Spaces of Flows

The phrase “space of flows,” most often associated with the later work of Manuel Castells, has come to characterize claims for a spatial reconfiguration of the urban order in an era of globalization. It is argued that cities find themselves in a world where capital, information, people, and economic activities are mobile on an ever-greater spatial scale and with an increasing scope in terms of the size of flows. For cities, this means an old system of settled national hierarchies has been replaced by more fluid, horizontal interrelations. Instead of a hierarchical order of scales (local towns to regional centers to capital cities), with integration meaning going up a level, there is now a more direct set of linkages between different cities cutting across those systems.

The effects of this space of flows can be seen in many registers—from financial, to movements of [Page 760]people, to new patterns of location and new organizations of economic activity. Urban studies scholars look at the role of information and communications technologies (ICTs), which allow close coordination of production activities that may now be located far from their markets and indeed disaggregated and dispersed around the planet. For instance, the insertion of ICTs into service provision via telephone call centers enables locational flexibility in provider location, and regional, national, and global distanciation via their relocation to places such as India, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Castells argues that we are witnessing a society organized around informational capitalism, and this gives rise to a global space of flows, through a new spatiality driven by the ability of ICTs to reconfigure the relationships of people and places.

The apogee of the space of flows is the globalized financial system as exemplified in continuous global financial trading (as New York winds down, Los Angeles opens; as Los Angeles closes, Tokyo is opening; as Tokyo closes, Singapore and Mumbai are trading, and as they close, London and Paris open; as London and Paris close, New York has reopened). This is a paradigmatic example of the use of ICTs to first overcome the difficulties of distanciated interactions and then to actually capitalize on this. We thus develop from using ICTs to coordinate widely scattered activities, bringing information together into a central office in the financial district, to using offices in different time zones to enable around the clock working, and thus not only allowing a global reach but also using space to overcome time. At the extreme this has been seen as the supersession of space and the annihilation of time. If we explore the impact of such a space of flows, we need to look both between and within cities.