After Mumbai

Saskia Sassen has a provocative post at Open Democracy suggesting that the violence in Mumbai represents an emerging type of urban violence. 

She writes, "Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and war - I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

"What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may cost major cities and their people a high (increasingly high) price. In the dense and conflictive spaces of cities, a variety of forms of violence can be foreseen."

Sassen worries, too, that looking environmental disasters will also challenge "the traditional commercial and civic capacities that have allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict. These crises could feed the violence that can arise from extreme economic inequality, and racial and religious conflicts."

Hers is a grim outlook for the world and a backdoor case for the centrality of cities to the strength of nations and their stability.

  

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