Space of Flows

The space of flows is a term coined by the sociologist and urban planner Manuel Castells to describe the geographies of the globalized postindustrial informational societies that emerged in the late 20th century, in which productivity is derived primarily from knowledge and information. Concomitant with this transformation, social scientists have searched for new frames of reference to make sense of the emerging geographies of centrality and peripherality unleashed by flexible globalization.

In Castells's (1996) reading, the time-space compression of postmodern capitalism was manifested in the three “layers” of transportation and communication infrastructure, the cities or nodes that occupy strategic locations within these, and the social spaces occupied by the global managerial class:

Castells notes, for example, that while people live in places, postmodern power is manifested in the linkages among places, their interconnectedness, as personified by business executives shuttling among global cities and using the Internet to [Page 2601]weave complex geographies of knowledge invisible to almost all ordinary citizens. This process was largely driven by the needs of the transnational class of the powerful employed in information-intensive occupations. Flows thus consist of corporate and political elites crossing international space on transoceanic flights; the movements of capital through telecommunication networks; the diffusion of ideas through organizations stretched across ever-longer distances; the shipments of goods and energy via tankers, container ships, trucks, and railroads; and the growing mobility of workers. In this light, the space of flows is a metaphor for the intense time-space compression of post-Fordist capitalism. Through the space of flows, the global economy is coordinated in real time across vast distances—that is, via horizontally integrated chains rather than vertically integrated corporate hierarchies. In the process, it has given rise to a variety of new political formations, forms of identity, and spatial associations.

Flows by definition involve more than one place; hence, in a networked world, places have little meaning as isolated entities. Places are not locales as much as they are processes in which different types of activities are embedded and different forms of interconnections are established. As they become increasingly connected, the repercussions of actions in one area inevitably spiral out to shape other places, so that discrete boundaries have less and less significance as they are permeated with mounting ease. Decisions made by hedge fund managers in New York, for example, reach out to affect the lives of millions of people in locations as distant as East Asia. The space of flows wraps places into highly unevenly connected chains that center on connections among powerful elites, thus typically benefiting the wealthy at the expense of marginalized social groups. However, the global space of flows is hardly randomly distributed over Earth's surface: Rather, it reflects and reinforces existing geographies of power concentrated within specific nodes and places, such as global cities, trade centers, financial hubs, and headquarter complexes. Thus, far from being abstract networks divorced from history, such systems are only made comprehensible by embedding them in history.

...