Castells, Manuel

Manuel Castells, born in 1942, is a distinguished representative of the late-twentieth-century progressive European intellectual. Of Catalan origin, having fled the Franco dictatorship, he was trained as a professional sociologist in France and taught for more than a decade at the University of Paris (Nanterre) between the 1960s and the 1970s, with more short-term academic appointments in pre-Pinochet Chile and in Montreal, Quebec. In the late 1970s, Castells moved to the United States, where he is still a professor of communication, technology, and sociology at the University of Southern California, after having taught city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley from 1979 to 1993, where he is now professor emeritus. In recent years he also obtained a research professorship in his native country at the Open University of Catalonia.

What is typical of Manuel Castells, as a late-twentieth-century intellectual whose perspectives [Page 115]were influenced by the political upheaval of 1968, is his active engagement in progressive politics and his fascination with the then-rising urban–social movements. At the same time, a specific feature of Castells's intellectual pathway lies in his characteristic cosmopolitan profile, a trait that has deeply influenced his vantage point and that at the time was not common among European academics. Castells is thus simultaneously a typically progressive European intellectual and a precursor of the cosmopolitan academic that nowadays has become increasingly widespread within the context of the globalization of academic labor markets.

Likewise, Manuel Castells's contribution to the field of urban studies has been path-breaking as well as temporally ephemeral. In fact, on the one hand, he is generally recognized in the field as one of the founders of what came to be known the “new urban sociology” from the 1970s onward. On the other hand, his belonging and concrete affiliation to the scholarly and institutional field of urban studies, with its set of specialized publications, conferences, and organized academic communities, has vanished in the years of his professional and scientific maturity, when Castells engaged in his most challenging intellectual endeavor: the trilogy on the network society and the age of information. In these more recent years, while occasionally applying his ideas and empirical findings on the network society to urban issues and problems (mainly on the occasion of invited lectures and papers), Castells has abandoned the field of urban studies, which gave him early notoriety and intellectual fame albeit within more limited audiences and readerships compared to those that have become acquainted with his subsequent work on the information age.

This entry explores the stages of Manuel Castells's intellectual trajectory in which his main field of investigation and concern was the urban phenomenon: particularly, his initial attempt to provide a systematic theory of the urban process under capitalism; then, his subsequent revision of his own departing theoretical hypotheses, with a consideration of social movements and technology as fundamental agents of urban and societal change.