Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University.http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sociology
Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University. Her new book is Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue and has now completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement based on a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Open Democracy.net, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, News week International, the Financial Times, among others.
Day 1: Friday 3rd October, Keynote Address
'New Frontiers of Global Space: Heavy Metal/Fuzzy Logic'
Periods of rapid transition have heuristic potentials. The velocity of change itself makes legible novel patterns. When the object of study is cities, especially global cities, legibility is even more pronounced. But it is not only the legibility of the material reality of state-of-the-art buildings, transport systems, and other components of the global hyperspace of capital -all of it built in metal and stone. It is also a second type of legibility: all that metal and stone is increasingly also the space for embedding software, which in turn unsettles the meaning itself of metal and stone. Further, the hyperspace of global capital is also the workplace of a growing multitude of migrants and minoritized citizens, which in turn unsettles the meaning of that hyperspace. Global cities are frontier spaces, and not only for global capital. They embed some of the most complex uses of the new digital technologies. And they are a space where powerlessness becomes complex. These cities are the new frontiers of global urban space: they are frontiers for the powerful and for the most advanced and complex applications of new technologies, but they are also frontiers where powerlessness becomes complex and the powerless, complex subjects. Here is a re-assembling of the bits that make urban space.
Saskia Sassen's new book is Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages
