Saskia Sassen

LA CIUDAD: ECOSYSTEMA EDUCACIONAL

TORINO

Noviembre 14 2015

THE DIVERSE KNOWLEDGE SPACES IN THE CITY

FROM FORMAL TO INFORMAL

ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE SPACES

THE “state of the art”

THE GLOBAL CITY FUNCTION

EACH NEIGHBORHOOD HAS KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE CITY

THAT THE EXPERTS AT THE CENTER– GOVERNMENT EXPERTS,

ACADEMICS, CONTRACTED SPECIALISTS, and more– DO NOT

HAVE

OPEN-SOURCING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

THE GLOBAL CITY FUNCTION

The specialized differences of cities

• The specialized differences of cities matter much more in today's global economy than is commonly understood.

The enormous variety of global circuits connecting cities

• Some of these global circuits are specialised and some are not. • Some are worldwide, others are regional. • Different circuits contain different groups of countries and

cities. • For instance, Mumbai is today on a global circuit for

commercial real-estate development and investment that includes firms from cities as diverse as London and Bogotá.

• Global commodity trading in coffee includes New York and São Paulo as major hubs. Global commodity trading in sunflower seeds includes Buenos Aires, Chicago and Mumbai. Gold includes Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Dubai, Mumbai, New York London, Zurich.

Culture, Politics, Migration, etc. also feed the proliferation of circuits

• For example, NGOs fighting for rainforests function in circuits that include Brazil and Indonesia, the global media centres of New York and London, and the major forestry companies and the headquarters of sellers (Oslo, London and Tokyo).

• The other side of all these trends is an increasing urbanising of global networks.

A given city may be located on dozens of global circuits

• Looking at it from the perspective of a given city makes clear the diversity and specificity of its location on some, or many, of these circuits.

• These emergent inter-city geographies begin to function as an infrastructure for multiple forms of globalisation. The first step is to identify the specific global circuits on which a city is located.

What exactly does the global

economy homogenize?

• The new state of the art built environment

as infrastructure:

• Necessary but indeterminate

But the global economy needs diverse specialized capacities

• The global economy needs those standardized built environments and it needs diverse specialised economic capabilities.

• Thus the indeterminacy of these built environments allows for sharp differences in the specialized economies that use them. State of the art office districts are very similar even when the types of business they handle can be radically different (if we take into account highly specialized differences)

These specialized differences feed the growing number of global cities

• .

Four dynamics that explain the strategic

knowledge function of global cities

• That is:

– that explain why the leading sectors of the economy which are rich enough to buy whatever technologies it would take to disperse their operations across the world, go to the lower cost sites, avoid expensive office buildings, allow their workers to work online from home, etc…

– Why they still need dense concentrations of resources, people, talent, and all of it state-of-the-art.

1. The limits of technical logics

• The key technical property of the new

ICTs: global dispersal and simultaneous

system integration. Technically this would

mean the elimination of agglomeration

economies..

• Technology loops through economic, political,

social, cultural, subjective environments and is

altered by these.

– The larger social, economic order contains multiple logics.

– As a result the outcome is a mix of technical and non-

technical features. The relative weight of each will vary

depending on case.

– Key implication: spatial agglomeration may remain as a

feature in even the most globalized and digitized sectors,

e.g. finance

Berlin (Population)

Berlin (Workplace)

Taken from Urbanage.net

Density

- Mumbai

Taken from Urbanage.net

Density

- NYC

Taken from Urbanage.net

Density

- Shanghai

London (Population)

London

(Workplace)

Sao Paulo (Population)

Sao Paulo

(Workplace)

2. The global economy is not a given.

1. The global economy is not merely a function of

the power of TNCs or the new technologies.

2. The global economy is made,

constructed. It needs to be organized,

designed, serviced– it is not simply a

given.

1. Global dispersal along with simultaneous system integration raises the complexity and importance of central functions because:

-to a large extent global trade is intra-firm and hence managed

-financial markets are increasingly becoming corporate owned

These functions become so complex that they are increasingly outsourced to specialized services firms. This complexity plus market uncertainty, imperfect knowledge, changing conditions —all sharpened under globalization– means these firms benefit from agglomeration. This is a new logic for the spatial concentration of firms: i) interactivity among these services firms and ii) need for multiple speczd. inputs on the part of hqrtrs.

3 The geography of ICTs:

• A. ICTs: Designed for long distance communications, capable of neutralizing distance, space/time compression, etc.

• Yet the most advanced infrastructures servicing leading sectors (such as wholesale finance) have a geography marked by i) long spans and ii) dense nodes with massive concentrations of infrastructure and various technical features.

• B. To maximize the benefits firms and markets can derive from these technologies they need organizational complexity –both internal to firm (e.g. complex needs) and in their settings (e.g. urbanization economies).

Cable and Wireless Digital Highway Map

Taken from Alliancedata.com

Digital Infrastructure

Taken from Economist

Digital Infrastructure cont’d

• As a ship cuts off underwater cable in Alexandria, internet outage spreads across the Middle East and

Asia

• Red: In Service, Black : Out of Service, Yellow: Planned Taken from Economist

• global span, nodes, the value-added of

organizational complexity

• The logics behind A and B have as one

outcome the importance of global cities for the

most advanced complex economic sectors.

• These trends are not simply about headquarters.

Increasingly they are about the networked

specialized services sector.

4. Information in an information economy:

Different types and spatial consequences

• A. Standardized information: no matter

how complex, accessible from anywhere

and hence no agglomeration advantages.

• B. Higher order information: a mix of A) and guesses, evaluations, inferences. Access to networks of specialized firms and professionals becomes crucial. Hence: agglomeration advantages.

• It is B. that is critical for the most complex and strategic activities of firms and markets with global operations. Firms cannot simply buy B. (as they can buy e.g. credit ratings). They need to make this part of their work process in both formal and informal ways.

• This also leads to growing demand for professional talent

• The global city is a strategic site where multiple global, highly specialized/partial information loops intersect and produce a dense, thick “enabling environment” for the production of B.

• And that is why THERE IS NO PERFECT GLOBAL CITY

• There is a need in many sectors (economic, cultural, scientific) for many different global cities

Overall Ranking: THERE IS NO PERFECT GC

1 London 79.17

2 New York 72.77

3 Tokyo 66.60

4 Singapore 66.16

5 Chicago 65.24

6 Hong Kong 63.94

7 Paris 63.87

8 Frankfurt 62.34

9 Seoul 61.83

10 Amsterdam 60.06

11 Madrid 58.34

12 Sydney 58.33

13 Toronto 58.16

14 Copenhagen

57.99

15 Zurich 56.86

16 Stockholm 56.67

17 Los Angeles 55.73

18 Philadelphia 55.55

19 Osaka 54.94

20 Milan 54.73

NEIGHBORHOOD KNOWLEDGES

OPEN-SOURCING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Digitization as a variable

Variable meanings: Derivative

Transformative Constitutive

.

Factoring in social logics

• Three elements:

a) imbrications between IT and social contexts (broadly understood)

b) Mediating cultures (access is not just shaped by technical competence, interface design, etc): cultures of use

c) scaling (many different forms:

1)The powerful: e.g. in financial markets we see a new type of risk, market risk -a network effect; various types of feedback; effects of expanding a program.

2) among the powerless: significant scaling can happen via recurrence –horizontal massing

Socio-Digital Formations

• Electronic structures (structurations) that reflect both technical capabilities and endogenized social logics.

• Thus: not all digital networks are such formations. Data pipe lines are not.

• Yes, all technologies are “society frozen.”

But within a given space and time technologies are also distinctive conditions or capabilities.

Two cases where digitization has been transformative/constitutive

• Key aspects of global financial markets today (which make it different from earlier phases of global finance): orders of magnitude, centrality of transactivity, level of complexity of instruments (software).

• These have given Finance enormous added power over governments

Enable the making of a new norm, a new normativity

• At the other end::::

• Resource poor-organizations can become part of global politics in ways that construct a politics of the global that is centered on localities. Non-cosmopolitan globality.

Parallels between both cases • Key features of digitization are critical in these two

very different cases: E.g. technology provides each of these domains with specific utilities

• 1. Decentered (distributed) participation/outcomes and simultaneous integration.

• BUT achieved through different socio-economic encasements of the technology: public access, private/dedicated

• 2. Threshold effects are critical in both

• 3. Values, projects, applied outcomes are different: distributed power; concentrated power

Project on future of work & Tech

• Two issues.

• 1) How digitization can enhance the work life of low-income workers by addressing the specific needs of these workers at their workspace and in their neighborhoods.

• There should be more innovations that meet the needs and constraints of low-wage workers.

.

• The key aspect that concerns me is that this digital under-utilization constructs a radical differentiation between work space and life-space (i.e. the neighborhood) for low-wage workers.

This is disabling and adds to the difficulties in their daily life at work and off work. Growing cultural distance...

Neighborhood is here used as a somewhat generic term to capture a fairly large local area with reasonable transport and generally modest socio-economic standing of households.

USEFUL APPS FOR LOW-INCOME WORKERS AND

NEIGHBORHOODS.

• Several efforts. • Examples of mostly recent applications geared to

modest-to-low-income households and neighborhoods.

• Kinvolved a simple for teachers and after school staff: makes it easy to connect to parents in case of a student's lateness or absenteeism. In many of our schools in poor neighborhoods lack or difficulty of communication between the school and a student's home has allowed self-destructive conduct to worsen, damaging a student's chances for a job or acceptance to college.

• The low-income worker knows that if there is trouble s/he will be alerted

..

• App developed by Propel, simplifies applying for government services, a notoriously time-consuming process. Now there is the option of a simple mobile enrollment application.

• Neat Streak, lets home cleaners communicate with clients in a quick non-obtrusive way.

• A money management app for mobiles which combines cash and loans requests, simplifying the lives of very low-income people who need to cash their pay checks before pay-day, and can avoid the high interest rates charged by so called “pay-day sharks.”

.

• A very different type of app from the aforementioned, far more complex and encompassing is Panoply:

• an online intervention that replaces typical therapy involving a health professional with a crowd-sourced response to individuals with anxiety and depression.

• What I find significant here is that it has the added effect of mobilizing a network of people, which may be one step in a larger trajectory of support that can also become a local neighborhood network.

.

• app to develop new ways of working together online.

• Quite common among middle class users and in certain professional jobs, but far less likely among low-income workers.

• aimed at low-income workers and families, it could be extremely useful to the latter. It can enable a sense of individual worth to a network, and thereby solidarity and mobilization around issues of concern to low-income neighborhoods, families, and workers. Again, it can feed into individual worth (“I matter to my community”) and a sense of collective strength.

APPS THAT CAN STRENGTHEN THE COLLECTIVE SPACE OF THE DISADVANTAGED

• We matter to each other

• Open-sourcing the Neighborhood

Larger ecologies of meaning: in cities it becomes extreme

• The specific technical capabilities of interactive technologies deliver their utilities through complex ecologies.

• These ecologies include more than just the technical:

• They also include the logics of users

• And these can diverge significantly from the engineer’s logic.

• In the city this should mean maximizing open source urbanism

BEFORE METHOD: Analytic Tactics

The instability of the category “remittances”

• Long associated with low-income migrants

• Now embedded in a development discourse

• An object for financial engineering

• Long-term growth trend

• Now sharp fall

Billions

of dollars

Billions

of dollars

1. India 21.7 11. Serbia 4.1

2. China 21.3 12. Pakistan 3.9

3. Mexico 18.1 13. Brazil 3.6

4. France 12.7 14. Bangladesh 3.4

5. Philippines 11.6 15. Egypt, Arab Rep. 3.3

6. Spain 6.9 16. Portugal 3.2

7. Belgium 6.8 17. Vietnam 3.2

8. Germany 6.5 18. Colombia 3.2

9. United Kingdom 6.4 19. United States 3

10. Morocco 4.2 20. Nigeria 2.8

Source: Author’s Calculations Based on IMF BoP Yearbook, 2004, and World Bank Staff estimates.

Top 20 remittance-recipient countries, 2004 (US$ billions)

a) Destabilizing the immigrant subject

b) What does the powerful category “immigration” keep us from seeing

about immigration

CONCEPTUAL EXPULSIONS

• .

Multiple immigration spaces

• The spaces (institutional, ideational, tactical) for

producing the migrant subject can be very diverse

• - the new transnational class of professionals • - the contract-labor worker entering for seasonal

work under specific short-term conditions • - the business-visa immigrant • - the family-dependent immigrant • - the green card immigrant • - the high-tech visa worker

Variability of the immigrant subject in a global world

• The low-wage worker

• The international business man or woman

• The foreign professional

• The “IMF citizen”

• The “sans-papiers”

• The documented unauthorized

• “Documentary citizenship”

(“paper citizens”( Kamal Sadiq’s term)