 Ond oeddwn i'n ddweud ond mae hi wedi'i gael yma ar y rai ddweud yn y rhan. Y dydyn ni wedi gweld eich rai ei wneud ar y bydd yn ymdweud, mae chi'n bwysig ar gyfer cael cyhoedd. Felly mae'n mynd i ddim yn dda i, mae hi'n ddim yn fflau, mae'n adeiladau, mae'n adeiladau cyfredeb, ond mae'n ddweud yn y rai ddweud yn dweud yn ddweud a'r cyfrodd i'r dweud yn ei wneud. Yn y ddweud yn y rhan ymddiol yn y rhan, Ie ddaeth eich cwmhreit eich cyfnod yn yr unig iawn. Mae'r cyfrifysgol yng Nghymru, mae'r cyfrifysgol o'r cyfrifysgol, yna'r cyfrifysgol gyda'r hyn yn gwneud hynny. Mae'r cyfrifysgol yn ysgolion oedd yn fath o'r gweithio yw'r cyfrifysgol ymdano y cwmhreit yw ddefnyddio'r cyfrifysgol o'r cyfrifysgol yw ddiddorol yn eu cyfrifysgol ymdano. Dyna'r cyfrifysgol yn ymddangos y ddechrau. Mae'r byw yw'n gweithio'r unig gwael ysgolwyddoedd ac yn ffio gweithio'r pwyllt o'r pwyllt yn dynol. Felly mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. A gweithio'r cyfrifiadau, sy'n dweud yw'n gweithio'r pwyllt. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifiadau, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r cyfrifiadau a llwythydd maes i gweithio'r llyfr ysgolwyr i gydweithio'r llwythydd. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifiadau. Mae'r robeddd Robert Lloesland, profesor o'r ffasologi, ymddiwr i'r gweithio yn gwlad ar ôl o'r Cymru, ac yn ddifrif i'r gweithio'r Cymru, mae'n gweithio ar gweithlo'r gweithio'r gweithio gŵr fel y gweithio'r cymdeithas o'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n ddweud o'r ffath o'r ysgrifetol, mae'n rhaid i ddweud, mae'n ddweud o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. But I think the point to really stress is she is a public intellectual. We've had a lot of discussion in the last few days about who's an academic. Who's an activist. Of course all these things should collapse and we should always remember that intellectual thought is inherently political and I think professor Sassen's work is an exemplary, a wonderful example of that. She's written in many newspapers if you go on to the website and search her name. She's very generous in the amount of interviews she gives on her radio appearances etc etc o'r newid o'r ddweud o'r pwylltu. Rydyn ni'n ddim yn ymwneud bod yw'r cyfnodd yn ymwneud i mi ddod o'r newid ymddiol, y dyfodd o'r cyfnodd yn y lles. Yr hyn yn ddod i'r sefydlai'r cyffredinio newid ymddiol sy'n gyfwyd o'r cyfnodd o'r ddysgu yn ymddiol, ma'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd yn amlwys sy'n cyfnodd, cyffredin ni'n ddysgu'r cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd. ac yn mynd i ddim yn gallu eich rhan oes yn ymweld i gael i'r bydd i ddechrau. Felly, mae'r byd ymgyrch yn ynrhyw ystod yn ynwydigol. Fy enw yw'r bwrdd ffwyd i'r byd ymweld i'r byd ymweld i'r byd ymweld i'r byd. A'r byd efallai nawr yn ymweld i'r byd i globaliaid, oedd yma yn mynd yn cyfnod ymweld i'r byd ymweld i'r byd i'r byd i eich rhan o erasio, wrth gyffredin, ond yn astud ydych yn ddefnyddio'r ffyrdd y ffordd, i'r faf oed yn gyflawniwer i'r cyllidion oherwydd y consider ac mae'r rhwng yn dweud olygu ag y bydd y c guffredin. Y cyfrigerdau o'r eisoesig y dyfodol, i where hefyd cyfwyr, y cyfrigerdau o'r syniadau, i whiffrolych y bydd y gwybod yn latwch, a ydych chi'n falchog ar hyn, os y Llyfrgell hefyd y cyfrigerdau eraill o culligiaf y bydd y cyfrigerdau mae roedd y cyfrifyddoedd i wneud yng ngyffrifyddol. Doedd wneud iddo gorfa ac yn hynny'r gwahol ac yn ei repair o'r cyfrifyddol yng ngyfrifyddol a ddiw i'r hynny'n digwydd. Fy enw'n edrych ni'n drwy'r golygu yng nghymru popeth o ran arno ddyngen. Rydyn ni'n credu y cael y cyfrifyddol yn ceisio. Yr iddyn ni'n mynd i'r rhagl, yr ysbellydd yma yw'r 21 yma. Daerwch yn y 21 yma hwn yn y bydd yn weithio newydd, but old tendencies which have been there which emerge in new ways. So, in her talk today, which is based on her book Expulsions, Professor Sassan will be looking at what's happening also in the spaces of the city, and the new threat that's emerging, if you like, under the neoliberal order, which is where we see growing cases of inequality, violence, structural violence, and increasingly a culture which is being dictated by corporate capitalism, and she's especially to talk about investment in property, which is a form of saving. So, investment now is no longer about building infrastructure, which is to the benefit of all citizens, but is something which is exclusionary. So, she's using the term expulsions in its widest possible sense. So, it is talking about the margin, making visible the complexities and the extremities of what's happening under the system at the moment, and how that's impacting on ideas of sort of global citizenship. So, I'm going to hand over to Professor Sassan, and please join me in giving her a very warm welcome. Thank you very much. I really want to thank all of you for being here, but very especially Professor Parvati Rahman, if I got that right, and Kerry Benjamin, whom I drove almost crazy, I believe. You're camouflaging it rather nicely. But really, it gives me much pleasure. I understand that you come from several different places, and I love talking to students, graduate students, also undergraduates, so it's a great pleasure. Let me throw myself promptly into the subject, and I should say that I was asked to talk about my new book. I did bring a second set of slides, slides that deal with the question of immigration and membership, but the little committee decided I should focus on my new book. My new book focuses on a range of issues that move away a bit of what you're focused on, I think. But it is part of the ground-level condition that, in a way, is also generating some of the particular processes on migrations, diasporas, et cetera, that you are focused on. So think of it that way. Oh, I realize, I don't have a... How do I move my... Okay, fine, fine, got it. Now, the focus in this book called Expulsions is on something that I call the systemic edge. The systemic edge is not the border. The systemic edge has nothing to do with interstate borders. In fact, I argue that in many of our countries, the operational space of the economy, society as an incorporated entity, et cetera, et cetera, is beginning to shrink. And so that actually the systemic edge means that there is terrain that fits within the nation state that is not really operational. It is there. There are people on there. There are activities on there, but it's not part of the core, if you want. And so I use a term of economic cleansing, our measures, et cetera. It's like they evict all kinds of conditions. So there is a kind of a space that in its full materiality is invisible, really a set of spaces. Now, for me, one way of describing the systemic edge is the point where a familiar condition, a familiar process becomes so extreme that it actually will lose it, conceptually, statistically, et cetera, in short, we lose it in terms of the existing categories for gathering data, recognizing what is data, for interpreting data, for analysis. So it is mostly very material. So it's not a question of what these eyes can see. It's a question of what the theoretical eye sees, the statistical eye, the conceptual eye. So that is a bit the argument. Now, partly this book, this is one of my little books. Big books each takes me 10 years. I don't know what it is for you, but I like to say when I go around, I am of a certain age. I feel I've been in the academy for 120 years. I exaggerate clearly, but like 25 years. And I really like going around and saying, I'm the author. In my 30, I exaggerate a bit. In my 30 years of research, I'm the author of three books, which is not true. But the big books, which are the ones that really count for me, each one has taken me 10 years. Isn't that astounding when you think about it? Only the academy allows you to sort of use an enormous amount of wasted time in there, where your mind sort of dribbles. But I do think that temporal immersion that you live with for so long and it often cuts across, if you want, many historical, not many, but many, many historical moments actually mean something. But anyhow, in this particular little book, I address sort of if you want the explanations, the master explanations that we have for our current period, which in a way are crises and inequality, I would say. This is sort of the other terms of the moment, certainly. And I argue, crises is actually a feature of capitalism. Capitalism would shrivel without crises. Capitalism is profoundly destructive. It needs to invade other sectors. And when you take the mother of all the forms of power in capitalism, finance, finance is basically highly destructive and continuously in crises. So crises is not enough to mark, to capture whatever is particular, specific, a bit different about this current period we're in, which probably has been going on for ten years in my reading. It begins to constitute itself almost 30 years ago in the late 1980s. And then it begins to spread to other parts of the world. The other category, inequality, very important, I've been writing about that long before it became fashionable. I remember being much criticised when I, in the late 80s, were saying, were moving towards a profound transformation in terms of job distributions and income distributions. And we were going to growing inequality, et cetera. And by then, at that time, it was not acceptable. But ultimately inequality is a distribution. And a distribution is not an explanation. The explanatory power of a distribution lies in that distribution. But it does not necessarily explain the distribution itself. So I came up with this term expulsions, which I really distinguish from notions of social exclusion, which is its own powerful, well-established category. I'm not playing with that at all. I argue that expulsions is precisely that moment at the systemic edge. It is a conceptual expelling, a physical expelling, an expelling that takes on many particular forms. There are whole anthropologies that one could build around that systemic edge, or the diversity of systemic edges. So I, in the book, actually the chapter that really got me going a lot, which has nothing to do with your subject. But I put all my cards on the table here. It's a chapter that I call Dead Land, Dead Water. And it's partly a little engagement with the category climate change. Climate change sounds so beautiful. And I say we need to name it. Dead land, dead water. I say we should show in kindergarten maps of each of our countries with that which is Dead Land. We have a lot of it, by the way, in the United States, especially vast amounts of Dead Land. And sort of say, you know, mommy and daddy did that. You know, we have to begin to, that is sort of the mindset, you know, of this little book. Now, to do the kind of research that I do, and really I expose, I emphasize, I've been doing this for a very long time, but now I have given it a kind of a shape. And so I have been giving a talk, a talk where the whole talk is what I call Before Method. I sort of, I am one of those who does not think that you can simply throw out the dominant categories of an epoch. Though I have long contested and engaged the dominant categories of an epoch. The Global City was one of those book that you mentioned. I don't think we can just simply throw them out of the window. But we can engage them. We can interrogate them, interpolate them. And so one of the zones that I have understood really matters to me in the kind of research which is oriented also towards discovering and naming, making visible that marks my own research, is really this notion of the fuzzy edges of paradigmatic knowledge. I think paradigmatic knowledge has a strong core. That's why it's paradigmatic. It comes out of extraordinary intellectual fights and combats, you know. It's got to be taken seriously. It's a collective product in many ways. But I also think that at times of deep transformations and by deep transformation I do not mean something that changes completely. I mean deep and that can be partial. The core of the paradigm becomes a weak source for explaining. And so at that point I think that the fuzzy edges and especially I do a lot of stuff between because I have a degree in my PhDs in Economics and Sociology to very different disciplines actually. So I'm really interested in fuzzy edges where the fuzziness allows you to mix forms of knowledge, to mix paradigmatic forms of knowledge, but precisely in that fuzzy weak edge. The zone before method in other words is a zone of freedom. I'm playing off the famous book After Method. I don't know if people know that book. But I really care about the before method. Before I re-enter the disciplining of method, which as a social scientist sooner or later you have to enter, I want that space where I can explore, position myself vis-à-vis the object of study the way I want. Totally anarchic, totally arbitrary in terms of the existing paradigm. Some of it might coincide but much of it does not. So in that sense truly a zone before method. Now one of the ways in which I then deal with that to give it a bit of a shape is a notion of a tactical analytics. Literally tactical. In other words that positioning vis-à-vis the object of study. And so here are some of these analytic tactics very simply put. One is the need to actively destabilise, stabilise meanings. No complex meaning is stable forever. But certain meanings really acquire a stability. If you look at the post-war period in Europe and in North America and parts of South America the Keynesian decades, there was a kind of stability when you said what is the state? What is the economy? What is the middle class? Those meanings today I argue are profoundly unstable. I've done a lot of this research in what I think is my best book Territory Authority Rights which is one of those that took me ten years. But anyhow there I really went into depth into this. The question there for me was how do complex systems change? They don't change by changing everything. They change by repositioning critical elements. So out of that comes also this notion of destabilised meaning. We still can use the economy. We can still use immigration. But they're unstable meanings. I will get to this question of immigration also a bit later. And then secondly in the shadows of powerful explanations. You know what don't I see when I invoke a powerful explanation? What don't I see when I say immigrant? Well I don't see for instance that by far most immigrants are citizens. There are about ten million people without a nationality. You probably all know that right? But there are 350 million immigrants. They're all citizens. What happens to the debate on immigration if we begin to say you know what? We're all citizens and then the question becomes who are we the citizens if we're so easily degraded and if we're so easily seen as sort of illegal humans. Because that is basically you know how very often they get treated anyhow. But I'm obsessing right now which comes partly out of my territory book but is the category territory. And it comes back to my systemic edges, the difference with interstate borders. I think that we need to work analytically with a category territory in a way that allows it to take on more meanings than the meaning that has dominated that category for the last 100 years which is national sovereign territory. When a complex term has only one meaning, no matter how complex it is not working analytically. So I want to make territory work analytically. And to give you sort of one example of what I mean at the extreme is to argue that dead land is a kind of territory. I just want to make dead land work analytically. I should say just quick footnote by territory I mean a complex category territory is not land, it's not terrain, it's not ground, it's not space, it's not earth. It is only partly material. A kind of materiality that has embedded logics of power and modernity takes on its most developed form in the modern state and embedded logics of claim making, which at its best in our western modernity again is citizenship. And I argue for instance in the work that I've done on high finance that high finance makes territory. The black pools and finance which account for about 70% of financial trading. They fall outside any regulatory framework. The data that we have on that comes from the Central Bank of the United States. This is not me the lefty making it up. The chair, the head of the American Central Bank said about 70% of financial trading is happening in black pools and we do not know what happens in them. I argue for finance to do that. It has made a territory. Clearly it's a territory that is in very good part digital but in some part it is not because it needs vast computers to do all of this. So there is always this materiality and so I want to capture in that case a territory which albeit is mostly digital is also material. And then the making of it all. I'm sort of in this little book one of my filiers, a sort of flashlight to navigate very complex multifaceted domains. I bring it down to a very simple proposition which is partial. Powerful but partial. And I don't want to be burdened by inherited genealogies of meaning, confining cultures of how we interpret etc. No. So it is a bit brutal. So I say we make, I actually love that, I love we make. We make this. Right now you begin to understand what I'm getting. So internally it displays people. They keep growing, keep growing. We made that. That is not simply a function of a function of a function. I argue we made it. Again this is a partial approach. But the purpose is to alert, to wake up to etc etc. We make this. And this when you look at it, this is an achievement. I'm using achievement ironically. We managed in 20 years to eliminate the we is clearly an ambiguous we, a rhetoricised we where it doesn't matter. It's some of us somewhere with power, without power, whatever. So 20 years, billions and billions of cubic metres of water gone. One of the biggest seas reduced to that little dark tronch that you see. You see what I'm talking about, right? The third picture. We made this. We managed to melt down. And the permafrost is melting too. Producing a methane. We haven't experienced that yet. It's still not totally coming out. Which is a methane gas that we have never experienced. So that's how strong it is. So I say these are capabilities. Clearly I'm not using it in the Amartya scent. Positive scent. And I frankly in my work I use capability. And I say we cannot say that it's inherently positive. What is positive time one? At time B it might not be so positive, right? We experience that continuously over time, over history. So I just want to emphasise capabilities as something that, you know, the making part, et cetera. And that it is a variable. Now to sort of bring together the many different things that I want to bring together under one umbrella in this type of analysis. I need an ordering. Something that orders. So one rhetorical question one might ask is what is the steam engine of our epoch? That capability, both good and bad, which was present far beyond its own narrow operational space which has left big traces, genealogies of meaning and of making that we cannot easily get rid of. That kind of power. Now usually, and I hope that you're all thinking well, what would you think is a steam engine of our epoch? Usually people think information technology and I think that is a good answer. But at this point I would argue partly as a provocation, partly for the sake of debate, that information technologies have become infrastructural. An infrastructure, quick definition, necessary but indeterminate. How we use it can vary enormously. Train tracks can be used to carry bombs or to carry food for hungry people. A kind of necessary but indeterminate. By the way, footnote, I'm very interested in indeterminacy. I think we have tended to really overlook indeterminacy in our research as social scientists, etc. Maybe other disciplines have not failed that way. One way then of defining what kind of a steam engine I'm talking about is that which can make a new ordering. It doesn't mean changing everything. But it means that some very powerful thing or what is in and what is out. So I argue that while information technology is a good element to bring up as the steam engine of our epoch, at the same time I think there is something that has been far more powerful though dependent on and in the digital and in that sense the digital is infrastructural. And that is high finance. Now, you can see that. Are you sure you wanted me to talk about this? We're going deep now into, but never ask a financier to explain high finance to you. Is anybody here a financier? No, I often have a lot of financiers sitting in the audience and if they're not super powerful they like what I say. If they are the elite financiers they don't like it at all. Now, so finance is different from traditional banking. The traditional bank sells money it has. Finance, and this is the trick, sells something it does not have. And in that selling what it does not have lies both its creativity, its got to invent bridges into something, and its danger because it has to invade. And so it has been doing this for 20 years. It's only in the last 10 years that it has started to invade the fragile, the vulnerable, the entities with limited resources and then it begins to hit back in a very visible way. We begin to actually, if you are modest, you are poor, you are poor maybe not, but modest, the little firms you begin to feel the impact, you feel the aggression. But it has been going on in my reading, the way I look at these materials since really the 1980s with Wall Street Ground Zero, London, the partner, but the weaker partner now London is totally dominant and then it sort of spreads to all these, we have about 100 local cities now that are in a very tragic terrain, both for the powerless I argue and especially for the powerful. Now, so finance as capability is a danger and that is, I argue the steam engine now, I want to show you just a few things. So one is, and I wish I had a pointer but I don't, look at the growth curve of this. Now 201 to 207, that is a very sharp growth rate and in the numbers that are attached here is less than a trillion up to 62 trillion. Think of anything that you are familiar with or know about that has that growth curve. Now just to situate, those 62 trillion are more than global GDP of all the countries in the world including China at that time, which was more like 54 trillion. Secondly, those 62 trillion is only 10% of global finance as measured by outstanding derivatives which is a classic measure, which was 630 trillion. Now when I do these data I go digging and digging, I say what means it, what does it mean because finance is not about money, so this is an indicator of the money part. So then I ask for instance, what's the actual currency in circulation at that time? In other words, currency not as in Bitcoin but currency as in officially produced currency by the central banks of all the countries in the world, which at that point was about 230 trillion. So you know what we name as a monetary measure, it's something else and so one way of putting it simply is a capability. Now I want to show you now a couple of conditions that indicate that this extreme form of power actually moves into very modest settings. But it's not visible as such, you know, it's a kind of invisible. So here just very quickly, well I'm going to skip this. So when modest neighbourhoods, I don't want to develop this too much, but the point here was as finance is invading more and more sectors, at some point it's running out of high value assets, something that has a kind of reality attached to it. It's reduced, this is the United States, which is ground zero for all of this, to very modest houses and assets. The high level circuit of capital of investors say please give me an instrument that is not simply something based on a derivative, based on an interest rates, blah blah blah, something that has real stuff in it. Well the only thing more or less left in the United States was some very modest houses, very modest. The purpose of this instrument was not to enable people to have a house, not at all. The purpose was to generate an asset backed security for the high finance circuit. To do that they had to camouflage, hide the low value of those modest assets. Tricky, very tricky actually to do that, because it's representing an asset, but what they do in, they trot in very high grade debt, but they can sell it as asset backed security. Now this process meant at its high point, very short brutal history, it's now declared illegal the instrument, truly abusive. At its high point it meant that if you were one of those agents that was trying to get people to sign, all you wanted was sign, sign, these were people who never thought they could own a house. And so sign, sign, you're fine, you're fine, you don't have to pay anything for five years, all they wanted was the signature on the contract. You had to get, if you were one of those agents, 500 of those contracts signed in a week to make it work. According to the United States Central Bank, 15 million such contracts were signed. Let's remember a household can be one person, two people, three people, et cetera. Now here's the brutal result. They got all they needed out of it, more or less. Many of the agents went broke because eventually it doesn't work anymore. So here you have numbers every year, 1.2 million for closure. Now for closure is not an eviction, but most of these according to the central bank, 14 million households have, somebody doesn't like what I'm saying, by the end of 14 were out of their homes. So you have these and then it goes on, the first half of 2014 and so now sort of it's dribbling to nothing. Now I like to make 14 million households a bit Pythagorean as a number. 14 million is very hard for the mind to understand what that is. So I'm Dutch. My country has 16 million inhabitants. It's like a voice from upstairs says, okay everybody on the Dutch territory out. Where you go I don't know, but out. And now we're going to repeat the exercise. That is 14 million households, in other words about 30 million people. That is an extraordinary amount of materiality and it is invisible. Because they are lost, I mean some of them double up, some of them we have thousands and thousands and thousands of people living in 10 cities in the United States. The same 10 as the international refugee system. They double up, they go homeless, the biggest homeless encampment in the United States after 208 is in Silicon Valley. And I have video, and if you're standing on top, Silicon Valley is a valley, so it has hills and it has. The mansions are on top, Google Castle is on top, Google Castle is hyper modern, but you know what I'm talking about. And if you're standing up on the hill, that hill, where that encampment is, you don't see it, oh you see other trees. And so you come from the bottom of the hill and then you see it. And it was mostly young people. And they had indicators, they had, I didn't mean they had indicators, I mean they had in quotation marks, and this is an indicator, the most expensive sneakers I had ever seen and the most extraordinary bikes, because in LA you need transport, you need wheels. And so of course you go homeless, they probably signed some of these contracts, and they couldn't pay, suddenly there was nothing. They were fired, you know, mixes of things. So a lot of the people who lost ground were sort of modest middle class and some who were on their way to be a bit less modest. Now Europe thinks it doesn't have this problem. This instrument is a brilliant instrument. And I don't say it ironically, it's a lethal instrument. It kills, basically. But it is brilliant. And so it spreads. It's illegal in the United States, but not in Europe. It is moving into Europe and wait till it hits India with its growing middle classes and China with its expanding middle classes. So here is a graph that shows you the high point. It was a very short, brutal history. That is sort of dribling to an end. This is Europe. Now look, I wish I had this pointer, look, among the highest foreclosure rates. Now foreclosure is an eviction notice, but we know de facto that many of these foreclosures become evictions. Germany is among the highest. Germany who does everything so well. I don't mean to attack any German, but I'm just attacking Schäuble, Mr Schäuble. I have a thing with Mr Schäuble. Anyhow, so Germany is... That is every year, this is not cumulative. You know, the numbers are significantly smaller, but these are households. Now Hungary is the worst off in terms just of actual numbers, which is a million households are out of their home. Hungary is a very small country. The other biggie is Latvia, almost 400,000. In other words, the massive destruction of an emergent middle class. I mean this is unbelievable. And then among the lowest ones are nice countries, Denmark, the Netherlands. A bit less nice nowadays. All the social benefits have been cut a bit. Just a bit, but cut. Doesn't look good. Now, the outcome, and now I'm going to switch gears, the outcome here can be read. There are many interpretations, but one interpretation that you wind up with is a lot of empty urban land. Because these are urban. A lot in some rural, whatever, or a little gated community on top of a hill. No, this is urban. And I want to show you another mutation of urban land. So I'm going to take you now in a direction with, it's a bit more concrete, rather than looking at businesses and at financial markets. I want to take you into something that is a bit more concrete, and that sort of tells a tale rather quickly as opposed to having to talk endlessly to extract a tale, you know, from data. Now, this is what's happening here. So this is total national and foreign investment in cities. This excludes site development, as they call it. Now, let me give you an example. And this is yearly, by the way. So it's not a small amount, year after year. It really takes off after 208, after the crisis. And so let me give you an example of what is excluded in the case of New York. A very large Chinese corporation, construction company, bought a huge piece of land in New York City called Atlantic Yards. I don't know if people have, it's huge. And it now is, it's sort of a degraded or an partly emptied logistical site, site for warehousing. So it's thinned out, a bit that used to have a bit of kind of industrial base too. And so now you have artists, little shops, little crafts work operations, and then you still have the old sort of warehouse functions and some industrial. Well, this Chinese company has some other ideas for it. So all of that is going to go out and going to be replaced with 14 huge luxuries. What else? Apartment towers. Now here's an interesting urban moment. In other words, they are going to raise the density. Very, very much. And for many people, the way they are measuring urbanization is density. If it's dense, it's got to be a city. I truly contest that. So I want to recover, and this is like a little footnote, but it weaves itself into the narrative a bit. So I want to recover a notion of city where the city really, density is not enough to mark city or city-ness. That the city, in one way, so what I do, back to my analytic tactics, I need to remove myself, I need to destabilize the meaning of urbanization. Enough, enough that I'm so far away from it conceptually that I have to rediscover, well, what the hell is a city? I do that with things that are a little less self-evident. So I argue that a city is actually a complex but incomplete system. And in that mixture of complexity and incompleteness lies its capacity to outlive other complex systems that are close, think all major corporations in the world, also all their forms of corporations, finished. They have not lived a full life. The last 20 years, we have seen the loss of hundreds of thousands of firms. But cities have outlived many different historical periods. Think of forms of organized power finished, you know, across the centuries. So in that sense, the city has a very special space. Now just to nail down one aspect of its specialness that I happen to care about, the city is a space, I argue, where those without power get to make economy, culture, a history. Think immigrant communities. You know, the immigrants arrive with modest means, they'll transform a neighborhood. A degraded neighborhood becomes a thriving immigrant economy, immigrant with lots of cultural things attached to it. That is something that the city enables. So the city, and so the global city, for instance, for me is a space, number one is the frontier, I argue, this is, again, a footnote. I argue that today's frontier is not that the edges of empires like it was, you know, in the 1800s, in the 1700s. Today's frontier is in the center of our big cities, where extreme forms of power and extreme forms of powerlessness actually have an encounter. I define the frontier as a space where actors from different worlds have an encounter for which there are no established rules. That is sort of my, sort of a bit conceptualized way of defining the frontier. So the frontier in the United States, your frontier goes, I don't know to when, here in the UK. You know, I really, that's a story that I, a story that I don't understand very well. But in the United States clearly when the Europeans come, the whole of the United States eventually becomes a frontier zone, right? It becomes conquered, destroyed. The frontier is a very violent, the British Empire in Africa, many examples, we don't like examples. And I argue that today, that notion, if you think Britain wanted to own or access the whole of Africa, control. Spain wanted to control the whole of Latin America. Today, that is not. When China buys land, or there are 15 governments, I don't want to single out China. When they buy land to grow, you know, your urban land grabs in the global south, the aim is not to control the whole of those countries. The aim is to use what you need and get out of there. So I see many and the same thing here. So this kind of investment basically transforms urban tissue into mega projects. A mega project eliminates dilutes, urban tissue, little streets, little squares, little this, little that, little office of the government, you know, a public office where people go and it transforms everything into a mega project which is private, with guards guarding it. So back to the city as a space where those without power get to make a history. Those without power do not get to make a history in an office park. You know what I mean by office park, right? A private corporate thing, it's controlled. They need the low wage workers, but those low wage workers are out there at night. It's a controlled space. You do not become a maker of a history in that. So in that sense for me this issue of this type of buying, and this is every year, you understand, is very problematic. Now, I wanted to mention something that many of you who, if you have spent time in London, know. So some people say, well, this is gentrification. It's that too. The question is if the deep process can be fully explained with the language of gentrification. And I say no. And so the good example is the Royal Cataris. You know what I'm talking about? They now own more of London than the Queen of England. Mind you, the Queen of England is not the main owner of London. But you know, it's a good nice juxtaposition. And the Cataris now will own Canary Wharf, right? So to simply say gentrification, gentrification is at some level a correct description. The street level, the people. I think a deeper dynamic. And that is why I talked about first about empty urban land, now about this mutation of urban land. Before I just want to quickly show you. So the dribble, I'm working with a data set of 100s. The 100 cities that are the main destinations for foreign investment. That basically is either buying buildings because it really wants to buy urban land. It's not about the buildings. Or is storing its capital. Because there's a lot of money at the top that doesn't know where to go now. They have just done the last thing and now they don't know what to do with it. So the last frontier, so to speak, is urban land. Safe investment and rural land. I'll get to that too. So here you have sort of this, the top cities and then it dribbles, dribbles. It's amazing the 100 cities. Rotterdam, Amsterdam, you know you have a whole bunch of cities, but then cities in several different parts of the world. And if you only take foreign investment, London is number one. I by the way, I think that whether it's foreign or national does not matter that much. I think the issue is corporate. So the minimum, I forgot to add, the minimum investment as using indicator for New York is investments that are at least $5 million. This is not you buy a little apartment because you like London and you want to come to the opera regularly now. It has nothing to do with that. That's happening too and that's fine. And again I want to emphasize whether it's foreign or like the Kazakhstanis for instance, wow they have discovered New York. The Chinese and the Kazakhstanis are the latest massive buyers in New York. Somehow I don't mind whether it's a nationality question, that doesn't matter. But it's sort of the implication really, this privatizing of urban land. Where are we going with this? So one question that I ask after many, many more such examples, which are these little micro innovations, if you want, in how we organize our economies, how we organize public, what was once public space, et cetera, et cetera. So I sort of ask, are we really dealing with the new systemics? And here I want you to bring in the slide, rather than everything that can be said about it, because I want to sort of use the case of Greece for a minute as an example. So when you hear the IMF, the European Central Bank and Mr Shoribl, you speak about Greece, it's like Greece is this terrible, terrible, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad child in the European Union. And we are all so very, no, we're not. So this is the slide that I have in my book where I show that all of these countries experience, I love these single lines, you know, they are rather complex content, but anyhow. And so you see that also Germany. There was a systemic crisis, we are living with a systemic crisis. Germany goes up, you know why, unlike the others which sort of bubble, you know, not so brilliantly. Germany, does anybody know why Germany? Not because they are German, eh? That would not be the answer. But Germany, because Germany has the leading, intermediate manufacturing sector in the world, machines that make machines. Machines that make machines are the key machines, you understand? The whole world needs them, there are very few countries which have, and the United States in particular area in the Chicago in the Midwest also has these very, very, I mean it's just a level of manufacturing has nothing to do with making an ice box or whatever. Or one of these laptops. And that is a sector, as all manufacturing tends to be, that is very distributed. You have a huge middle sector there of very well trained workers and very well trained designers for that stuff and very well trained, whatever, you know? And so that creates a sort of a possibility, but the German economy as I showed before is also suffering. But the main point I'm trying to make is that we are witnessing a new systemic, you know, a systemic turn if you want. Now, I wanted to show you a few things that capture this whole talk about inequality, et cetera, right? I like to nail it down with some concrete. So look at this, corporate, and here I want to point out a particular trend. Corporate profits after tax. United States exhibit number one. Don't think that that straight line means nothing was happening. No, but it was below billions. So it goes up. In the 1980s you can see it goes up nice, nice, nice. Then it has a crisis that I would say lasted two hours, it lasted two years. And then it goes up more than before the crisis. Because the trend continues up, up, up. Now on the one hand all these miseries, all these expulsions. And on the other hand a capacity to capture what there is to capture that becomes more accentuated after the crisis. The crisis served to create a crisis in the mind of the state, in the mind of elites that then enabled this corporate sector to do better than ever. I have a lot of stuff on the financial, but this is not the moment to talk about that. And if you look at corporate assets, the crisis lasted about 30, about half an hour. You see that? I mean you barely notice it. So this still, and it goes up higher, higher after the crisis. The crisis really materializes very strongly in two-wall weight. That's where that little wrinkle sort of to seven, two-wall weight, to nine. And of course most other sectors still, they have really got a hit. And then in that sense Greece is the extreme case. For issues that have to do with their oligarchs, you know, as the FT put it and Madame Merkel. Not so often are FT and Madame Merkel actually speaking the same language, but there they use that word. And our states are all getting a bit poorer, including the German state. So in the United States probably extreme case, we have 15,000 bridges. That we know are going to fall. But there is no money to fix them. When a bridge falls, it's a bit, it's not like they have closed those bridges. Those bridges, they're still using those bridges. So you know, these are, and every year there are a few bridges that fall and then there are a few dead people, a few destroyed cars, a few destroyed livelihoods. You know, no matter. That is a very odd position for a state to maintain. So I think our states are a bit out to lunch. They have been overwhelmed, you know, out being out to lunch is a certain expression. It means not that you're literally out launching too long. It means that you don't really know what you're doing. It's like they have lost the plot. How can? Now the United States for me is a bit exhibit number one. Now I just, are you familiar with this graph or not? Who's familiar with this graph? I always tell all my students, you want to have this graph engraved in your brain. Like, you know that one in one is to know this graph. So very quickly, again, United States, the extreme case, 1917, as you see, actually the trend goes up to 209. So what you have is capture at the top, this is just earnings, this is not wealth. Then at the high point 47%, then we have the big crisis, right? In the 20s, then it falls down. Adorable Keynesian period, because down it's still a big grab. That decline, though, allows you to establish the growth of a large middle class, modest middle class, the growth of a prosperous class. Those are the Keynesian decades, the adorable, really, in rich respective Keynesian decades. With all the racisms and discriminations they had, they did produce an economy that wanted to expand. Why did it want to expand? Because it was based on consumption. So you wanted to pay your workers reasonable wages. Today's economy still has consumption, but the organizing logic is not. The dominant sectors are not about consumption. It's this high finance, corporate, etc. So there are, yes, a lot of consumption sectors. But then look at that, that is what I was predicting way back in the late 80s. 1987, it goes up again as if nothing had happened. When you read the literature of that period, the Keynesian years, you have a sense, you know, so often they say, we found the formula to have a more democratic economy. We will never give it up before they knew it. It was back up. So, now, partly that possibility is a mixture of policy and a mixture of the structure of an economy. It was mass manufacturing and mass consumption so that we don't have that in our advanced countries anymore. I just don't want to move on this. This is another one. Look at this. This is wealth, ratio of 1% wealth to median wealth after the crisis. Whoop, sharpest increase. These are very disturbing trends. I don't know if you follow. I love these simple lines. To me they tell stories. Now, how much more time do I have? I should be ending. Again, I come back to my analytic tactics. When I say urbanization, and I mention urbanization because so many politicians now say, and most people are living in cities and blah, blah, I can't stand that phrase anymore. So I ask myself, when I say urbanization, this self-evident, what don't I see? One element I don't see, which is feeding into the growth of cities, is land grabs. So here very quickly I'm using the data from the land matrix. Anybody who's interested in the land grabs, the land matrix, is a worldwide network, has the best data, overall data. So old history, new face is one way, I don't want to go into that debate, the imperial, and all that. So from 2006 to 2010, 220 million hectares of land, only properties that are above 200 hectares are measured. So Europe, by the way, which is getting land grabbed as well, I don't know if people know that. It is. I have some very good little stories on that. Europe doesn't show very much in the chart that I will show you because in Europe many of those properties are quite like 200 hectares and then they buy five little, you know? So Europe is not sufficiently present. Now here I look at the yellow lines. You can see Africa dominates, but other parts are rising. Europe very flat, actually bigger. I mean just to give you a sense of Europe, two stories. One is France. So sons and daughters of former farmers wanted to buy land again to become farmers. They said that's a better job than my unemployment in Paris, but they didn't buy it. It's all been bought up by corporates. The UK, do you know that wonderful Swedish company that is very this and very that, HMM something? H M H H. There you go. Wonderful owner. He just bought a huge piece of land in the north of the UK, of England proper, actually. I don't know what he's going to do, but you know. And then in Cambridgeshire, around Cambridge University, you know these amazing stretches of farmland, very rich farmers, et cetera. The, what are they called? This is a kind of religion Mormons. The Mormons of Utah have been buying vast plots of land. Again, the sizes of this land is different from what you can do, say in Africa or in Brazil. But you know this story and so I'm really, and that is why, remember at my start of my talk, do you remember what I said now? So I said that one image that I have in my expulsion's book is that the actual operational space of our economy, society, whatever, you know, that is actually shrinking in terms of the actual borders. You have a lot of land that is dying. And this is then also producing some of these land grabs. But it also, when you then add the land grabs to, if you take a given country, land that is dying, you know, due to pollution, due to whatever, mining, land that is being bought up by foreigners, these are beginnings of trajectories. I mean, on some very grand historical level, too general to be useful. This has been going on for millennia, clearly, any conquest, et cetera. But I'm just looking at this current period. And I don't know where this goes. But when I put it together with my notion that a lot of what constituted our society, economy, you know what belonged, is being expelled, is being shrunken in one way or another, this massive number of unemployed, long-term unemployed people that simply are no longer counted. We now have man in the United States, 33-year-old, 35-year-old, who have never held the job. Berlin has a lot of very nice men and women who have never held the job. But I think that is, again, a different story. You know what I'm talking about, that art is and all of that. But, you know, it's a different story than so, you know. But those men in the United States, they are suffering anyhow. And other item here that often is overlooked, most of it is not to grow food. Most of it is to grow industrial crops, biofuel crops, you know what I mean? And that means that they put an extreme amount of pesticides and fertilizers which kill the land. Because since it's not food, you know, you can sort of poison the whole thing. Now, I am always, I know that there are many anthropologists, you don't need this, but many of the audiences that I talk to, like economists, and I don't know at all, I always say, you know, making a plantation is actually a real process of making. And it means first evicting the flora in the fawners, then evicting rural cultures, rural genealogies of meaning, knowledges, economies, rural manufacturing district, eviction, eviction, eviction, till you get a very elementary condition, land. And then you go at it in a way that doesn't respect what it needs and you kill it, right? Because the practices at where they are before it becomes plantation, they knew about crop rotation, they had knowledge about climate, etc. The other part of me talking about immigration, where do those people go? They go to cities. They become part of slum dwellers. They who were carriers of knowledge that we are now often trying to recover about land, about climate, about vegetation, they are flattened into slum dwellers. Like erasure of a lot. These are enormously complex processes. And so they go to cities, they become, they are not necessarily going because they want to, they are being evicted. So I really think that in this question of immigration as category, you know, I'm sure you know more than I know about all of this, but it captures only part of the story of people on the move. And we've got to, we've got to find more language, more precise language. Anyhow. And then just to situate all of this, my dead land, dead water, there's going to be more and more land grabbing because much land is being killed and temperature is one part of it. When land gets hot, it can still look green on the surface, but it's dying. So a lot of the Midwest in the United States, which calls itself, modestly, the bread basket of the world, not just of the US, it still looks very green. I mean they have super fertilizers, and I don't know if they also paint it, I really don't know, but it's dying. Not all of it necessarily, but the temperature is rising, rising, rising. So, you know, it's the temperature of the earth, not of the air. So we're going to see more of these expulsions that are there of people, that are the result. These are some of the areas. I mean the United States is severely implicated in this. Latin America somehow escapes that, but these are all where water is already limiting agricultural productivity. You know, if you add then the heating of the land, etc. And by the way, I love this graph, so I am... Nobody asked for this, but... So the dotted line is where we are at. If we implement it, all the policies that we right now have, policy, not scientific policy, that is a little difference. So my big project now in the environment is that policy will get us nowhere. I mean we need some policies too, but we need... So I have a big project on cities and working with biologists and with material science people, every surface in a city should be working. You know, this is sort of... a really losing ground. I mean it's just extraordinary. I want to end with this notion... I want to sort of return at some basic element, you know. One way of putting it is, who are we the citizens? But I mean citizens in a very encompassing. I mean those who reside, a form of membership, whether you're an immigrant or doesn't matter. Because a lot of what I show brings consequences. And one name for those consequences is expulsions. Being expelled from. Expelled from your histories, from your cultures, from your space, from your home, from your city, etc. From your livelihood. And I want to end with this map. Who has seen this map? This is in the public domain by the way. Have you seen it? Right. But I'm always amazed at who has not seen it. So which is always the majority. This is 10,000 buildings. And many of them, when this was originally made, it's in the public domain, I repeat it. Some of them are under construction, like Utah was under construction, it's now made. Washington DC has a few others that they're adding. Basically 10,000 buildings, most of them private. They are full-time gathering information. You know, this 24-hour non-stop site. If you've been two hours in the United States, you're in this data set. Now, I want to point out two things. Because it is another instantiation for me of my category expulsions. The logic, there are two logics that organizes enormous apparatus. One of them is that it is gathering data about everybody in the territory of the United States. That makes it a very expensive operation. We the citizens of course pay for this. And one asks oneself, well, who really benefits? Well, the tech company certainly benefits. The upgrading of everything, the construction companies. Now, also I want to point out that in its full materiality, this is invisible. You can be standing in front of one of those buildings. You wouldn't know what it means. Now, second aspect of the logic of the system. The way it works is that we, in a first instance, first moment of the process, were all suspect. That's how it works. A very peculiar, and I would add, wasteful logic. If we're all suspect, they need data about all of us. They need vast numbers of machines, vast numbers of buildings, vast numbers. There are over a million people with top secret clearance working in there. This is a very costly operation that we the citizens pay. Germany is under a many state of security. The UK is under a many state of security. France is under a many state of security. This is happening, as you know, in some countries in Europe as well. Now, how does this work? They find the suspect not in this data. This is unmanagable. This is 20. They find the suspect through their old prejudices. Muslims! And then, after they found them sort of the schleppy mode of the street prejudice this, that, then they move into this data set and they see all the possible connections that the suspect found through very traditional slash irrational ways. Then they make all the connections. So here I want to leave you with this final image, which is that my image is that, so they hit Manhattan, lower Manhattan, lots of coffee shops, etc. When I go to one of those, I live in lower Manhattan, to one of those coffee shops and I open up my computer and I try to pull down the networks. You know the market shows you automatically all the networks in there. I like 60 networks. So my image is, I have to confirm that this is it. My image, this is a possibility, is that all the data there gets completely scrambled. If they locate one person who has connections with lower Manhattan or isn't lower Manhattan, then the whole of lower Manhattan more or less is suspect. That is not workable. So anyhow, I love that image that the mass of people, urban space, can actually unsettle this extraordinary apparatus. So, oh no, I see it now. I thought I had a blank slide, but I'm not. So I wanted to, this is too much. We can maybe in questions and answers show it. So that's the story. I'm just going to shut up. I see that I already talked far too long. Thank you very much.