ancient cities

688 Savannah, Georgia
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 midrange
global cities, Sassen believes, play an important
role in connecting regional economies to the
global economy.
In later works Sassen further developed her
understanding of the unfolding of economic
restructuring in global cities by looking at immigrants
and migration, mechanisms of governance,
and the role of technology in cross-border flows of
capital, information, and people. Sassen’s perspective
on global city formation is critical, particularly
of its concomitant social polarization. Thus, her
more recent interest in the regulatory governance
of economic globalization is directed toward finding
“a new governing architecture” that is socially
and environmentally just. In that regard, her work
considers the multiple scales at which we are governed
in an age of increasing globalization and
cross-border flows. The movement of goods,
money, people, and ideas, she points out, is subject
to myriad regulations imposed by supranational
bodies like the European Union and the World
Trade Organization, by nation-states, and by subnational
governments and agencies. One of her key
assertions is that although the authority of the
nation-state is being “unbundled,” it has not been
eliminated; the rise in importance of urban regions
does not inevitably lead to the “hollowing out” of
the nation-state.
With respect to technology, she has shown that
global technology networks have created a new
geography in which the financial centers of global
cities are more tightly connected to each other than
to their own regional peripheries. Her research
also explores the potential of new technologies to
create new political spaces. For example, she
believes the Internet provides an opportunity for
even poor people to organize at a global scale.
Sassen contends that economic restructuring
and global city formation make necessary the
development of new methods of research and
analysis to capture and understand the changes
under way around the world. This is reflected in a
major research project she directs at the University
of Chicago, the Transnationalism Project. It has
two major components: Global Governance and
Migration. The goal of this interdisciplinary project
is to link general theoretical concepts to more
detailed and specific empirically grounded research.
In this project, Sassen and her coresearchers hope
to determine whether or not new regimes of global
governance are emerging.
Sassen considers herself a global citizen, having
lived and worked in several countries. This has led
her to put enormous store on belonging in many
places. “My life does not allow for exclusive loyalty
to one single country or nation-state.” Clearly,
Saskia Sassen is a scholar to whom the “global” is
not just the object of research but also a way of
living.
Douglas Young
See also Global City; Globalization; Urban System; World
City
Further Readings
Sassen, Saskia. 1988. The Mobility of Labor and Capital.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1991. The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
———. 1994. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
———. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents. New
York: New Press.
———. 1999. Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press.
———, ed. 2002. Global Networks/Linked Cities. New
York: Routledge.
———. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From
Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Sassen, Saskia and Robert Latham, eds. 2005. Digital
Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global
Realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sa v a n n a h, ge o r g i a
Savannah boasts one of the most celebrated
urban plans in the United States, and the city is