Lecturer explains complexities in the global economy

The Department of Architectural Engineering held on April 10, 2017 a lecture on complexity and brutality in today’s world, presented by the professor of Sociology at Columbia University, Sasika Sassen. The lecture was organized in collaboration with the International academy of Arts- Palestine (IAAP), and the A.M Qattan Foundation.

Sassen drew connections to illuminate the systemic logic of expulsions. She pointed out that post-World War II era, the critical components of Western market economies were fixed-capital intensity, standardized production, and the building of new housing in cities, and new towns.

According to Sassen, the hegemony of capitalism and liberal patterns affects the surrounding environment. “Today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice. Soaring income, inequality, unemployment, expands populations of the displaced and accelerating destruction of land and water bodies.”

“The sophisticated knowledge that created today's financial "instruments" is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the worlds’ have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots,” she stated.

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She won the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences and is author of Cities in a World Economy (4th edition 2012).