Whose city is it: globalization and rights to place

Saskia Sassen

Time and time again, I have been struck by places in many different parts of the world that are emerging in terms of some sort of international hierarchy of cities. A similar kind of dynamic, a similar set of conditions is evident in these cities, always filtered through the specifics of that place. We see a new kind of growth and prosperity that concentrates here. One can physically measure the expansion of what I think of as the 'glamour zone' of the city, and also growing inequality along with this new prosperity and enormously dynamic economic growth. I'm going to zero in immediately on my understanding of why this has happened, and then I want to focus on the notion that, because cities have emerged as strategic economic sites, they have in many ways emerged as strategic political sites. Through privatisation and deregulation, national governments have reduced the institutional sphere where they are an active and crucial political player. This in itself has made the city - which is a very ambiguous, anarchic institutional arena - one of the sites for a kind of politics that operates outside the formal political system. This brings with it, I would argue, a redefinition of the citizen, a redefinition of politics. I think we are moving once again - it's not the first time in history - to something that we could think of as a politics of place. The rights to place become a very crucial catalyst for a certain kind of activity, be it on the part of the homeless, the poor, or the international business community. Hence the title I had given this talk - 'Whose city is it?' - which is the question that faces those of us involved with the city.

Let me then first take you through the question of why this has happened. I am going to take it as given that you know what has happened, or at least that you know how it has operated in Dublin. We could say that economic growth spatialises in different ways in different periods. I would say that the period of the last forty years, up to the late eighties, was one where the city was not a strategic site for growth. When I say growth, I'm really talking about the engines of growth, that which makes the machinery of the economy really work, and therefore sets the patterns and criteria for broader sectors of the economy. The engines of growth of these industrialised economies were the mass-manufacturing factory, which is not an urban site, and the government, through the Keynesian policies which were crucial in whatever shape or form they may have taken under different political parties. Today the engines of growth are clearly no longer these sectors of the last forty years - though they continue to operate. Today there is a new set of sectors, and these find in cities a strategic site for their operations.

There are two dynamics that one can identify as crucial in explaining this. One of them is something that I call the growing service intensity in the organisation of all economic sectors. By that I mean that, whether you are a firm in mining, in agriculture, in transport, in health, in manufacturing, in finance and so on, it doesn't matter, you are going to be buying - and this is the crucial issue, buying - more specialised service inputs, more accounting services, more financial services, more legal services, more insurance services, more consulting, more public relations, more advertising, more of it all. The site of growth, in other words, lies in that which is being bought, not necessarily with who is buying it. The sector that is dynamised by this is that increasingly autonomous independent network of highly specialised services. These find in cities the ideal site for their production.

The second trend that is significant is the question of globalisation. Two crucial features of the global economic system make cities strategic. One is that the global economic system cannot be taken as a given, or as a function of the new technologies. The other is the hypermobility of capital, the capacity to dematerialise components of capital which used to be material, but which have now been rendered liquid. This global economic system needs to be produced, designed, managed, serviced, co-ordinated, financed, et cetera. The hypermobility of capital also needs to be produced, designed, managed, serviced, co-ordinated, financed, et cetera. It is then not that we have a global economic system as such, or that we have hypermobility of capital as such, that is the key for these cities, but that both of these conditions require an enormous set of activities which find in cities one of the principal sites of their production.

These two features coincide in the case of global cities, which are at the top of this urban system, and where the complexity of operations is such that agglomeration economies become very important. This also explains why cities that are not at the apex of these new economic hierarchies are also experiencing these forms of growth. Around the world there is a whole series of secondary and third level cities which are also experiencing some of these trends. In the 'Global City', I emphasised the globalisation issue. In a later book, I began to emphasise this broader dynamic which really cuts across cities, regardless of whether they are implicated in the globalisation process or not.

Why do cities matter to this specialised service activity, to this work of managing the global economic system? The dynamic of agglomeration used to be centred in questions of weight, and then it was metamorphosed into other variables. I think today it is centred in questions of speed and complexity. It is precisely often the most dematerialised, most mobile, most digitalised economic activities that are subject to this new type of agglomeration dynamic. The complexity comes out of the issue that, as a firm that is specialising in many different countries, it has to negotiate the accounting systems, legal systems, regulation systems of these countries. And it has to do so under conditions of continuous change (a privatisation here, a deregulation there, a crisis everywhere) and speed, since time IS money in these sectors. So there is an enormous amount of work and guesswork that has to be done, and this demands and benefits from the spatial agglomeration of a multiplicity of different types of service firms.

I think of the global city, just to give a quick definition, not simply as a place where you have headquarters and foreign investment. I think of it as a site that contains the specialised capabilities that allow you to manage, service, co-ordinate, finance operations of firms and markets that are happening in many different countries in the world. These kinds of cities do not necessarily have the large headquarters of non-financial corporations. The whole point is that, as these functions become more and more complex, the headquarters that manage these functions can move anywhere. What they need is for somewhere to be located this highly networked specialised service sector that can sell them the specialised products. Corporate headquarters are outsourcing more and more of their high-risk very complex functions, because it doesn't make sense for a firm that is operating in many different countries to hire full-time in-house staff to produce all of this.

The city, as a particular kind of production site, has emerged with renewed vigour and renewed strategic functions out of this combination of macro-level trends I have just described. It seems to me that this also is something that explains a number of the outcomes that materialise in cities. One the one hand, because these service functions are complex and subject to speed, they become truly strategic for markets and for firms. What this has meant is that the firms that are producing the services, and the professionals involved in producing them, are part of a pricing dynamic that is really very different from the pricing of tangibles. One can see it, for example, in the different pricing of hardware and software - one has gone down, the other has risen sharply. What this new economic dynamic has done, which in one of its crucial moments spatialises in cities, is to concentrate a group of firms that have very high-profit-making capacities. Because the specialized services they produce are strategic, these firms and professionals can charge because they know they are producing something that that firm needs, and needs urgently . This creates in the heart of these cities a growing and expanding sector of firms and households with above-average - and in fact sometimes just off the chart so to say - profit-making capacities and earnings capacities.

This then is implanted in an urban web, an urban fabric that is made up of a multiplicity of sectors, many of which do not have these profit-making capacities, even if they are necessary for the urban economy, and even if they are necessary for those specialised service firms. This is what I think of as the 'food chain' that connects the high-level high-profit-making service firms to a whole variety of other firms and types of workers that never get coded, valued or recognised as having anything to do with the new leading sectors. These often exist in profit-making capacities and pricing dynamics that are totally different from this leading sector.

Now, when you look at the city this way, you can begin to understand why the city emerges as a strategic economic site. As it does so it is marked by growing spatial polarisation, growing income inequality, growing fragmentation. Cities have always had inequality and spatial polarisation. However, when it reaches these dimensions, when you have this much profit-making capacity in some of your firms, and this much earnings capacity in some of your households, and this much poverty in another, and so much homelessness and inequality, you are dealing with a new set of social forms. It is not simply more of the same. I insist that the homelessness we have today is a new kind of social form. Similarly, these new very high-income upper-middle class households are not the old rich elites any more. They are made up of the 20% of people who are making much more money than they ever thought, and this is a significant mass of people vis-a-vis the city and urban space. It can inscribe the urban landscape, it can redefine what the city is. They're also politically speaking the ones who have a voice this makes a lot of difference. It leaves behind an enormous sector of the urban population and the urban economy.

For me what we're seeing is a new economic phase that spatialises in very distinctive fashions in cities. That brings with it massive consequences, possibilities, costs, et cetera, for these cities. Who is making claims on the place that is the city? A new type of claim on the city is that made by global capital. Global capital is denationalised national capital, a mix of foreign capital and national capital that reconstitutes itself as global capital. This makes claims on the city and on its resources - different kinds of claims in different types of cities - but in most of them, global capital asks for 'state-of-the-art' infrastructure and built environments, and 'world-class' culture. Different cities can meet those demands to different extents, and different parts of global capital go to different kinds of cities. Global capital has worked at shaping these claims, pursuing them and making them work. With a rhetoric of trickle-down effects, liberated markets, privatisation, and deregulation, it has brought a legitimacy to its claims.

What is an important issue here is the fact that the city is a strategic site, and the fact that the government has reduced its role at the national level, and also at sub-national or local level. Vis-a-vis global capital, the city - and that means the city through its various constituencies (formal, political, civic, planning, et cetera) - has more bargaining power than the rhetoric of the hypermobility of capital suggests. I said at the beginning that the hypermobility of capital also needs to be produced and managed, that it requires materialities, and a lot of those materialities are concentrated in cities. Global capital needs not a particular city, typically, but a whole set of optional places that are part of a growing network of global cities. This network now has about thirty or forty places (with enormous hierarchy by the way, some of these cities really just have global city functions, rather than being the full-blown event). The politics involved in this, for a city, is in a way a politics of that network as well. The leaderships of these cities could get together and create a broad front, and recognise that they are the leaders of what is a cross-border strategic geography of centrality, the space of power for the management of the global economic system. This would take enormous innovation, because we have so long suffered from statist politics (the national as the container for politics). That is why I emphasise work. There is no formula that already exists. There is no policy that is ready-made on a shelf that we can take. These are things that need to be invented, made produced, worked at, but I do think we are at the beginning of a new strategic history in this regard.

We're talking about a strategic geography of power that cuts across the north-south divide, that includes Sao Paolo, includes Bombay, includes Manila and Bangkok. To execute bargaining power on the part of an urban leadership vis-�-vis global capital really will take knowing two things very well. The first is knowing your own city. The second is knowing what global capital really needs. That means decoding radically this ideology of hypermobility, placelessness and space-time compression. (I say the ideology of it, but there is a reality to it. All of this is real, but it's just part of the reality. But it's been used and deployed as if it were the full reality - in that sense it becomes an ideology.) To act with conviction politically in a negotiation, you need a certain amount of knowledge. What I see among a lot of politicians, both at the national level and at the local level, is a lack of conviction about their own capacities, resources, and bargaining power. They're simply ignorant, they don't know enough. That is why I emphasise: global capital has worked at constructing its claim and its normativity. Similarly, our national politicians, our local politicians, we all need to work.

In the global economic system, cities are not simply competing with or against each other (that's another part of the ideology of global capital). This network of global cities does need to have a high standard in terms of all these infrastructural and structural issues that I talked about, this homogenising 'hyperspace of international business'. However, another crucial element is a city's level of specialisation in something. What is historically the special difference of a city - New York is different from Paris is different from Sao Paolo - has to be transformed into its specialised difference, because this current economic system operates in enormously specialised and complex networks of transactions. The homogenising part is just that visible part that architects, planners, designers are continuously aware of, but the operational economic side is marked by enormous levels of specialisation. There is a much more specialised division of functions than straightforward competition. The fact that there is less competition than the rhetoric suggests, should make it possible for cities, in dealing with global capital, to feel more empowered than they do.

The other kind of politics is that of the citizens inside the city. Part of the global city is something that I think of as a denationalised or partly denationalised place. Here you have a growing population of foreign workers, households, children, communities, immigrants, refugees, but also the new international professional class, the managers, the owners of foreign firms that locate here. It is in that sense a kind of new frontier. There is a multiplicity of new actors throughout the social hierarchy of the urban system, for which there is no clearly-stated set of rules of engagement, of interaction. This is a bit of history in the making, a time when certain forms are being produced. There is an important dynamic between the legitimacy of the claims of the foreign international business community, and the lack of the legitimacy of those of the foreign immigrant, of the low-waged refugee, of the low-income discriminated native minorities, of certain sectors like squatters and anarchists. Citizenship is partly being denationalised, it is no longer comfortably ensconced in those older notions of aggregate membership in a nation. There is too much diversity. I think of the gay community, the queer community, certain sectors of feminism, as also being partly resistant to this idea of aggregate membership in a nation. Also, if you look at the new constitutions of South Africa, of Brazil, of Argentina (these last having come out of long-term military dictatorships) and in the new constitutions of central and eastern Europe, there is a new clause that alludes precisely to that. This states that the sovereign government even if democratically elected, cannot presume to represent all its people. This is a massive transformation potentially, because it suggests there are collectivities inside the nation that do not see themselves as being fully represented by the sovereign.

The city of today, the new kind of city I'm describing, certainly represents a new set of conditions, because partly it is a strategic site for the operations of global capital, and partly because it is a strategic site for all kinds of other collectivities. Again I remind you that it is in cities that a certain kind of politics of identity, a politics of culture can get enacted. This kind of city for me is also the place where disadvantaged and powerless sectors of the population can gain something that I have a very hard time naming, so I use the notion of 'presence'. It's not that they gain power as such, but they gain presence, they gain visibility. This signals the possibility of a kind of politics that gets enacted outside the formal political system. In this regard we can say that the space of national politics is quite abstract and confining for citizens (basically electoral politics) while the space of urban politics is far more concrete and open to a variety of political projects. Urban politics pivots on a politics of the rights to place. But the city emerges today as a site where those who lack power can nonetheless be recognised as subjects, because they can gain presence, and this makes more complex the political landscape in these cities than simply talking about powerlessness. I think the condition of powerlessness can assume many different forms, some of them marked by enormous obscurity and invisibility, and some of them marked by much more visibility. One way of thinking about it is that the city is an opportunity for the enactment of new forms of politics, and for the reconfiguring of certain aspects - not all aspects - of citizenship. National government no longer offers citizens the concrete possibility for this sort of project. Citizens, like the citizens of this city and the citizens of many cities, should find in their own cities a place to enact these powers of citizenship.

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology, The University of Chicago and Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics. Her most recent books are Globalization and Its Discontents and Guests and Aliens (both from New Press, New York 1999). Two of her books are being reissued in updated editions in 2000, The Global City (Princeton University Press) and Cities in a World Economy (Pine Forge/Sage). Her edited book Cities and their cross-border networks, sponsored by the United Nations University, will also appear in 2000. She is completing her research project on Governance and Accountability in a Global Economy.