Liane Lefaivre: What was your role in the Biennale? The theme of the main exhibition of Richard Burdett’s at the Arsenale was global cities, an area of expertise which your work pioneered in so many ways.
Saskia Sassen: Several of us (Ricky Burdett, Richard Sennett, the whole Urban Age tribe) met frequently for intense discussions about what it meant to do a Architecture Biennale on cities. The challenges is how to connect architecture with cities as key places for major new social, political, environmental challenges. Further, and I relaly cared about this, how do you bring “art” (film, photography, sculpture, and the foundational meaning of the artistic as a non-paradigmatic way of seeing, of “theoria”) into a discussion on cities.
I also had my own idiosyncratic take on it all. Beyond the generic issue of cities and why architects and designers should be focusing on them, there was a politco-technical question about global cities and architecture. As I say in the Biennale catalogue essay, architecture and engineering have played critical roles in reshaping vast stretches of global cities into platforms for the new economy. Two features become legible in this process. One of them is that. What is usually interpreted today as the homogenizing of the built environment of cities is partly a mis-interpretation. The new hyperspace for global firms and the new transnational professionals is actually a kind of infrastructure for global business, rather than being about cities. In that sense I speak of architecture as “inhabited infrastructure”. Secondly, in building that platform for global capital, architecgture and engineering, urban planning become political, whether they want it or not. Why? Because that platform reprsents and expanded terrain, that you can measure in kilometers in all these cities. That expanded terrain inevitably wil mean the displacement of others –low-profit firms and low-income households are the most dramatic cases. In this process, the city moves from a civic space to a politicized space. Politics is wired into urban space.
Liane Lefaivre: Sounds like this is an attempt to, if you’ll pardon the term, “urbanize architecture.” And, frankly, to architectural ears it sounds very foreign. It strikes me that you too would have trouble figuring out what a lot of architects have to say about the city. Urbanists and architects are apparently both talking about the city, but in totally different terms. I think this is what is so interesting about this Biennale. It is jumpstarting a discussion that was cut off about 30 years ago.
