ancient cities

in cities are entangled with those in others. Thus
some parts of the city may be connected by electronic
flows to a set of remote other centers, while
other parts may be connected by different flows to
another set of cities. There are then networked
subeconomies that link translocally.
Urban Constellations
The city breaks into urban constellations scattered
through huge territorial expanses binding together
technoburbs, real virtual spaces, and so forth, rather
than unified cities. This urban fragmentation,
Castells has suggested, produces a dual city, sharply
divided between prosperous knowledge workers
and those incapable of finding a place in the new
economy (other than, ironically, in servicing the
needs of knowledge workers for babysitting, housecleaning,
and other such activities). According to
Castells, the dual city is simultaneously “globally
connected and locally disconnected.”
Rather than seeing a dual city outcome though,
the city is decomposed in more complex ways
than simply the connected and disconnected.
Rather there are degrees of control over those
flows. So while the vision of the dual city of digital
elite and excluded others certainly has resonance,
it is by no means the be-all and end-all of
the story. Globalized telecommunications are
altering the rhythms of urban life to produce new
patterns of disjuncture and differentiation. Female
employees in call centers in Bangalore are now
part of a different space of flows—answering to
the temporality of U.S. markets, the night shift is
a time trap emphasizing their marginal employment
status in the city in which they live and as a
new global pink-collar labor force. This digital
economy’s work regimes are far from those of a
global elite. In terms of the city, these call center
workers are part of the city where they live and
work and the cities (usually Western ones) whose
populations they service. Such global rhythms
give rise to what Castells sees matching the space
of flows, that is, crystallized or timeless time. He
suggests a sequence of hegemonic forms of temporality,
with industrial capitalism producing and
produced by clock time and now informational
capitalism entailing a time in which linearity is
replaced by instantaneity and discontinuity rather
than predictable sequence. The space of flows
Spaces of Flows
761
dissolves time by disordering the sequence of
events and making them simultaneous.
The space of flows also creates new possibilities
for grassroots actors. A range of movements and
nongovernmental organizations have been enabled
by global networks, which are learning from each
other, forming new structures of alliances, and so
forth. Equally the flows of poorer workers, though
often heavily policed, create new flows of ideas,
remittances, and new urban cultures. Critics such as
Smith point out that much of the work of Castells
lends itself to seeing the overriding of emplaced
politics via the global space of flows. There is a
tendency to portray the flows as “out there” linking
places rather than also “in here,” and to frame
global and local social processes in binary opposition,
as mutually exclusive and inherently antagonistic
explanations for urban development that pit
local cultures against globalizing economic transformations.
The risk is to imply that flows are
always dynamically global while stubborn resistance
is the best that places can muster. Instead one
might more productively see the weaving of different
spaces of flows through the urban fabric.
Mike A. Crang
See also Castells, Manuel; Cyburbia; Globalization;
Informational City; Non-Place Realm; Sassen, Saskia;
Technoburbs; World City
Further Readings
Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society:
Networks and Identity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
———. 2000. “Grassrooting the Space of Flows.”
Pp. 18–27 in Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The
Fracturing of Geographies, edited by J. Wheeler, Y.
Aoyama, and B. Warf. London: Routledge.
———. 2002. “Local and Global: Cities in the Network
Society.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale
Geografie 93(5):548–58.
Sassen, S. 2001. “Impacts of Information Communication
Technologies on Urban Economies and Politics.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
25(2):411–18.
———. 2002. Global Networks, Linked Cities. New
York: Routledge.
Smith, M. P. 2001. Transnational Urbanism: Locating
Globalization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.