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Manuel Castells
Contents
1. Biography ................................................................................................ 3 2. Introduction on Space of Flows.................................................................... 4 3. Manuel Castells & Space of Flows................................................................. 5 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. The New Industrial Space ................................................................. 5 End of Cities?.................................................................................. 6 The Informational City...................................................................... 6 Space of Flows ................................................................................ 8 Places and Non-Places...................................................................... 9
4. Other Thinkers .......................................................................................... 10 4.1. 4.2. John Urry ....................................................................................... 10 Anthony Giddens ............................................................................. 10
Biography
Manuel Castells was born in Spain in 1942. He grew up in Barcelona where he studied law and economics at the University of Barcelona from 1958 until 1962. As a student activist against General Francos fascist dictatorship he had to escape to Paris. He continued his study in Paris in order to obtain his PhD. Based on statistical analysis of location strategies of high-tech industrial firms in the Paris region, his doctoral work alerted to two issues that would continue to preoccupy Castells over the next three decades namely, the emergence of new technologies and the changing form of cities. Working in Paris at this time brought Castells into contact with leading Marxist theorists. Expelled by the French government, because of his participation in the revolutionary fervour of May 1968, he spent periods in Chili and Canada before returning to Paris in 1972. Castells first major work The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach was also published in 1972. It was announced as a remarkable and pioneering attempt to bring Marxist concepts and perspectives to bear on the urban question. In Castells opinion, Marxist theorists had yet to analyze cities in a sufficiently specific way. This work inspired a generation of geographers to engage with theories of political economy and utilized the insight of Marxist theory as a means to explore the urbanization of injustice. Castells thus found himself at forefront of the new urban sociology. In 1989, Castells published The Informational City which is an analysis of the urban and regional changes brought about by information technology and economics restructuring in the United States. It highlighted changes in the nature of urban governance that were contributing to the dual city where poor, immigrant workers serviced a more affluent elite, working in hi-tech and knowledge rich industries. This served as a forerunner to his three-volume treatise on The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, comprising The Rise of The Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997) and the End of Millenium (1998). In The Rise of The Network Society, Castells introduces the term Space of Flows.
The new industrial space is organized in a hierarchy of innovation and fabrication articulated in global networks. But the direction and architecture of these networks are submitted to the endless changing movements of cooperation and competition between firms and between locales. The new industrial space is organized around flows of information that bring together and separate at the same time their territorial components.
The profile of Americas Informational City is represented by the relationship between fast exurban development, inner-city decay, and obsolescence of the suburban built environment. According to Castells, European cities have entered the information age along a different line of spatial restructuring linked to their historical heritage. The business center in European cities is, as in America, the economic engine of the city, networked in the global economy. The business center is made up of an infrastructure of telecommunications, communications, advanced services, and office space. The business center does not exist by itself, but by the interconnection to other equivalent locales organized in a network that forms the actual unit of management, innovation, and work. The suburban world of European cities is a socially diversified space, that is segmented in different peripheries around the central city. There are traditional workingclass suburbs organized around large public housing estates, new towns inhabited by a younger populations of the middle classes and there are the peripheral ghettos of older public housing estates, where new immigrant populations and poor working families experience exclusion from their right to the city. Central cities often become defensive spaces for workers who only have their home to fight for, being at the same time meaningful popular neighborhoods and likely bastions of xenophobia and localism. The new professional middle class in Europe is torn between the attraction to the peaceful comfort of boring suburbs and the excitement of a hectic, and often too expensive, urban life. Castells states that the major European metropolitan centers present some variation around the urban structure, depending upon their different role in the European network of cities. The lower their position in the new informational network, the greater the difficulty of their transition form the industrial stage, and the more traditional will be their urban structure. On the other hand, the higher their position in the competitive structure of the new European economy, the greater the role of their advanced services in the business district, and the more intense will be the restructuring of urban space. The critical factor in the new urban processes is the fact that urban space is increasingly differentiated in social terms, while being functionally interrelated beyond physical continuity. It follows the separation between symbolic meaning, location of functions, and the social appropriation of space in the metropolitan area. This is the trend underlying the most important transformation of urban forms worldwide, with particular force in the newly industrializing areas: the rise of megacities. The new global economy and the emerging informational society have a new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographical context: megacities. Megacities are very large agglomerations of human beings. Megacities articulate the global economy, link up the informational networks, and concentrate the worlds power. Megacities are connected externally to global networks and to segments of their own counties, while internally disconnecting local populations that are either functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive. Castells states that it is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and social, that makes megacities a new urban form. Some examples of megacities are: Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires, London and Calcutta. Not all of them are dominant centers of the global economy, but they do connect to this global system huge segment of the human populations. They function as magnets for their hinterlands. Mega cities cannot be seen only in terms of their size, but also as a function of their gravitational power toward major regions of the world. Thus, for example Hong Kong is not just its six million people, and Guangzhou is not just its six
and a half million people: what is emerging is a megacity of 40 to 50 million people, connecting Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Macau, and small towns in the Pearl River Delta. Megacities will continue to grow in their size and in their attractiveness for the location of high-level functions and for peoples choice. Megacities are the nodal points, and the power centers of the new spatial form and process of the information age: the space of flows.
The third layer of the space of flows refers to the spatial organization of the dominant, managerial elites that exercise the directional functions around which such space is articulated. Articulation of the elites and segmentations and disorganization of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies. Space plays a fundamental role in this mechanism. In short: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while peoples life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history. On the other hand, the elites do not want and cannot become flows themselves, if they are to preserve their social cohesion, develop the set of rules and the cultural codes by which they can understand each other and dominate the other, thus establishing the in and out boundaries of their cultural/political community. However, Castells analysis does not share the hypothesis about the improbable existence of a power elite. On the contrary, the real social domination stems from the fact that cultural codes are embedded in the social structure in such a way that possession of these codes opens the access to the power structure without the elite needing to conspire to bar access to its networks. As a sociologist Manuel Castells is especially interested in social movements and the influences of the information technology on society, and the effect this has on the changing forms of cities. Everything is changing these days; technology is enhancing, logistic improvements are constantly being made, processes are transforming and demands are changing. Everything is moving. News broadcast and other media keep you informed about everything that is going on in the world. Organisations can locate themselves everywhere around the world. Mobile offices become more and more popular. Progress is required if you want to survive the everchanging society. Special skills are needed to manage organisations these days. It is not enough to manage a specific organisation, youll have to manage processes and flows in which the organisation is participating. These processes and flows are constantly changing and are connected in networks. It is about managing flows, instead of managing separate components of the organisation. This is why flexibility and being innovative are of essential importance. Thus, a whole new form of management is required. So called special meta-competences are needed to deal with the changes.
4. Other thinkers
4.1 John Urry
According to John Urry the discourse of globalisation really took off in 1989, when exponential growth in the analyses of the global began to suggest that there was a supposed global reconstitution of economic, political and cultural relationships. One central feature was the sense that people had that they were living in a global village, as the struggles for citizenship themselves were brought into their homes wherever they were located. At the moment that almost everyone is seeking to be a citizen of an existing national society or to set up their own national society, globalisation appears to be changing what it is to be a citizen. Urry distinguishes two aspects of networks, namely, scapes and flows. Scapes are the networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which flows can be relayed. Such scapes reconfigure the dimensions of time and space. Once particular scapes have been established, then individuals and especially corporations within each society will normally try to become connected to them through being constituted as nodes within that particular network. They will seek to develop their own hubs. Between certain nodes along some scapes, extraordinary amounts of information may flow, of financial, economic, scientific and news data, into which some groups are extremely well plugged-in while others are effectively excluded. New inequalities of flows are created. Social and spatial distances are no longer homologous (Beck 1999: 104). Urry sets apart two different kinds of networks; global networks and what he calls global fluids. Global enterprises are organized by the means of a global network. Such a network of technologies, skills, texts and brands ensures that more or less the same product is delivered in more or less the same way in every country in which the enterprise operates. Second, there are global fluids, the heterogeneous, uneven and unpredictable mobilities of people, information, objects, and money. Fluids do not always keep within the scape. Different fluids spatially intersect in the empty meeting grounds of the non-places of modernity, such as airports, the internet, international hotels and so on.
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6. Sources
Hubbard, Ph., Kitchin, R. & Valentine, G. (2004) Key thinkers on Space and Place. Sage, London (Chapter 10) Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, society and culture. Volume 1: The rise of the network society. Blackwell, Oxford Castells, M. (1997) The Information Age: Economy, society and culture. Volume 2: The power of identity. Blackwell, Oxford Castells, M. (1998) The Information Age: Economy, society, culture. Volume 1: End of Millennium. Blackwell, Oxford Crang, M. (2002) Between places: producing hubs, flows and networks. In: Environment and planning A. Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 569-574 Webster, F. (1995) Theories of The Information Society, Routledge, London http://www.transformaties.org/bibliotheek/urry2.pdf 06/12/2005
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/weblinks/spaceflos.html 15/12/2005 http://www.Transformaties.org/Castells/network_Society/Vol_Vol_I_flows.html 15/12/2005 http://www.lbora.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb14.html 27/12/2005 http://www.onderzoekinformatie.nl/nl/oi/nod/onderzoek/OND1301366 27/12/2005 http://www.zoutenpeper.nl/de_netwerksamenleving.html 27/12/2005
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol5/number2/html/urry/ 27/12/2005
http://www.outsource2india.com/services/telemarketing.asp 27/12/2005
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