dont know whats happening inside. But inside
there might be a crisis developing. We now know in Latin America, we
have had professors and housewivesimagine, two very respectable
sections of society - do food riots, they went to get food that is pretty
basic. How has it gotten to this behind the facades of middle class
neighbourhoods?
In my new book, I am looking at so called rich governments in rich
countries-- they dont have the money to develop some of the basic
infrastructure. I have a fantastic little table that shows the incredibly
sharp growth since 1980s in the deficit of the governments in rich
countries. Greece and Spain are simply the vanguard. At the same time
corporate profits have risen sharply over the same period. The middle
classes, modest enterprises, and the state are growing their debts and the
corporate sector, including finance, is growing its wealth. So my extreme
way of putting itthis is grand larceny- where you go with a truck, you
dont just steal a few things but you steal the whole house. In its
relationship to citizens, modest enterprises (including small farmers), and
to the state, the global corporate sector has committed a form of grand
larceny. Certainly not all parts and officials in the state are innocent in
this process.
The resources of states have gone disproportionately to the global
corporate sector (and to war!). This is not a new story, but it takes on an
extreme form since the 80s with the rise of a globalized corporate and
financial system. So global South countries see this at their sharpest in the
1980s and 1990s and 2000s, and now this extraction is hitting rich
countries-- the Euro zone and the US begin to extract resources from the
state and citizens to pay banks the language is to rescue banks. This
reorienting of a countrys resources to rescue banks dont fall from the
sky. Partly, the governments have allowed enormous tax evasions by big
corporations even as they raise taxes for small modest enterprises. Some
of this hits the newsthe recent law suits against Amazon, Starbucks and
other respectable corporations which have tried to avoid paying billions
in taxes to the US, to the UK. The estimate of tax evasion by corporate
firms and finance is in the trillions in the case of the US.
In short, something is happening. But we dont have a language that
captures this mix of conditions. Particularly acute events organize our
political moves. The price of apartments in Tel Aviv, the food riots in
South America, extreme unemployment of middle class youth in Spain
and Greece, and so on. One very general reason is that the social contract
with the liberal state is not working any more. The elite are not affected
and the super poor never got any benefits. It is the middle classes which
got so many benefits. Now when there is talk of austerity, the middle
classes are the ones most immediately affected. The liberal state with all
its problems had a social contract with the middle classes. - its broken
now and its broken in China, in the United States, South Africa --no
matter that apartheid is ended.
Do you think a new world order is in the making? And what is the
role of the various players in it? How does the Global Street figure as
a catalyst in these developments?
I dont know if a new world order is in the making but there is a new
geography of privilege and disempowerment that cuts across the old
divide of rich and poor countries, or North and South. And the ones that
are emerging as the contesting actors are young men and women of the
middle classes. They are the ones losing the most, who feel the social
contract with the state is broken. They are also largely a consuming class
their parents and they themselves have largely consumed their
democracy, their citizenship. I like to ask: who knows how to make in
this world make the social, make an economy, make the civic? Mostly it
is elites and the very poor, because they have had to. Being an elite is
more than just a collection of rich people, or rich firms. The global
corporate and financial elite have developed a project you dont need a
conspiracy: it is a mix of aims and instruments along with a globally
networked political economy. And the poor have had to make an
economy, their own housing, their social support systemsin order to
survive! That is why a working slum is something to respect...and admire.
Against all odds they made an economy and a social order and support
networks.
But we the middle classes were converted into consumers and the main
beneficiaries of much of the resources of the state from schools and
hospitals to roads and electricity, and we paid for it through our taxes.
But too much of our taxes now goes to bail outs of banks and luxury
projects... and that is why the social contract between the liberal state and
the middle classes is broken.
In the US thousands have started to live in tent cities since 2010. These
are tent cities set up by municipal governments. But there are also
encampments in the desert, often referred to as slab-citiesbecause they
are often old buses and cars made into housing and you need some heavy
rocks to keep them from shifting given strong winds in the desert. Over 9
million households have lost their homes in the US since the late 2000s
that could be up to 30 million people (one household can have one, two,
five,..people). Most find some sort of temporary living arrangement. But
increasing numbers have nothing left. Now these are mostly modest
middle class families, who at one point owned or expected to own a
house! I show a video when I teachwhich shows one of these tent
cities. One segment of the film has a well dressed blond man (not a
traditional minority, in other words) stepping out of his little tent and
saying, see, I try to keep myself clean and well dressed, I am waiting to
be asked to go to work. In other words, he is ready for a job. This is a
middle class man against all odds taking good care of himself, dressed as
a middle class person with label t-shirt and khaki pants, etc. And he is
waiting for the system to call him back. And there is little chance this will
happen. This is the difference with the slums they dont wait, they make.
Now the Occupy movement worldwide is, I think, a movement that is
about making social capabilities among vast strata of our societiesthe
impoverished middle classes. For example, Occupy Wall Street is now
occupying the restoration of a mostly lower-middle class area
destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast of the US- they are
making sure the $ 50 billion of tax payers money the US government has
promised will go to the right people and places. Or -Tahrir square- they
are occupying the emergent democratic system to make sure that it will
take off and be democratic. In India, where the state is putting so much
tax payers money into luxury projects and helping big multinationals
move into retail commerce.not a bad idea for an Occupy movement
that checks how taxpayers money is used in critical or new projects. For
instance the projects of transferring help to the poor via individual
accounts a good project! But what about the poor who have no access to
electronic accountsthis is something where middle class activists can
really help and construct themselves as a movementThere are hundreds
of good issues for such focused movements to work on.
All of this is also part of my notion of the Global Street. It is one of the
places to meet, recognize each other, strategize, and become witnesses to
historical processes, including small, specific initiatives of powerful
actors that can have negative effects on some social sectors. I am not
making the argument that this is a historic vanguard. It might or not. But
rather, am saying that this diversifying of the occupy movements world
wide is about making making social justice, something we can make
without also having a political platform, making a political party, having
funds for organizing elections. There are many strategies. I think India
has some very significant movements of this sort by women, by farmers,
by environmentalists.
You are a key figure in a long and distinguished tradition of urban
sociology. Can you say why the city is a key space of research for
you?
In many ways I am not an urbanist. I am interested in studying complex
but open conditions or systems. And there are few conditions that are as
complex and as open and mutating as a city. So the city is an
extraordinary window into all kinds of missions and never more than
today, because today, one of the interesting developments is that many
non urban processes and actors
now have also an urban moment in their trajectories. So being in a city,
being alert to its complexity and its incompleteness is a way of
understanding more than the urban. Also interesting is the citys
incompleteness gives it a capacity to mutate. Think about it-- the city has
outlived empires, republics, corporations and financial firms. Why?
Because cities are complex but incomplete- - a financial firm might be
complex but its closed and therein lays its capacity to go down.
One of the most important aspects of your work is your analysis of
how contemporary globalization is distinctive. Can you say a little
about how you understand globalization and its complex impact on
how it is reorganizing society today?
I have a doctorate in economics and sociology and I think of myself as a
political economist so when I started my work on the city, I did not
approach it as an urban sociologist. Not at all. I was looking at global
markets in insurance, finances, accounting, taxation, international
commodities trading my driving question at the time was-- does all this
stuff ever hit the ground. I had that question for a very specific reason
which was that most people talking about globalization in the 1980s and
still today is a notion of space time compression, we are all connected,
place no longer matters ...a flat world etc.
So back to my question --When you are trading non-material financial
instruments do you ever hit the ground, do you need a city? I was looking
at macro level data about diverse electronic flows. Let me clarify: this is
the time when NY and other cities became global, not simply nodes for
inter-nation flows, but nodes in a global corporate economy. In the 1990s
the network of global cities broadens out into a hundred or so cities. So in
tracking these flows I found that particular cities are key sites for
producing the complex legal, financial, accounting, insurance, etc.
instruments that allow firms to operate globally. Specific cities matter for
specific flows, with a limited number becoming major global cities. In the
1980s it was New York, London and Tokyo. In the 1990s, the global
corporate economy became more globalized, and it added many other
cities as countries and areas of the world were incorporated into this new
type of global system not simply inter-national trade and such.
Further, when I entered the actual space of the city-- my next question
was can I actually see all of this? The extreme rebuilding of the centre,
extreme expansion using high-end architecture and urban design to
expand the space of the centre of the city so that what may have been a
marginal space, for instance Times Square, becomes part of the centre
of New York. And one can literally measure it- I checked out Frankfurt
and other cities to measure the new expanded space of the centre, with its
luxury spaces of consumption, hotels and offices. When you expand the
spaces for the financial services or corporate headquarters, and more, you
must ask: what you have expelled? More than three million people from
their homes in the old center of Shanghai, hundreds of thousands of poor
who became homeless when their neighbourhoodshousing and shops
were replaced by high-end housing and shops. And you saw this in
London and Paris, and gradually this mode of remaking spaces of the
center in more and more cities. I recall in Tokyo when it was gentrifying
the old centers, I was doing my research and the experts would say we
dont have homeless people but they did. So entering the city, as opposed
to tracking global networks, means entering the thicket of the urban
condition, and thats where it becomes interesting for me because a larger
story becomes visible, one that includes all of that which is left out when
we just describe the new spatial upgrading of a city.
To understand the urban, you also need to understand the non urban, such
as the global electronic networks I was tracking. That was one of my
contributions, though I shouldnt be saying this. I got criticized by
urbanists for doing this. I was interested in the connection between a
global complex reality and the territorial, the city, and then, as a second
step, how does it alter and become visible in urban space.
How does the city mirror its diverse groups and how do you
approach studying a city?
One of the things that interests me about a city is that it can be a critical
moment for something digitized. It is the moment when global finance
hits the ground, it makes itself visible and reachable in that it has to
employ people, needs suppliers, needs housing and restaurants and shops
for its employees, and so on. It is, in principle, also a vulnerable moment.
It is dependent on infrastructure and connectivity, with key elements of
those infrastructures physically concentrated in cities. When September
11 happened, many firms left making visible that they did not need to be
in a city. But some left and had to come back, making visible that they
need the city for this then was also a way of documenting that these
powerful global firms need cities, and hence cities can negotiate much
harder with these global firms, ask for more. Still today when this is so
evident, many city leaderships act as if these global firms are doing us a
favour and hence we have to be nice with them. In brief, these were some
of the issues that interested me, questions of power and the limits of
power so yes, many urbanists saw me as not quite an urbanist!
The city then becomes a window on the vulnerabilities and needs of
Power. Entering the space of the city became very interesting, not just the
urbanism (the visual order) but also because of it making visible power,
powerlessness, and how powerlessness can become complex. Also how
the minoritised of a society are not just the poor - gays and queers are
also minoritised- its not just a division between the rich and the poor.
The city is also a space where they can execute a life project, make a
politics for their aims. It is not only the space for finance, the powerful,
etc. It is a transversal terrain. So I dont see the city as an object of
study that I will examine as such..the city. I enter a complex space .
Global cities are todays frontiers, in the sense of the wild west. This is an
argument I have developed in some of my writing. The frontier in the
European colonial period is at the edges of the empire. Today, the frontier
is deep inside our global cities. By frontier, whether the historic or
todays I mean a space where actors from different worlds encounter each
other and there are no established rules. It can evolve into a predatory
space, or a cosmopolitan space. The frontier is deep inside such cities, it
is not at the edge. And that opens a research agenda that is a bit unusual.
What about your study on the Global Street and the link between
power and the powerless.
The question that concerns me is whether the powerless also make
history. In my territory book I examined various histories, completed
histories which tell us that they do, but they do so under particular
conditions. One of them is that it often takes a long time, many
generations of invisible work and suffering. Think of the civil rights
movement in the USA: it took many generations and then suddenly one
day the political system goes Oh! Lets give them some rights. And the
actual making of this possibility is lostall that is visible is that
formalizing moment. So it took historians and activists to get the full
history of making the civil rights laws into our record. When the
formalizing moment does not happen, we can lose track of it all.
Secondly, it takes a particular type of space for the powerless to make
history. Today one such space is the city.
It is a real issue that when the powerless do not achieve power in some
visible way, that is become empowered, we do not see the hard work of
powerless actors that may also have contributed to a major event that
happens much later.So thats why I was interested in discovering whether
there is an in-between zone between powerlessness in the typical sense,
and becoming empowered, also in the traditional sense. The Anglo way
of looking at this is a bit too dualistic for my understanding of history: if
you are powerless and something good happens to you, then you are
empowered. This means that many struggles by the powerless that did
make history but did not lead to empowerment become invisiblewe
bury them deep beneath the ground. I tried to identify spaces where those
without power have made history, even if they never became empowered.
Of course I wound up in the city as one of those spaces. The Global
Street in my work is such a space where those without access to the
formal instruments for making a building, a history, a politics, a
differencecan get to make. I think the Occupy Movements, the Arab
Spring, and othersmade history even if they did not become
empowered. The Global Street, does not have to be a street it can be an
empty parking place, or whatever.
A piazza is a space that can be the destination you go there to do
something--sit and read, wander, play with your kid. And, more deeply
perhaps, it is one key space in the European tradition for the making of a
public sphere, where the piazza is a place for ritualized practicesthere
is an embedded code as to how to conduct yourself. Embedded codes
make publicness, the contribute to a public sphere. But the street is also
such a space for making a public sphere, though, and this matters, with
less ritualized practices, more anarchic, where people bump each other as
they rush by. So I think of the Global Street also as a space for making a
different type of publicness, that comes from the powerless, and it not
catalogued immediately or recognised as such. Think of all the practices
and codes developed during the occupations of Tahrir Square, Wall
Street, and the big piazzas in Spain.
You spoke of the rise of the middle class and the disconnect with the
liberal state. Can you elaborate?
The liberal state is in deep decay. And the social contract of the liberal
state is with the middle class, much more so than the very poor and the
very rich. Today we see a first generation in the middle classes since
World War II which is poorer and more hopeless than their parents and
grandparents. One way of putting it is that the deal between middle class
and the liberal state has broken down. Privatization of everything is one
manifestation. Reduction of social benefits of all sorts is another. It is
happening everywhere where you have this kind of statewhich, of
course can also be a military state such as Egypt insofar as it has
developed a range of state supports for a vast share of the population
public schools, public hospitals, housing, retirement benefits, etc..!.
The Arab Spring and the Occupy movements are about the social
question. This is an indication then also of this break down. This is not
about party politics, and it is not about power. It is about the breakdown
of the social contract with the state. So the Old Left says the Occupy
movements dont have a plan and no leadership. But this is not what
Tahrir Square and the Occupy movements are about. Systemic change
undermining the connection between state and middle class is already in
process. One of my concerns is the new geographies of centrality that cut
across the old divisions of national borders and North versus South,
developed versus underdeveloped countries. I argue and document in my
book Cities in A World Economy the emergence of a new global class
whose spaces include all kinds of cities of the global South as well as
North but only parts of those cities the spaces of power. For instance
the new global class in Sao Paolo, or New York , or Joburg, connects
with the elites in many cities of the Global South and North much more
than they connect with their own hinterland. New alignments are getting
made, even as many aspects of the old divide still carry enormous weight
hunger, disease, housing all are still much worse in poor countries than
in rich countries, no doubt.
But the network of global and other key cities is a new geography of
centrality, and of power that is not marked in any conventional map but is
nonetheless very real, And the members are denationalised and connect
across the old traditional borders with enormous ease. But this geography
has its own borders, and they are not very permeable. It is easier for a
poor worker to cross the border into a rich country than to cross into this
new geography of power.
The point that I am trying to make is that there might be far more radical
change than is evident. The French revolution took ten years, it was not
just the storming of the Bastille, the most visible moment of a long
process. Before that visible moment, the elites might have known about
the complaints of the masses but felt that nothing serious was going to
happen even though their world was falling apart.
meena.menon@thehindu.co.in
Keywords: rich-poor divide, Saskia Sassen, globalisation, Global
Street, Subaltern Urbanism, Columbia University, Mumbai Global
Centre, global corporate system, bailout packages