Unlike Detroit, Chicago’s diversified industrial base has helped it to successfully switch from a material to a knowledge economy

In recent decades, some cities with a strong history of manufacturing have been able to make the switch to a strong knowledge economy, and thus have maintained a relative level of economic prosperity in the current economic climate. In the wake of the city of Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy, Saskia Sassen looks at how a city that was once economically very similar – Chicago – has made that successful transition. She argues that the gearing of Chicago’s agro-industrial economy, and its associated financial and legal support services, towards international markets have allowed it to succeed in its transition to a knowledge economy. Detroit, on the other hand, has been historically dominated by the automotive industry, and has not been able to redeploy its knowledge and practices in the same way

Bordering Capabilities Versus Borders: Implications for National Borders

A core argument of this Essay is that the capability to make borderings has itself switched organizing logics: from institutionalizing the perimeter of a territory to multiplying transversal borderings cutting across that perimeter. This switch is partly linked to the types of scalar shifts in the operational space of a growing number of systems. To the more economic systems already mentioned above, let me add such diverse instances as the policing of the illegal drug trade, the war on terror, the judicial and political struggle to protect human rights, and the environmental effort to reorganize transnational economic sectors, including the fisheries examined in this Symposium. Each of these systems functions today as a globally scaled assemblage that includes subnational, national, and supranational components, ranging from varied laws to operational geographies

Cities Help Us Hack Formal Power Systems

Initially delivered as the 2017 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 12 presents an analysis of cities as complex, diverse, and incomplete systems. For Sassen, it is precisely these features of urban forms – their complexity, diversity and incompleteness – that offer the possibility of a new type of politics, centered on new types of political actors. She is particularly interested in two features of global cities: their presence as strategic frontier zones where actors from different worlds can meet without clear rules of engagement and their strategic importance for hacking old orders.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_papers/1012/thumbnail.jp

The State and Globalization: Denationalized Participation

The effort in this paper is to recover the ways in which the state participates in governing the global economy in a context increasingly dominated by deregulation, privatization, and the growing authority of non-state actors. A key organizing proposition, derived from my previous work on global cities\u27 is the embeddedness of much of globalization in national territory, that is to say, in a geographic terrain that has been encased in an elaborate set of national laws and administrative capacities. The embeddedness of the global requires at least a partial lifting of these national encasements and hence signals a necessary participation by the state, even when it concerns the state\u27s own withdrawal from regulating the economy

Cities Help Us Hack Formal Power Systems

Initially delivered as the 2017 CARGC Distinguished Lecture in Global Communication, CARGC Paper 12 presents an analysis of cities as complex, diverse, and incomplete systems. For Sassen, it is precisely these features of urban forms – their complexity, diversity and incompleteness – that offer the possibility of a new type of politics, centered on new types of political actors. She is particularly interested in two features of global cities: their presence as strategic frontier zones where actors from different worlds can meet without clear rules of engagement and their strategic importance for hacking old orders.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_papers/1012/thumbnail.jp