Her main fields of study are immigration and the role of major cities in the management of the international economy. One of her greatest scientific contributions was her concept of the ‘global city’, now accepted and employed in all the social sciences.
Saskia Sassen is an internationally renowned sociologist, both from the point of view of her teaching and research activities in Europe and the United States and for the scope and influence of her ideas.
For Sassen, global cities form networks that concentrate decision-making and new relationships between territory, authority and rights, thereby diminishing the role of borders. They also generate major inequalities and social segregation due, among other reasons, to differences in access to information technology. As an advisor to the United Nations, Sassen has carried out crucial research on sustainable human settlements.
Statement by Saskia Sassen on being bestowed with the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences:
"It is a great honour to receive the Prince of Asturias Award and be a part of the community of those who have received this accolade. And now it is my turn to honour the great institution that grants it".
Saskia Sassen was born in The Hague (Netherlands) on 5th January 1949 and obtained her PhD from the University of Notre Dame (USA) in 1974. She is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Co-Chair of The Committee on Global Thought at the same institution. She is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Saskia Sassen is one of the most prestigious international sociologists in fields such as the social, economic and political dimensions of globalization and urban sociology. She is the only woman to appear among the top ten social scientists in the world, as ranked by the Social Science Citation Index of the last decade, which also include Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman and Alain Touraine, all Prince of Asturias Award laureates. Her fields of study also encompass phenomena such as immigration, global cities and changes within the liberal state resulting from current transnational conditions. One of her greatest scientific contributions was her concept of the ‘global city’, now accepted and used worldwide. According to Sassen, the control and management of the world economy emanates from these metropolitan areas, in which economic and financial power as well as that stemming from the main telecommunications networks are concentrated. The main centres of world power are likewise found here, where vital information is generated for top-level decision-making. She also analyses the problems that arise in these cities, such as the impoverishment of the middle classes and the difficulties in accessing telecommunications that create social inequalities and social segregation. In another field and contrary to the dominant approach that considers the global and the national to be exclusive realms, Sassen examines how the disassembling of the national realm (territory, authority and rights), in which denationalizing and deglobalizing dynamics have coincided, constitutes a key process to establishing the global realm. In another field and contrary to the traditional approach, Sassen holds that ‘global’ and ‘national’ are not mutually exclusive concepts and that, as a result of globalization, territory, authority and rights do not always coincide with national spaces.
Her books have been translated into 21 languages, the most significant among which are The Mobility of Labor and Capital (1988), The Global City (1991), Cities in a World Economy (1994), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006), A Sociology of Globalization (2007) and Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects (2007). She has likewise published articles in newspapers such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, International Herald Tribune, The Financial Times and Clarín, among others. She has just completed for UNESCO a 5-year project on sustainable human settlement whose conclusions have been published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (UK).
Advisor to a number of international bodies and for several United Nations projects, she is member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, of the independent organisation Council on Foreign Relations and of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). In 2007, she won the Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus Award from the University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Future Mentor Award from the University of Chicago. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Delft (Netherlands), Poitiers (France), Gent (Belgium) and Warwick (UK) and from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
This is the second of eight Prince of Asturias Awards to be bestowed this year for the thirty-third time. Each Prince of Asturias Award, which date back to 1981, comprises a diploma, a Joan Miró sculpture representing and symbolising the Awards, an insignia bearing the Foundation's coat of arms, and a cash prize of 50,000 Euros. The awards will be presented in the autumn in Oviedo at a grand ceremony chaired by H.R.H. the Prince of Asturias.
