Interview with Saskia Sassen: "Gezi is a kind of global event"

Can Semercioğlu

Mesele book review magazine has made an interview with Saskia Sassen, urban theorist and professor of sociology, on Gezi Park protests and urban struggles in the context of urban thought.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books is The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. Her new book is Expulsions: When complexity produces elementary brutalities. (Harvard University Press 2014). She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, ranging from multiple doctor honoris causa to named lectures and being selected for various honors lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences.

Can Semercioglu (CS): How may you interpret Gezi Park protests in general?

Saskia Sassen (SS): There is a shared set of claims among the protest movements of the last two years. This in itself is quite remarkable, given the sharp differences in situation between Spain, Egypt, Greece, the US, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, and other countries that have seen their people in the streets. Each of these movements has arrived at protest through its own history and ecology of meanings; each comes out of a specific history of opportunities and oppressions, with a different understanding of what makes for a good society. But today, these diverse histories converge on a couple of pivotal points.

First, it is a protest against the state much more than it is against ‘capitalism’ or multinational corporations, as was the case in the 1960s. Second, it is mostly the modest middle classes, with modest aspirations and modest visions. It is not the wealthy middle classes, who have gotten richer than they ever thought they would be. Nor is it the syndicalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s, or of the struggles that followed the world wars.

Elswehere I have argued that this is perhaps the most revealing aspect: our current  global epoch, with its vast complexity and brutality on a perhaps unprecedented scale, has found its history-making actor: the modest middle classes. I develop some of this in my new book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

CS: Gezi protests has begun for a "park" and people from many backgrounds has involved the protests. What may you say about the urban dynamics of Gezi protests, in the context of worldwide urban protests?

SS: Most generally, the city becomes a space where those without power can make a politics, a history. The same people on a plantation would not make a politics—they would be invisible. In the case of Gesi, the protests arise out of a specific condition in the park, but they really were against the state because the state is failing them – some version of what in Europe we call ‘austerity politics’ which are hitting the middle classes hard, is also happening in Turkey and is one important manifestation of this state failure. Their socioeconomic situation has been eroded by neoliberal economic policies that have seen both wealth and opportunity captured by a narrowing minority. This holds true in a broad array of countries, although it is in liberal democracies where it is clearest. In the Gesi case the threat was  further gentrification – renovating that area of the city for the rich top 20% (not quite the top 1%).

CS: In Turkey, urban transformation has been developing for years, especially in the era of AKP (Justice and Development Party), the ruling party. And according to a widely accepted opinion (they are also facts), people who are from lower classes has suffered and relegated, on the other hand people who are from upper classes and who are closer to AKP has had unearned incomes. From this point of view, where do neo-liberal urbanization and right to the city stand?

SS: I would agree: the data I have seen points to such trends. In my new book I argue that we are dealing with “predatory formations” –mixes of  powerful elites and powerful technologies, bits of advanced lawyering and creative accounting—which generate “legal” capture at the top and impoverishment of the modest middle classes and working classes

CS: How may you explain Istanbul as a globalizing city, given the fact that the strict relationship between ruling party (AKP) and urban policies?

SS: You raise an important point. What has become clear is that cities in countries with very diverse political systems and party politics have all seen this capture of wealth and income at the top and the expanded demand for high-cost urban space by an expanded very rich upper middle class (which is barely a middle class), besides the old rich. Cities as diverse as New York, Istanbul, Shanghai, Lagos, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Singapore and many  more are now part of what I have described in my work on the global city as a geography of centrality the cuts across the divide of global north and global south,  secular and religion driven polities, “democratic” and authoritatiran regimes, capitalism and communism, and so on. For a fuller development your readers may want to look at my Cities in a World economy (4^th edition, 2012).

CS: What kind of relation exists between global(izing) cities and the public space have, for Istanbul? What kind of link between society and urban cities? How can people lay claim to the cities? 

SS: I could not address the case of Istanbul, as I am not sufficiently familiar with this city. But in the global cities I know of, the upgrading of public space is part of gentrified urban areas, and it often goes along with the eliminating or degradation of public urban space in poor areas.

CS: What kind of urban transformation policy may be for the benefit of society today? May you show us an example?

SS: I think one critical dimension is distributive policy: that all neighborhoods have parks, and  good quality public space, plus all the many diverse facilities that one can find in the better and richer areas of a city.

CS: Do you think that we will be witness to the urban struggles like Gezi? What is the future of urban areas and urban struggles?

SS: As I indicated at the start, I see this combination of specific histories of contestation and the meaning of contestation with  their happening in many different places experiencing the impoverishment of the modest middle classes. This is a kind of global event constituted via often very different local struggles in very diverse cities. It gives a new , or added meaning to globalization.

* This interview published on Mesele book review Magazine, June issue.