Sassen, Saskia

Saskia Sassen (1949—) is widely recognized as a preeminent scholar in the field of global city theory; indeed, she is credited with having coined the term global city. Her early works in particular are considered seminal contributions to the understanding of global cities. They have provided a foundation for subsequent theoretical and empirical explorations of the links between globalization and urbanization, and the sociospatial impact of capitalist economic restructuring.

Sassen was born in 1949 in the Netherlands and moved as a child to Buenos Aires. Her undergraduate studies were undertaken at universities in Argentina and Italy. In 1973 she earned an MA from the University of Poitiers, France, and in 1974 Sassen completed a PhD in economics and sociology at Notre Dame University in Indiana. She has held many academic posts, including professor of urban planning at Columbia University in New York City and professor of law and sociology at the University of Chicago. She currently is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor in sociology at the London School of Economics. Sassen is a much sought-after policy advisor and is a member of the Club of Rome, a prestigious international think tank.

Her early books, The Global City (1991) and Cities in a World Economy (1994), followed the work of John Friedmann and Wolff Goetz in the 1980s on “world cities.” In them, Sassen argued against the intuitive supposition that in a world of flows—of flexible, globalized production and instantaneous electronic communication—place would no longer matter. Instead she demonstrated that while much economic production was being dispersed around the globe, there was at the same time a parallel concentration of other economic activities in a network of special places—some 30 or 40 global cities that acted as command and control centers of the global economy. These global cities were not just the location of transnational corporate headquarters but included a vast supporting complex of financial and business services.

Sassen's research led her to conclude that global city formation resulted in a dual and highly polarized labor market. On one hand a global corporate elite earned high salaries and enjoyed an extremely high standard of material well-being; on the other hand the work of the elite was supported by a class of low-wage service workers, many of them immigrants. Thus, her work revealed two essential contradictions in global city formation. The first is that while global cities command and control the “placeless” flow of capital, they themselves are very place-bound. The second is that the formation and growth of the global city entails the linked enrichment of some of its residents and the impoverishment of others. The two groups live and work in the same city, yet have vastly different experiences of it.

Sassen argued that global cities are linked in a transnational network of places. That insight represented a break from earlier urban studies that viewed cities as being embedded in national economic systems and mainly linked to other cities [Page 688]within the nation-state's boundaries. The network of global cities she describes is a hierarchical one, with the most intensely linked cities forming an alpha group that manage the world's economy. Whereas The Global City dealt solely with three “alpha” cities (New York, London, Tokyo), Global Networks/Linked Cities (2002) discussed the “beta” cities in the global South, among them Mexico City, Beirut, and Buenos Aires. These mid-range global cities, Sassen believes, play an important role in connecting regional economies to the global economy.

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