CityReads│Global Urbanism by Sassen: Class Lectures Online

Saskia Sassen 城读 2022-07-13

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Global Urbanism by Sassen: Class Lectures Online

Global Urbanism is online.

sources:http://saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/Global_Urbanism_Syllabus.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBlHATTtT7os3Y1Ixb9yBXQ

https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2015/09/11/over-enrollment-global-urbanism-poses-challenges-students-administration/

Prof.Saskia Sassen at Columbia University has put the class lectures of her course Global Urbanism on YouTube. It is recorded by a film maker, Don Bagnato, at New York University. Prof. Saskia Sassen has been teaching this course for 10 years. It is a very popular undergraduate course at Columbia University. In 2016, over 700 students enrolled in this course, which had resulted in administrative difficulties for faculty members and students alike. Now with the class lectures and syllabus online, students across the world can benefit. (The syllabus can be downloaded from http://www.saskiasassen.com/)

Introduction

Cities are at the forefront of a range of global governance challenges, the application of technological innovations in complex settings, and novel types of economiesand politics, both formal and informal. As a result, many of today's majorglobal governance challenges become concrete, urgent and practical in majorcities worldwide. Urban leaderships and urban activists have had to deal withsome of these major challenges (air quality, flooding, the growth of gangwarfare, a proliferation of racisms, human insecurity, new kinds of inequality)long before national governments and inter-state treaties did. In short, citiesemerge as a frontier space in a growing range of domains/challenges.

What states offered in the past – mediations between the local and the international, protectionist policies, and more – has become weaker and often irrelevant (for good or for bad!). Firms can now engage localities directly(through cross-border networks, through the World Trade Organization, and more)without going through the national state. And citizens can access formal global jurisdictions (e.g. through the International Criminal Court) and informal ones(e.g. electronic global civil society spaces) directly without having to be represented by national states.

In this changing and globalized landscape, cities and networks of cities become farmore important than they were in the immediate post-World War II decades (when national states and the inter-state system gained prominence and developed multiple agreements). The new phase begins in the 1980s. It has brought some very good trends – for instance, the strengthening of global civil society(which finds in cities a critical space for its projects). And it has brought some very problematic and destructive ones – for instance extreme gentrification and the growing, disproportionate power of high finance in moreand more sectors of the economy, even as small traditional banks die.

We will focus on urban conditions and global challenges that concern both power and powerlessness. Of particular concern are the environment, the global and local economies, decaying and new types of urban infrastructures, human security (as distinct from the national state security), racisms of all sorts, new types of inequalities, new types of formal and informal political actors and initiatives, and emerging inter-city networks involving a broad range ofactors (non-governmental organizations [NGOs], formal urban governments, informal activists, global firms, immigrants). It is in cities that these challenges can be studied empirically and that policy design and implementation can become more feasible than at national levels.

Cities are the sites for new types of formal and informal political actors and initiatives, e.g. the diverse uprisings around the world, from Tahrir Square to Wall Street. They are the sites for emerging inter-city networks involving abroad range of actors, from NGOs to transnational corporations (TNCs). As well,formal networks of these city governments have multiplied sharply since the1990s.

The course draws both on classical texts about cities (Do they still work for us? What do they fail to account for?) and on the diverse new literatures on cities and larger subjects with direct urban implications. We will use a variety of data sets to get at detailed empirical information, and draw on two large ongoing research projects involving major and minor global cities around theworld. An excellent site is https://lsecities.net/.

We will also deal with some of the new theoretical questions that arise out of our current urban age, ranging from the urbanizing of more and more processes that are not urban per se (war, drug gangs, extreme financial concentration), to the possibly foundational transformation in the civic features of cities, and in the meaning of urbanity itself.

Textbook

Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy - 4th Edition, (Sage/PineForge

Press,2011)

Course contents

1 Introduction

Introduction of some of the theoretical and methodological issues we confront when one studies cities in the context of globalization, changed relationships between national and local governments, the new military asymmetries that tend to urbanize war (conventional armies against insurgencies), and the new environmental challenges that cities are facing and the notion that every surface in the city should be working with the environment.

2 Urban global space: global cities and global slums

3 Global urban space: the spaces of migrants, refugees, and displaced persons

4 Infrastructure violence, urban insecurity& geographies of war

5 The territorial moment of global capital

6 Sustainable development: ecological footprints & the limits to urban growth

7 Migratory and monetary flows: refugees, remitters & internally displaced persons

8 Theorizing the city: classical &contemporary reflections

9 Inequality- penalizing the poor: neoliberal enclosure & the production of advanced marginality

10 Intelligent cities

11 Territorializing capital: cross-border circuits, the political economy ofplace,gendering

12 Transformative technologies: digitization & the possibility of new urban politics

There are suggested readings for every lecture, please check the syllabus.