The Politics of Equity: Who owns the city? - Saskia Sassen

well it's an enormous pleasure and really a big big pleasure that we are celebrating 10 years of urban age so I really want to thank Ricky Burdette the London School of Economics across years that have all supported this fantastic project it is really sweet generous I don't know if anything like it but now I'm going to start with my lecture so the city I want to I want to I'm going to show you a few negative aspects of cities today and so to frame that I want to start with what I think of cities but what is it about cities that matter so much today so a first feature is that cities are really complex but incomplete systems and given that mix they have managed to outlive all kinds of more powerful actors which however are formal and closed maybe complex but closed think of most corporations that have ever been invented they're gone but the cities where they where they're still here when you look at cities that way then you must say ok here is a particular kind of systematicity that actually is very interesting that contains capabilities a second feature is that I think of the city as a space with those without power get to make a history a culture an economy a neighborhood economy in other words a space where powerlessness can become complex they don't necessarily become empowered but their powerlessness can become complex and in that sense they can make its a space where they can make and then finally I think of the city as as a sort of frontier zone when I ask myself where is today's frontier I think it's in cities it might also be in a few places where you have you know massive mining expansion and land grabs and you have encounters with indigenous people but it's not like the frontier as we knew it you know in in in our Imperial epic and the frontier one definition of the frontier space is that it is a space where actors from different worlds have an encounter for which there are no established rules of engagement now in the past that meant very often that we just slaughter them or we took whatever they had but today in the city it's a highly intermediated encounter and so the city's also a space where power which has increasingly become very abstract very intermediated actually hits the ground one moment in its trajectory and it's often global trajectory and it becomes men and women who want it all and get it all and thereby leave a huge footprint they make power which is today I repeat so intermediated and elusive they actually give it a very concrete moment and having grown up in Argentina the the sort of the fighting poor have this wonderful phrase a familes presentes were present we're not asking you for anything power we're here that's all so the city enables those without power to have that position to sort of say you know what the city is also mine and those three features I mean one could list a few more but let me just stick with those three they mark for me a possibility a set of capabilities you know a lot of positives so what I turn to next is some of the main features that are happening in some of our major cities I'm actually working with a data set of a hundred cities and these hundred cities are classified in terms of the the the leading hundred cities in terms of foreign investment so I'm not going to show you the 400 cities because they dress would be a list that goes all over so I'll just show you a few and so the main issue here really is a kind of buying of urban land that I think represents a major threat to those particular features of cities that have enabled cities to have long lives and that have enabled those without power to actually feel that this is also my city so those are sort of the the critical concerns within which I want to situate a lot of the data that I'm showing you all right so so there is a broader framing here so if this is just a few but very quickly I don't want to dwell too much there isn't a lot of time so these are the top ten this is total foreign and national investment this is a story that begins in 208 I mean it had older versions but really what I'm talking about right it's a whole new phase begins in to awake the crises etc and so by this is just one year mid 2013 to mid 2014 in that year the top hundred cities received six hundred billion dollars just buying property it does not include site development you know when you buy a big piece of land and you totally redevelop it so it's just buying property now you can see that New York Metro is number one New York likes very much always to be number one London is number two far more modest not you know Tokyo and you you see a mix now if I showed you the hundred it's an extraordinary mix of cities so it includes also I am Dutch and so I'm still dumb you know and they're in chocolate what's happening there now I'll develop a bit more you know what are the contents etc of all of this now here is another way of looking at it you know you have sort of a more dramatic feature again and I think the list is just a bit longer here I don't know if you can see in the back what we're talking about but you know just looking at the ball at the ones that are further down we have Shanghai Seattle Miami Beijing Stockholm Elmore Denver Philadelphia etc Toronto so it is mix of cities and there are quite a few American cities and I think that is probably a function of the data gathering but you know that they are better documented now if you only take foreign London is number one and a very high proportion of investment in London is foreign and you I think you all know the story so I like to say about this you know many people think that oh my god this is gentrification on steroids maybe but still well I'm not sure so this little it's a vignette but it is actually a truth the Qatari Royals owned more of London than the Queen of England Pachi the Queen of England is not the main owner of London but you know and I don't worry about either by the way they're totally fine but you know when that happens then if you just say oh this is gentrification it's a sort of invitation not to think not to understand well what am I actually witnessing here what is happening now again here you have a longer list and here you know if you go further down you see Frankfurt so Hong Kong Barcelona a lot of cities including me sort of mid-sized cities are part of this story now boy when I wrote them on my computer these letters they look very tiny here it's like wow I didn't mean it so woof it's beautiful but very dramatic why did like always works so what does it all mean who know what does all look like or look like right so this is one example look what good taste these are all Chinese acquisitions nothing against the Chinese yeah because there are many nationalities but look at what they all bought I don't know if people can see it from the back but it's quite a select bit of buildings so one has to stand back and say good taste now what else is involved you know there's another story this is also Chinese company not such good taste this is New York this is a site in New York called Atlantic Yards which actually has a mix you know it's sort of an underutilized it's a huge piece of land and and it has you know little factories but you know little fabricators who actually feed into the architectural profession etc because artists studios it has a lot of activities that were displaced from lower Manhattan because lower Manhattan is you know totally built up now and so it is actually very nice it's deeply urban even though it is low-density now at the same time this Chinese company which bought it is a site development this is not property and he's going to erase all of that and build the last thing I heard was 14 massive towers luxury towers for residents now that adds to the density but I argue it actually demonizes because it creates one use it privatizes a lot of land it eliminates little urban tissue little streets at cetera et cetera the architecture what shall I say it's impressive isn't it I mean it's like your own little Colossus I also adore Atlantic yard is just not an elegant name so they called it something like Pacific Yards you know there is a Pacific also on the other side of the country but no evidently there is an old Street in Brooklyn maybe Brooklyn always had aspirations that it has something of the Pacific in it I think it's an Avenue so now very quickly just to one way of wrapping up the top 100 cities I've only shown you a few and this goes by property investment just buying property not the site development I just showed they account for 10 percent of the world's population 30 percent of the world's GDP and 76 percent of property investment you have to say Wow German laughs Lucia poor very disturbing people that is what I'm really meaning so one of the effects when you have that kind of you know I don't know manipulation of land etc it's sort of the possibility of inventing whole new housing markets and this is information I have from the Financial Times did a very very good study on this so this is the so called super prime housing market and these are minimum prices by now actually the de-facto minimum price is like a hundred million now this is housing what I've shown you today except for Atlantic Yards was mostly office buildings etc now these are the main nationalities this is a very this tells each of these cities actually tells a tale about who are the main buyers so if you look at Dubai it's quite different you know you can see Dubai is situated in a sort of a geography that makes it quite different from London or from Monaco etcetera I love this one Shanghai it looks like the world wants to buy a flat in Shanghai look at that that's quite a mix and Hong Kong who wants to buy in Hong Kong the main buyers our mainland Chinese I find this very comic but people mostly don't find it very you realize I mean everybody it's it's like it's a beauty and how not to be said about each one of these now as we know from London London here is a very powerful exhibit of what's happening so London has a lot of these properties that you know in New York has said a bit to are not occupied there are now people who make it a sport in Manhattan to go stand where these new towers are and at night all windows are dark or maybe one is lit we know some people have bought in and are actually living in there oh my god and they say we feel very lonely here and they're about to check out so this is really about buying into the city and so I in my bigger study I'm beginning to think of this is about buying urban land not just this but I mean know everything that I've been showing to you and so the issue here also is you know what are the legal regimes that we have and they're very enormous ly by city that actually govern land urban land ownership there's a lot of ambiguity and one of the thoughts when I think of the big property contracts that I mentioned before is to what extent the contracts are going to be shaping the elements of an emergent urban law where there is not much urban law governing the notion of who owns urban land as opposed to the building's see the UK has in parts of itself a very clear regime like you may own the top but you don't own the land actually right but in many cities that is not the case so I'm doing for Habitat a little study I'm looking at five cities in the world including say like Mumbai Joburg that have very different ways of understanding who owns urban land I'm also working with a lawyer legal scholar who is obsessed here in London about this question who owns the land in London not the buildings but the land so there is a Duke cool of it or a lot of it but then there are all kinds of other so anyhow to me this is a this is an issue that enters into the picture here now these are images taken by a photographer the name is there I think or the Guardian who managed to get into some of these mansions and you can see they haven't nobody has lived there quite a while I would say it takes quite a bit of time this is another property to get that much moss on it on a staircase right so so this is really about occupy it's like I don't know what I'm going to do with it I don't know where this all goes but you know what for now I'm going to grab it it is a kind of land grab it's not just about building new buildings I think there there are multiple logics that come together here now another parallel history it's the issue of foreclosures foreclosure is a notice but according to the Fed I mean this is this is now that the United States according to the Fed our central bank for 29 keys stepped down the former head of the Fed he said over 14 million households have lost their homes this is data that comes from the Federal Reserve you know the the the central banks are research institutions besides small the other things that they do you know these are annual numbers so this these 14 million this is about a total of 14 million and most of them according to the Fed are out of their homes either now already or very soon and in sort of in in my book expulsion so I sort of examined this issue in some detail and I say you know what does it mean to have foreclosures on 14 million households that's about 30 million people so my country the Netherlands has about 16 million people so I'm trying to make it Pythagorean how 30 million is a big number so it is like some voice from above says from the above the Netherlands says okay everybody on the territory of the Netherlands out where you go I don't know but out and now we repeat the exercise that is 80 million people and I'm very intrigued always by by by how the very material because 30 million bodies that's a lot of materiality huh materiality is using a bit of an abstract sense that we cannot see that this is an imaginary geography that I'm telling you that we can imagine 30 million people but we actually don't see it and so it's sort of an interesting dimension oh my god is that the little cuff that means that I have to start wrapping up yes oh no okay here we go anyhow oh very bad stuff Europe thinks it doesn't have this problem it does and I can't help but feel I won't say glee because there is a lot of suffering here but also Germany which has an economy that we really admire you know deservedly so and and the United Kingdom now these are households remember the worst case in Europe right now is Hungary in Latvia so Hungary has a million households the data actually go on for other years so this is a particular kind of financial instrument I cannot develop that but it is an insidious way of winding up that's not the intention of the the instrument with a lot of empty urban space now I am NOT trying to this is not a conspiratorial thing that I'm saying I'm just juxtaposing elements and how can I not it instead of just talking about investments in buying also talk about these kinds of features now oh my god this is my last slide more or less I'm so impressed so why does all of this matter I am still engaging with the big letters here well it matters I'm just going to invoke what I said at the beginning for all the reasons that I mentioned at the beginning the kind of space that a city is this kind of massive construction adds a lot of density but actually the urbanized and it sort of makes you also understand that density by itself is not enough an office park can be very dents those without power can go and have a job there but when they're done they have to leave they cannot it's not like going back to their communities and having also partly a life of their own now the final element that I and this is the final image is that one of the capabilities of urban space is to generate an urban subject an urban subject that can transcend the religious subject the ethnic subject the racial subject etc now the urban subject is a momentary condition so I live here with this last slide this is one sort of moment of the day rush hour when we all become urban subjects thank you very much

Channel: UrbanAge

Views: 17,105

Keywords: Saskia Sassen (Author)

Id: UAQuyizBIug

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2015