Castells, Manuel (1942–)

Manuel Castells is a prominent urban sociologist who has made major interdisciplinary impacts through his theorizing of various contemporary global socioeconomic transformations.

Born in a Catalan family in Spain in 1942 and educated in France, Castells exemplifies a global theorist of contemporary societies. His expertise ranges from urban sociology and social movements to theories of technology and network society, and he has been influential in a wide range of social science disciplines, including anthropology, urban planning, economic geography, and telecommunications. Castells is known for a combination of talents rarely gifted to a single individual: an ability to interpret, analyze, and incorporate real-world examples around the globe; an ability to craft theories by combining rigorous inductive and deductive methods; and a commitment to the masses as the instigators and primary drivers of social change. His hallmark extensive international coverage of topics and rigorous comparative analysis are based on his firsthand observations and experiences gained through appointments and lectures he conducted in 40 countries, primarily in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Castells's lifetime interests have been to uncover the factors and agents that bring about revolutionary changes in society, and he has done so through engagement in research on [Page 365]urban politics, social movements, and information technologies.

Exiled by the Franco regime in the early 1960s, Castells began his intellectual journey in Paris under the guidance of Alain Touraine, an esteemed urban sociologist. Castells's dissertation and his first book, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (published in English in 1977), focused on urban politics, planning, and policy. The book is remarkably suggestive of analytical traits that are evident in his later work. Castells developed a global interpretation of urban structures by incorporating historical analysis and examining data from American, French, and Latin American cities, as well as those in the socialist world. His goal was to demystify and expose ideologies of the dominant classes through analysis of their social practices and develop a Marxist urban theory, which he claimed to have generated questions yet lacking sufficiently specific analytical framework. The outcome is an extremely dense writing that combines rich theoretical explorations with extensive empirical research that illustrates the underlining forces behind the ideology of the urban question.

At the University of California at Berkeley, which became Castells's longest intellectual home (1979–2003), he expanded his inquiry on the urban question into social movements by developing a cross-cultural theory of urban social change. In The City and the Grassroots (1983), Castells examined grassroots mobilizations in San Francisco's Mission district; in the gay community around Castro Street; in squatter settlements in Lima, Mexico City, and Santiago de Chile; and in citizens’ movements in Madrid. Although somewhat overshadowed by the fame of his later work, this book is still regarded as a groundbreaking work in social movements research.

Subsequently, Castells shifted his focus to technology as a driving force of social change, with a particular emphasis on information technologies and their impacts on cities (as depicted in his books The Informational City in 1989, in which the concept of “space of flows” is first elaborated, and Technopoles of the World coauthored with Hall in 1994). The trilogy on The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996 to 2004) is considered Castells's seminal work, and it has been translated into 22 languages. He analyzed the socioeconomic transformations of globalization, seen as outcomes of the information technology revolution. In the first volume of the trilogy, titled The Rise of the Network Society, Castells focused on the socioeconomic aspects of informationalism. In the second volume, The Power of Identity, Castells reconceptualized identity, social movements, and the state in the new global order and explored religious fundamentalism, patriarchalism, and information politics. The third volume, End of Millennium, covers broad contemporary sociopolitical transformations, ranging from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of the fourth world, the global criminal economy, the Asian economic crisis, and European unification.

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