Acting on behalf of place
by Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Manuel Castells, the Spanish sociologist who’s taught urban planning at the University of California Berkeley for 20 years, is best known for his 1500-page magnum opus, a trilogy under the overarching title of The Information Age. Responsible scholars have compared the work to those of Max Weber and Karl Marx. It can be dense, sweeping, abstract, theoretical, and insightful. Certain of its themes were anticipated in this 1991 volume specifically outlining the impact of informational capitalism on the city.

Like Saskia Sassen, Castells argues against those who’ve foreseen the city disappearing in the face of decentralized informationalism, that is, the dispersal of labor and withdrawal of capital into cyberspace. In his view, the network economy structures the informational megacity as a "space of flows." This term encompasses the material processes, the technological hardwiring, for the electronic flow of information and capital as well as the corporate headquarters for the flow of command and control decisions. It also includes the concentrated location of specialized service firms and, finally, the reorganization of living space for the managerial elite and specialized personnel.

In fact, this process does represent an assault on the city as "place," a reality layered with history and collective memory. "People live in places, power rules through flows." The social meanings of the city as place tend to evaporate as the flows dominate space. The loss of individual identity for the city is threatened. Castells is in effect calling for a certain kind of resistance, for cultural strategies and new social movements that act out of and on behalf of place. Labor, for example, which is learning to think globally, must become more aware of the power of the local. "Labor – and indeed, individual citizens – must develop an awareness of the precise role of their place-based activities in the functional space of flows" if an alternative is going to be reconstructed.

Even as the nation-state is diminished by globalization, Castells foresees the space of flows actually generating a kind of renaissance for city as local state. And cities have the opportunity to seize control over globalization’s spatial logic, but that will involve not only consciously reclaiming identity in pursuit of change, but encouraging democratic participation and community organization. All somewhat rare.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a media review editor for The Witness.