ancient cities

116 Castells, Manuel
viewed the state as a strategic actor and a crucial
source of power, exercised through urban planning
on a spatial level and through the institutionalization
of social conflict on a political–societal level.
Castells’s structuralism was thus an interpretation
that, while recognizing the primacy of the economic
instance, attributed an important role to the
state as a guarantor of the capitalist process of
development and social reproduction. Unlike
another influential urban-Marxist line of interpretation
in the 1970s and beyond such as that of David
Harvey, who explained the crisis of urban capitalism
as a crisis of capital accumulation, Castells argued
that the decline of the postwar pattern of urban
development arose out of the increasing difficulty of
keeping the basic mechanisms for accomplishing the
provision of urban services functioning efficiently in
such basic realms as housing, transportation, education,
and health care. Put briefly, Castells understood
the urban crisis of the mid- and late 1970s as
a failure of the state in managing a crisis of collective
consumption, that is, of the distinctive element of
the urban process. The state, indeed, received pressure
both from the grassroots, in the form of social
movements and from the business sector, and this
twofold demand ultimately induced a fiscal crisis for
local governments in large inner cities in the United
States: According to Castells, this happened because,
on the one hand, corporate capital needed to build
directional centers requiring service workers and
facilities downtown; on the other hand, the state
had to provide welfare and public services to the
large underemployed and unemployed populations
in the inner cities. The “urban question” in the mid-
1970s was particularly epitomized in the United
States by this crucial contradiction between corporate
needs, rising social demands, and the budget
constraints of the state in a market-led economy.
Beyond Structuralism:
Grassroots Movements and Technology
as Agents of Urban and Social Change
After the large theoretical endeavor of The Urban
Question, in 1983 Castells published a book on
urban social movements that reported the findings
of urban research conducted internationally since
the early 1970s. The last chapter of The Urban
Question had concluded by noting the scarce
attention paid by social scientists, including
Marxists, to research on urban social movements
and, in doing so, underlined the explanatory power
of everyday social struggles to disrupt the rationality
of the technocratic city. The City and the
Grassroots was conceived, therefore, as an ambitious
attempt at filling that void by entering the
real world of urban grassroots movements in capitalist
cities. Although researched in the same years
as the previous book, The City and the Grassroots
came out in times of growing disillusionment over
the need for a comprehensive theory of social processes,
most notably one centered on the primacy
of the economic over the social and the spatial, and
was announced by the author as an intellectual
project sharply departing from the theoretical
hypotheses spelled out in The Urban Question.
The final result was a book presenting mainly
empirical material in the form of powerfully narrated
case studies, anticipated by a short conceptual
introduction and supported by a long concluding
section dedicated to the research design. The book
aimed at providing a comparative account of urban
social movements in different geographical and
historical contexts, showing the simultaneous concern
for the expansion of collective consumption,
the assertion and defense of cultural identity, and
the search for political organization that drives
urban protest movements in capitalist societies.
Although the book disappointed those who expected
another major contribution to Marxist urban theory
(and probably the book’s subtitle “a crosscultural
theory” was largely responsible for these
frustrated expectations), its influence has been, in
many respects, even stronger than that of the The
Urban Question. Indeed, the book contributed fundamentally
to the development of the lively and still
expanding field of research on urban social movements,
while also clearly inspiring subsequent work
of Castells on identity-based social movements in
the information age.
The abandonment of structuralism, therefore,
entailed a new relationship between theory and
empirical analysis that has since accompanied
Castells in the remainder of his career: Theory was
now intimately blended with the observation and
discussion of social phenomena, rather than the
other way around as it was in The Urban
Question. This way of proceeding—a typical casestudy
research methodology in many ways—
informed also his last contribution to urban
scholarship: that on the informational and technological
city in the 1980s and the early 1990s.