Predatory Formations in High Finance, Cities & Housing | Saskia Sassen | Institute of Design (ID)

Описание: What happens when high finance turns cities, housing, and even land into abstract “assets” and the consequences disappear from view?

In this lecture at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, sociologist Saskia Sassen unpacks what she calls “predatory formations”: extractive financial systems dressed in Wall Street suits and algorithmic math. She shows how these systems generate invisible expulsions from mass foreclosures and empty luxury towers to foreign-owned property that no local eye can truly “see.”

Along the way, she explores:
• How high finance differs from traditional banking and why it’s fundamentally extractive
• Dark pools, asset-backed securities, and the housing crisis that displaced millions of households
• Cities as spaces where people without formal power still make politics and history
• Why we need new analytic tactics and cross-disciplinary ways of seeing complex systems
• How designers, innovators, and leaders might respond to these invisible structures

If you’re an emerging design leader or innovation leader working in large organizations, this talk helps you see the economic and urban systems your work sits inside so you can move from treating symptoms to engaging the systems themselves.

Link to article: https://saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publica...

About the speaker
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering, and digitization as three key variables running through her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated into over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them multiple doctor honoris causa, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election to the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

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