ancient cities

118 Castells, Manuel
Conclusion
According to Castells, in an essay written in 2000
as his own contribution to The Castells Reader on
Cities and Social Theory, the advent of an information
age has radically changed the “urban question,”
as this was dealt with both by Chicago
sociologists and by the new urban sociologists of
the 1970s, including himself. While the former
gave prominence to the building of a unified urban
culture through a process of social integration and
the latter investigated the ways in which the state
responds to urban struggles over collective consumption,
the urban question is now articulated—in
Castells’s view—around the fundamental tension
between the city as a “space of flows” and as a
“space of places.” The space of flows links up
immaterially separate locations in an interactive
network that connects activities and people in distinct
geographical entities. The space of places, on
the other hand, organizes experience and agency
around the confines of locality. The issue of social
integration, which was at the core of the foundational
reflections on urban societies at the time of
the Chicago School, should be now approached—
Castells suggests—by urban scholars so as to
understand the multiple ways in which the spaces
of flows are folded into the spaces of places
through material infrastructures, technical devices,
and everyday practices of communication and
exchange, the latter either at a distance or in the
form of face-to-face interactions.
These reflections powerfully resonate with contemporary
key debates over the resurgence or dismissal
of scalar approaches, the meaning of
sociospatial relations in an age of globalization,
and the values of territoriality and positionality in
a persistently socially and spatially uneven world,
which have animated the intersected disciplines of
urban sociology, critical geography, and urban and
regional studies in recent years. Even though
Castells has not directly taken part in these more
recent debates, he is still widely recognized as a
leading intellectual authority by contemporary
urban and regional scholars and other sociospatial
scientists, well beyond the judgment about the
present relevance of his “classic” theorization of
the urban question. Despite the “specters” of structuralism
in urban theory that Castells inevitably
evokes, he is one of the most influential scholars
and public intellectuals to have emerged in the field
of critical urban studies over the past four decades
or so.
Ugo Rossi
See also Capitalist City; Citizen Participation; City
Planning; Global City; Globalization; Harvey, David;
Informational City; Local Government; Marxism and
the City; New Urban Sociology; Social Movements;
Technopoles; Urban Sociology; Urban Theory
Further Readings
Brenner, Neil. 2000. “The Urban Question as a Scale
Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban
Theory and the Politics of Scale.” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24:361–78.
Castells, Manuel. 1972. La Question urbaine. Paris:
Maspero.
———. 1983. The City and the Grassroots. A Crosscultural
Theory of Urban Social Movements. London:
Arnold.
———. 1983. “Crisis, Planning, and the Quality of Life:
Managing the New Historical Relationships between
Space and Society.” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 1:3–21.
———. 1989. The Informational City. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
———. 2002. “Conclusion: Urban Sociology in the
Twenty-first Century.” Pp. 390–406 in The Castells
Reader on Cities and Social Theory, edited by I.
Susser. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel and Peter Hall. 1994. Technopoles of
the World: The Making of Twenty-first Century
Industrial Complexes. London: Routledge.
Castells, Manuel and Alejandro Portes. 1989. “World
Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of
the Informal Economy.” Pp. 11–37 in The Informal
Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed
Countries, edited by A. Portes, M. Castells, and L.
Benton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pflieger, Géraldine. 2006. De la ville aux réseaux:
Dialogues avec Manuel Castells. Lausanne,
Switzerland: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires
Romandes.
Ward, Neil and Eugene J. McCann. 2006. “‘The New
Path to a New City’? Introduction to a Debate on
Urban Politics, Social Movements and the Legacies of
Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
30:189–93.