Acting on Behalf of Place: The Informational City by Manuel Castells
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Originally published in The Witness magazine, November 2001
Thursday, November 1, 2001
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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.
The Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann is program director for the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE) in Chicago, Ill. He is also on the steering committee of Word and World: A People's School. Bill lives in Detroit, Mich., and may be reached by email at bill@scupe.com.