Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist known for developing the concept of the global city in her 1991 book The Global City, which examined New York, London, and Tokyo as a new kind of urban node produced by the globalization of economic activity. She argued that even as production and routine economic functions dispersed around the world, the specialized financial, legal, and business services needed to coordinate that dispersed activity became concentrated in a small number of cities, giving those cities a strategic command function in the global economy disproportionate to their share of overall economic output. Sassen's work reframed urban sociology around the city's position within global economic networks and shaped subsequent research on globalization, migration, and the changing geography of state power.