'The Urban Question' and 'The Rise of the Network Society'

This text was written in 1997 and revised in June 1999 as part of the theses project 'The Informational City and the Street as Urban Form'. It takes as its startings points two compiled groups of quotations from Castells' work in the 1970s and the 1990s respectively. The development of Castells' thinking through 20 years and the tensions between his early and later works are at the focus of this tentative overview.

 

 

Castells: 1972/1977:

'Urban Culture'...is neither a concept nor a theory. It is...a myth...(which)...provide the key-words of an ideology of modernity, assimilated, in an ethnocentric way, to the social forms of liberal capitalism ... it suggest the hypothesis of a production of social content (the urban) by a trans-historical form (the city) ...(but) the city creates nothing...The link between space, the urban and a certain system of behaviour regarded as typical of 'urban culture' has no other foundation than an ideological one ...From this point of view, the problem of the definition (or redefinition) of the urban does not even arise....Such a tendency helps to reinforce the strategic role of urbanism as a political ideology and as a professional practice. (Castells: The Urban Question, 1977: p 83, 89, 90, 431, 441, 463)

Castells: 1996:

The circuits of electronic impulses is the material foundation of the information age just as the city in the merchant society and the region in the industrial society...information is the key ingredient of our social organisation...it is the beginning of a new existence...marked by the autonomy of culture vis-à-vis the material basis... (Castells: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996: p 412, 477-78)

The urban question and my question

When Manuel Castells, in 'The Urban Question' said that 'urban culture' and 'urbanism' had no other foundation than an ideological one, what was his reasons, context and purpose - and can my project on 'urbanity' survive his critique?

If the urban' is purely ideological, my case will not hold. It is therefore of decesive importance to confront Castell's claims.

Here in the beginning it should also be mentioned that 'ideological' in this context has to be understood as a system of ideas, which justifies or legitimates the subordination of one group by another, i.e. knowledge and representations characteristic of or in the interest of a class. Castell's relates to a Marxist understanding of ideology that is related to false consciousness.

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