Sassen’s interview on Expulsions condenses her larger argument into the concept of the systemic edge: the point at which extreme inequality, environmental destruction, imprisonment, unemployment or financial extraction ceases to be adequately named by the language of “more” and becomes a process of removal from the operative spaces of economy and society. The iconic idea is expulsion as a threshold condition internal to contemporary capitalism, where people, places and activities are rendered statistically, economically or conceptually invisible. Its theoretical contribution is to shift critique from distributional inequality to predatory formations: complex assemblages of finance, law, logistics, land, debt and technical expertise that produce brutal exclusions through sophisticated means. Methodologically, the text operates by conceptual compression, reading crises across domains as homologous edge-effects rather than isolated events. Its bridge to the wider field connects urban political economy, migration studies, ecological crisis, financialisation and critical sociology, making expulsion a diagnostic category for advanced systemic violence.
URBANISM MEETS ART