ancient cities

When Castells started to conduct research on this
subject in the early 1980s, human history had not
yet been revolutionized by the advent of the
Internet and the related electronic means of communication,
cultural exchange, and trading. Even
so, in the 1980s Castells, like a growing number
of social scientists at that time, was already aware
of the fundamental importance of the new information
technologies in shaping the evolution of
human societies and particularly that of cities and
regions. In fact, cities and especially large metropolitan
areas were in the front line of the “service
economy” process of expansion: Even the booming
computer industry in the so-called American
Sunbelt appeared to be persistently dependent on
the old established base of headquarters and corporate
services in major U.S. cities such as New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
At the same time, however, while noticing how
the cores of the dominant metropolitan areas preserved
their function as location for most of the
command and control centers of the economy,
Castells also emphasized the process of regional
decentralization and suburbanization of information
and office activities linked to second-rank
business services and to producer services of what
he called the “new industrial space.” The lower
land prices and office rents and the linkage with
residential suburbanization were the most important
factors lying behind the preferences for a
suburban site over the traditional downtown location
in the service sector.
In his account of the process of technoeconomic
restructuring and its related spatial manifestations,
consistent with his persistent commitment
to a critical urban sociology, Castells was particularly
concerned with the changes in the urban
social structure, proposing an interpretation of
urban and social change centered on notions of
social polarization and economic dualism, which,
a few years later, became popular and widely discussed
in the early debate over the globalizing city.
Drawing also on a large research program on the
informal economy conducted in collaboration
with economic sociologist Alejandro Portes,
Castells described the occupational structure of
large cities in the United States as a “complex pattern”
combining the creation of new, highly paid
jobs in advanced services and high-technology sectors;
the destruction of mid-level jobs in old
manufacturing; the gradual shrinkage of protected
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jobs in the public sector; and the proliferation of
new, low-paid jobs in services, in downgraded
manufacturing, and, most particularly, within the
expanding informal and criminal economies. The
increasing polarization and segmentation of the
local labor markets, Castells argued, produced a
highly differentiated labor force displaying distinct
lifestyles in terms of household structures, intergender
family relationships, and uses of the urban
space. Far from aiming at providing a schematic
representation of the urban realm, Castells’s dual
city thesis intended to make sense of the multifaceted
social realities that took shape from the overlapping
of structural dualism and sociospatial
polarization in postmanufacturing capitalist cities.
In these early studies dealing with the informational
city that inspired Castells’s subsequent
major research effort on the network society, the
structuralist mode of thinking that still informed
his interpretation of urban and social issues was
mitigated by an increasing awareness of the complex
character of human societies, irreducible to
dialectical relations of cause–effect and to a purely
rationalist understanding of social change. The
overcoming of structuralism became even clearer
in his subsequent work on world technopoles,
coauthored with geographer Peter Hall. Cities and
regions were described in this book not only as
sites of economic restructuring and technological
innovation, but also as emerging “economic
actors” whose strength lies in their ability to
adapt to the changing conditions of the global
economy and in their response capacity to promote
development projects, negotiate with multinational
firms, and foster the growth of medium
and small-sized firms, as well as in their long-term
attitude to compete with each other in becoming
places of greater innovation and efficiency. What is
noteworthy in the work on technopoles is the
cross-national research approach that Castells and
Hall developed. While other authors at that time
were publishing single-case study research on successful
technological cities, this remarkable book
provided a truly global picture of the rise of
technopoles located in different regions of the
world: from the celebrated cases of endogenous
entrepreneurial spin-off in Silicon Valley, California,
and in greater Boston, Massachusetts, to less
known examples of planned science cities in
Siberia, Japan, and Korea, where the state played
a major role in the development trajectory.