Professor Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen, Ph.D., Hon D. is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. She is a sociologist and economist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. Saskia coined the term global city.
 
During the 1980s and 1990s, Saskia emerged as a prolific author in urban sociology. She studied how the impact of globalization such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labor and capital influence urban life. She also studied the influence of communication technology on governance. She observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism, including transnational human migration.
 
Her new books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages and A Sociology of Globalization. Other recent books are the third edition and fully updated Cities in a World Economy, the edited Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales and Subjects, and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press.
 
Saskia also authored Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, Losing Control?, Guests and Aliens, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow, and Metropolis: Reflection, coauthored Power: Producing the Contemporary City, and edited Global Networks, Linked Cities.
 
She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue and has just completed a five-year UNESCO project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries. The project report was published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo came out in a new, fully updated edition in 2001. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.
 
She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA).
 
Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, OpenDemocracy.net, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, among others.
 
From 1966, Saskia spent a year each at the Université de Poitiers, France, the Universitá degli Studi di Roma, and the Universidad de Buenos Aires — for studies in philosophy and political science. From 1969, she studied sociology and economics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1971 and 1974, respectively. In addition, she earned a French master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Poitiers, France, in 1974. She also received a Doctor honoris causa from Delft University (Netherlands).
 
Watch Urban Age India: Saskia Sassen Cities in Global Context: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Watch Plenary Session: Toward a Transformative Agenda around Race and Q&A – Indesem 2007 The Legacy. Read The Ideas Interview: Saskia Sassen, Globalization, the State, and the Democratic Deficit, and A State of Decay.