Cities Are The New Global Frontier Zone

“Whereas historically the frontier lay in the far stretches of colonial empires, today’s frontier zone is in our large, messy global cities.”

Today, empire grows inward as much as outward. Urban space is increasingly the field in which power reshapes itself and stakes its ground.

And yet, argues urbanist Saskia Sassen in this essay, cities are also the frontier at which the powerless fight—and the particular qualities of urban spaces can be “hacked” toward a redistribution of power in a way that would have never become possible at the historical “frontier” demarcating one territory from another.

Sassen believes that, while the middle class is “decimated” by the structures of most contemporary cities, cities are also the “strategic frontier zone” for the most powerless—the “disadvantaged, outsiders, and minorities”. For only in cities, where people are crowded against one another and everyone depends on strangers in one way or another, it’s hard not to have to confront the Other.

The visible presence of this critical mass of disadvantaged groups in cities can be used for leverage, and for the invention of informal political processes. The urban subject is “at home with enormous differences” and urbanity can allow us to “hack our essentialisms”. 

Sassen is referring to "essentialisms" like identity, but also such as city and periphery, nation-state and extra-national. For example: as is increasingly happening in the US, cities can claim themselves as sovereign entities (to an extent) and have the power to counteract disempowering national forces. If the world is urbanizing, she seems to be saying, let's urbanize politics.