I’ve done a lot of research on land grabs. It is urgent that we recognize these dimensions. There is a whole logic at play that has to do with a much larger ecology of meanings, possibilities, temporalities, spatialities-a lot of the non-urban plays a critical role in how the urban is constituted. But can a city be destroyed? Is it remade or rebuilt? That is partly because of non-city issues, such as the choice of the original site where a city is founded. Kingdoms, republics, multinational corporations, financial firms, they all end. It can outlive other systems that may also be complex, but are complete, like a formal government structure. Saskia Sassen: I cannot say, “this is a city,” or “that isn’t a city”.I always define the city as a complex, incomplete system that is sufficiently indeterminate to keep reinventing itself. Two decades after the publication of your book, The Global City, and ten years after Mutations by Rem Koolhaas, what is your feeling about the evolution of the contemporary city? Do you think that generalization of the “global city” has become the symbol of our urban condition? Share this article Facebook twitter mail.Richard Sennettis the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a professor of the humanities at New York University. Specialist of globalization, migrations and the sociology of the world’s largest cities, she teaches at Columbia University.
More than ever before, she believes that the complexity of the city makes it the right scale for formulating sustainable strategies by repositioning our relationship with the biosphere. For this issue of Stream, Saskia Sassen looks back on our urban condition and on the evolutions of the “global city,” highlighting the increasing importance of social issues. A small number of thinkers such as Saskia Sassen and Rem Koolhaas have nevertheless tried to grasp the phenomenon through concepts such as the “generic city” and the “global city.” After nearly fifteen years, this urbanization of the world is still advancing at full speed, even though a number of critical factors seem to have come into play. When they acknowledged the global urban boom at the turn of the twenty-first century, Western observers were dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the revolution that was unfolding.
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