Bo Grönlund (text and photo):
'The Urban Question' and 'The
Rise of the Network Society'
- Manuel Castells confronted
'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)
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)
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.
Content:
1. 'The Urban Question' - Castells, and a new urban sociology? Castells and the new urban sociology Castells' critique of earlier urban studies Structuralist substitute: 'collective consumption' Castell's critique of Henri Lefebvre Missed aspects and new openings 2. 'The Rise of the Network Society' - Castells and the question of information age urbanity. 'The Informational city' 'The Rise of the Network Society' - an overview The urban question revisited Space, flows, places and real virtuality (to be edited) Informationalism - a new historical stage based on an information paradigm? Network logic The networked Self - experience, identity and the city The informational mode of development - theoretical questions on typologies Provisional conclusion Literature:
1. 'The Urban Question' - Manuel
Castells, and a new urban sociology?
Castells and the new urban sociology
Castells has influenced urban sociology maybe more than anyone else after 1968 (compare e.g. Tonboe, 1993, and Lebas, 1982). In the English speaking world, the geographer David Harvey's 'Social Justice and the City' of 1973, broke ground in partly the same direction, though he started from the question of understanding space, while Castells started from the questions of understanding social relations. Harvey was more economical -geographical and orthodox Marxist, Castells more political-sociological and Althussarian / Poulantzas' structuralist. In Denmark an unofficial Danish translation of parts of 'The Urban Question' circulated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the mid 1970´s, where Castells also lectured. Several teachers here were influenced by his work, and also by his theoretical backing, Althusser and Poulantzas, of which several works were translated into Scandinavian languages (1968, 1970, 1972) and (1970,1972, 1978) respectively. Castells shorter texts started to be published in English and German in 1975. Castells was also for several years the key person in the 'International Journal of Urban and Regional Research'. In Barnow et al., 1982, 'Storbyens krise - introduktion til urbanteorien' two of Castells texts were published in Danish. In the years 1972 to 1984 at least 18 books and texts by Castells were published in French, English, German, and Spanish, where the titles implicates that they were about 'cities' and 'urban' issues.
Castells' work 'The Urban Question' (original French edition 1972) had two major purposes, on the one hand to criticise earlier urban studies, and on the other, and that was the major part, to create a more solid theoretical foundation for further urban studies. My summary below of 'the urban' in human and social sciences up to 1970 is only intended in a very compressed form to state Castells' critique.
Castells' critique of earlier urban studies
The critique in 'The Urban Question' focused mainly on the Chicago School of Urban Ecology of the 1920s, Louis Wirth, urban sub-culture studies in the 1950s and 60s and Henri Lefebvre, but there were also passages on Tönnies, Simmel, Mumford and others. The starting point for Castells critique was that urban studies didn't look at the processes of society as a whole and that they didn't consider the specificity of capitalist society, its class contradictions, and its uneven and non-continuos development. Another starting point was the question of the city and the urban as a theoretical object, and the influence of space on social life.
Rejected as ideological were approaches that tried to explain social life within an evolutionary perspective based on economic competition (Adam Smith) or biological determinism (Darwin), or approaches, that tried to find stages in a universal human history through the reading of spatial form. This included approaches based on interdependence between individuals, the principle of central function, and society understood as community, which is localised territorially. The principal ecological processes in this approach are based on centralisation and decentralisation, circulation, segregation, and invation-succesion. The urban configurations, that is seen as a result, are built up of zones, radii, sectors, and nuclei. Related to this problematic are also perspectives that see the society as an integrated unity built on everyday life and neighbourhoods.
Urban planning and its technocratic bureaucracy was also generally rooted in a kind of thinking, which Castells saw as: 1) "the pure administration of a classless society - or one naturally and necessarily divided into classes, which amounts to the same thing", together with 2) the values of private consumption and the family.
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Rejected as ideological were also the dichotomies and dualistic typologies of country/town, rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, traditional society/modern society, community/association (i.e. Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft), and local/cosmopolitan. Here, further, Castells objections built on the outdatedness of these typologies and their coupling of certain levels of production with systems of values and specific spatial forms.
As a consequence, Wirth's definition (1938) of the urban as built on dimension, density, and heterogeneity was discarded as well. (In Wirth's own words 'the urban' is 'a permanent localisation, relatively large and dense, of socially heterogeneous individuals'.)
The usually understood cultural implications of 'the urban' then had to be put aside as well : the segmentation of roles, the multiplicity of loyalties, the primacy of secondary social relations (through specific associations) over primary social relations (direct personal contacts based on affective affinity), the individualisation, the secularisation, the anonymity, the superficial, the transitory character of urban social relations, the the lack of participation and social disorganisation. What had to be given up according to Castells, was i.e. an ideal type of urban civilisation, defined in psycho-sociological terms on the basis the idea of crisis of personality.
Maybe most important, though, was the very secondary role, generally, of spatial forms on social relations, cultural systems, behaviour and representation, as Castells meant no causality had been proven between social and spatial variables, and that social relations couldn't be deduced from spatial ones. Space had no meaning in itself, as it was only an expression of the social.
According to Castells the evolutionary and dualistic ideas about 'the urban' dominated common sense and empirical urban studies, where the 'city' took the place of explanation, through evidence, of the cultural transformations, that one fails to (or cannot) grasp or control. In reality urban sociology lacked an empirical object, because the urban was everywhere. It had large difficulties in finding any empirical criterion for the definition of the urban. All you got were explanation by co-variation and normative thinking. From Castells' point of view the city was not a relevant unit any more, as capitalist production, as well as its political foundation, operates in a much larger space than the single city.
The whole perspective of traditional urban sociology had therefore no specific answer to give to the theoretical problems posed by the social determination of space and urban organisation. Urban culture, according to Castells, couldn't be something general, but corresponds to a certain historical reality. Urban ideology, then, is specific ideologies that sees the modes and forms of social organisation as characteristic of phases of the evolution of society, closely linked to the techno-natural conditions of human existence and, ultimately, to its environment.
His conclusion was very sharp : "1) there is no cultural system linked to a given form of spatial organisation; 2) the social history of humanity is not determined by the type of development of the territorial collectivities; 3) the spatial environment is not the root of a specificity of behaviour and representation" (Castells 1977, p 111). After this, there was not much left of the urban question.
Structuralist substitute: 'collective consumption'
Based on Althusser's' Marxist epistemology, Castells tried to build a new urban sociology with a strictly defined theoretic urban object as its core. Starting out from the capitalist mode of production, as the urban could not be located in the sphere of production, if it could be anywhere, it had to be in the sphere of reproduction of labour power. Here Castells found the proper object of study to be 'collective consumption', which also had the advantage of being a possible class alliance issue for popular struggles against the ruling powers. And there were, actually, many struggles around public amenities, services and the like involving new social movements in cities in many countries in the 1960s and 70s, both in the developed and less developed world. Castells not only built a rigorous system to be able to handle 'collective' consumption theoretically, but he also carried out several empirical studies as well (e.g. 'Monopolville' (1974) together with Godard).
Although the word 'city' and 'urban' continued to show up in the titles of Castells' books and texts, creating some confusion, they were in reality discarded, as they also should be if his critique above was taken seriously. What was put instead was an abstract concept of space, a space that was subsumed under the social and didn't play any real role of its own, so in fact space was done away with too, or it was only interesting as a historic product, not as a setting for the present. The structuralist approach also did away with human actors, and in this way became unable to handle change. As Pahl said, 'it was difficult to see Castells empirical referents at kerb level' (Pahl,1978, quoted from Lebas,1982, p 28.).
Castell's critique of Henri Lefebvre
Before concluding on Castells critique of 'the urban, his critique of Henri Lefebvre also have to be mentioned here , and for two reasons: the critique of Lefebvre seemed most urgent and central to Castells in 'The Urban Question', and this is at the same time of special importance to me, as my own theoretical 'construction' (or 'reconstruction') of 'urbanity' starts out from Lefebvre.
Under the heading 'From Urban Society to Urban Revolution', Castells' chapter on Lefebvre formed the centre of rotation in the critique of 'the urban'. Here Castells came very close to his own battles in left wing Paris. In the years around 1968, Lefebvre was one of Castells' professors at Nanterre. In fact, this was where the uprising of May 68 started, and Lefebvre had added fuel to the fire with his manifesto 'The right to the city', written in 1967 - the 'centenary of Capital' being the last words in the book, indicating, I think, that it was time to transcend traditional Marxism.
To Lefebvre, human development proceeds in three major stages: The agrarian, the industrial and the urban society. These three stages are related to need, work and pleasure respectively. The urban expresses above all a cultural content: the free work. "Close to Wirth ...it is the density, the warmth of concentration that, by increasing actions and communication. encourage at one and the same time a free flowering, the unexpected, pleasure, sociability and desire", says Castells (1977, p.90).
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In Lefebvre's urban space something is always happening. Experience and adventure, emancipation and liberation, festival and creative spontaneity - this is supposed to be produced by urban form, which being neither object nor subject, is defined above all by the dialectic of centrality, or of its negation (segregation, dispersal, periphery).
Lefebvre's, space and urban structure were seen by Castells as pure transparent expressions of the intervention of human actors. For Lefebvre the urban was also a productive force - and the core of the next large transformation of human history - the next revolution wouldn't be what Marxists traditionally had thought, it would be urban instead. By 'the right to the city' he proposes to replace by urban praxis an industrial praxis that is now over, Castells said.
This perspective, seen as a whole, gave Castells no specific answer to the theoretical problems posed by the social determination of space and urban organisation. To him, Lefebvre had to advance a mechanistic hypothesis that was quite unjustifiable: the hypothesis according to which social relations are revealed in the negation of distance. "And that is what the essence of the urban is in the last resort. For the city creates nothing, but, by centralising creations, it enables them to flower" (Castells, 1977, p.90)
Lefebvre's urban revolution was also seen as utopian. The introduction of the corrective 'free of all repression' destroyed any causal relation between the form 'the city' and human creation 'the urban'. This meant, according to Castells, that the conditions of emergence of 'the urban' had to pass elsewhere than through forms, e.g. through political practice. Lefebvre's perspective was therefore judged as a political dangerous: a transcending of the theory of the modes of production and class struggle. To Castells this was seen as a reversal of the materialist problematic, where Lefebvre set out from 'men' rather than from their social and technological relations of production and domination. Within a decade, though, the urban questions popped up again without mercy, as Castells' own approach to found a new urban sociology turned out to be a much too narrow one.
Lefebvre answered himself: " But Castells does not understand space. He sets aside space. His is still a simplistic Marxist scheme...very reductionist" (Lefebvre in Burgel et al, 1987, p 77, here quoted from Tonboe, 1993, p 377).
Missed aspects and new openings
What was missed in Castells' perspective were other aspects of the life world in the cities, than those related to 'collective consumption', like interactive actors - i.e. individuals - cultural issues, politics in its complexity, race and gender. And above all space as concrete properties and a concrete structure.
Concerning 'the urban', in the long run Lefebvre's writings are more interesting. Compared to Lefebvre, it becomes even more clear that the Castells of the 1970s missed aspects such as individual social relations across the social stratification or to strangers, emotions, chance, play, learning, and creativity. Tonboe (1993), who has written the most well balanced evaluation that I know of Castells and the new urban sociology, sums up their results: "The Neo-Marxists have at best been satisfied by contributing a little better or a little deeper explanation of the social, political and economical backgrounds for the spatial structures...Paradoxically (they), more than anything else, seems to have contributed to spatial amnesia" (Tonboe, 1993, p 3-4; also see p 371 and 422-437).
To deal with these aspects, I think disciplines other than sociology have to be taken into account as well, e.g. social psychology. But anyhow - and that is the important - the fields of urban studies are now wide open again.
You might ask, then, if we are back to square one. Not quite, I think. In the 1970s, if they had had it before, urban studies anyhow lost their innocence, and questions of 'the theoretical object' and methodology were brought forward demonstrably. Today we also have: 1) the recognition of the necessity of more complex analyses (though every research have to be reductionist to some extent - its part of the purpose/necessity to produce synthesised knowledge, as it is impossible to study everything at once - this of course doesn't make systematic approaches and clear distinctions superfluous); 2) the information age and a very much changed agenda; 3) 'Space syntax' and other new approaches that can deliver systematic and structured description of space, that can be compared to social aspects (see Hillier on 'Space Syntax', 1984 and 1996, as well as the 'fractals' of Batty & Longley, 1994).
In the 1980s Castells started to break out of the structuralist theoretical prison. Now, in the 90s, he is talking about the Information Age, including not only systemic, but also life-world questions as the self, experience and architecture. But concerning architecture and the urban, in the 1990s we also see a rejection of urban social and spatial issues among some leading architects. To some extent, this might be the result of a time lag in combination with professional fragmentation and closure. The problems of some 1990s urban architectural thinking therefore have to be mentioned here as well.
2. 'The Rise of the Network
Society'
- Manuel Castells and the question
of information age urbanity.
'The Informational city'
After 'The City and the Grassroots', where Castells in 1983s summarised his studies on the struggles around collective consumption, he turned to the more general questions of space and social relations in the new rapidly developing information age. His first writings on this issue may have been a UC Berkeley paper of 1984 'Towards the Informational city?', a theme he developed into the book on 'The Informational City' (1989) - Castells first major work on the information age. His main contribution is on the understanding this new situation at a structural or systemic level, an approach that continues in his last work, the trilogy on 'The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture'. I will here focus primarily on the first volume 'The Rise of the Network Society' (1996).
As times go by, it becomes increasingly necessary, though, to open up for a wider range of life-world issues than before, like questions of experience, identity, the Self, architecture and urban design, towards which he now take his first probing steps. A new urban question is arising here.
Castells' title 'The Informational City' can be interpreted in several ways, I think. In a direct sense, the electronic networks collapses into simultaneous interactivity the leading edge activities of economics, politics and media on a planetary scale, making the whole planet one city. In a metaphorical sense, the city is an image of society, with all its diversities, ongoing processes, contradictions, struggles and asymmetries, and 'The Informational City' is therefore 'the global society' of the information age. Another supplementary but later interpretation, towards which Castells (1996) possibly gives an opening, could be that the non-cyberspace city - the city of streets, facades, bodies in public space, and 'real life' activities here - can be seen as information interfaces and information processes as well, taking the new paradigms of the information age all the way through. As the observant reader has already noticed, the catchwords of Castells' book title 'The Informational City' are also part of the title of my dissertation, and deliberately so, as it is my intention to try to place the contemporary urban question into the context of the information age and possibly contribute to the "the street level" perspective. But now I am jumping ahead too fast.
When I began the project leading to this dissertation, my starting point on the information age was more Alvin Toffler than Castells. Though there are many similarities between their works, Castells have the recognised academic underpinnings and conflict oriented approach, where Toffler's work is more 'futuristic' and journalistic, as well as less oriented towards spatial, city and class issues. Toffler's three waves 'the agricultural', 'the industrial', and 'the informational', is triad that now also is Castells'. (See Toffler 1980, 1984, 1990, and 1993: 'The Third Wave', 'Previews & Premises', 'Powershift - knowledge, wealth, and violence at the edge of the 21st century', and 'War and Anti-war, survival at the dawn of the 21st century'. Toffler 1993 p 20-30 is a recent summary of Toffler's 3 waves)
In 'The Informational City', Castells introduces 'the informational mode of development' as a new stage in the capitalist 'mode of production', with its own specific characteristics, including 'the space of flows' and the rise of a dual city, while in his next major work the focus on dualities starts to get superseded by more complex consequences of 'The Rise of the Network Society'
'The Rise of the Network Society' - an overview
Castells' (1996) book 'The Rise of the Network Society', besides the prologue on the Net and the Self and the concluding pages on 'The Network Society', has chapters dealing with 1) the information technology revolution - the new technological paradigm; 2) the informational economy and the process of globalisation; 3) the network enterprise; 4) the transformation of work and employment; 5) the culture of real virtuality; 6) the space of flows; and 7) the edge of forever: timeless time. Globalisation and the transformation of work are the largest chapters, but to me the rest are at least as central, and the book contain more than 1000 scientific references.
The importance of Castells' recent work, I think, is not that he now talks about the information age, which many do, but that he brings many pieces together in a comprehensive way related to cities and space. 'The Information Age' Castells, therefore, to me is a relevant starting point for a new perspective on the city based on an information paradigm, though I also see priorities conceptually narrowing his understanding. This means, that I basically accept Castells' findings - at his level of analyses. So does e.g. Anthony Giddens, who about 'The Rise of the Network Society' says: 'This is a very major work of social and economic theory - perhaps the most significant attempt that anyone has yet written to come to terms with the extraordinary transformations now going on in the social world'. Castells is also now appointed to the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on the Information Society.
My survey of the 'Information Age' Castells has a double purpose here: 1) to introduce and discuss the informational paradigm in order subsequently, if it is not all hype, to try it out at the street level in cities in my own analyses; and 2) to see if Castells has changed his views on the urban question. I will do so in a 'circular' movement, starting with the urban question, passing through his notions of the space, flows, places and real virtuality, ending in informationalism, network logic and a complementary double perspective of 'The Informational City'.
The urban question revisited
The conceptual divisions of agrarian/industrial and local/cosmopolitan that in 1972 worked as a red rag to the bull, are back as essential categories in to the Castells of the 1990s, but now related to the new context of the information age. The agrarian/ industrial dualism is superseded by the triad of agrarian/ industrial/ informational, pushing to the forefront the fundamental urban dualism of our time, Castells now says, namely the cosmopolitanism of the elite versus the tribalism of local communities. In a world dominated by global flows of electronic bits an increasing lack of communication between the elite and the locally-oriented population is developing, with experiences of ever deeper identity crises (Castells 1989 p 172, 224, 228; Castells 1994).
Spatial and urban concepts rejected in 1972 are coming back too, like centrality, centralisation and decentralisation, central city vs. suburb, and even a concentric urban empirical analyses reminiscent of the Chicago School. And where Castells in 'The Urban Question' condemned the urban as a rejection of distance and as such without interest, today you may turn the question around and ask if Castells new dominating and distanceless space of flows is not actually urban.
The development of multiple dual cities now gives Castells new political problems related to loss of meaning, which demands new strategies. While Castells 25 years ago would have tried to counter external power primarily through grassrot organisations, today grassrot mobilisation locally is no longer enough to him. Political counter strategies therefore have to be changed (Castells 1989 p 350).
Now it is necessary not only to be defensive but to be offensive, and local government also have positive contributions to make, sometimes maybe even parts of the 'elites', when the informational development threatens to break down communication channels in society and to make the scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, and, as Castells sees it, less and less able to share cultural codes.
Castells now also recognises that there is no direct link from centres of power to peoples understanding messages that they receive. He accepts Umberto Eco's notion, that the 'receivers' of media messages, etc., always will perform an individual and/or group-specific interpretation. And although not formulated as a self-criticism, it could as well be it, when he says that Eco's notion 'undermines fundamental aspects of critical social theory from Marcuse to Habermas'. To the Castells of 'The Network Society', it is one of the ironies of intellectual history 'that it is precisely those thinkers who advocate social change who often view people as passive receptacles of ideological manipulation, in fact precluding the notions of social movements and social change except under the mode of exceptional, singular events generated outside the social system' (Castells 1996 p 335; Eco 1977 p 90).
Even 'the right to the city' is now mentioned by Castells, talking about the isolated ghettos in suburban Paris, but without mentioning Lefebvre though.
I think it is possible to take the implications of the 1990s Castells even further. If the network logic, now introduced by Castells, can be used on street systems in cities as well, then a spatially structured form of social contact possibility and contact generation exists that cross different modes of production and different modes of development, further wiping away the ground underneath the critique of 'the urban' in Castells' 'The Urban Question' of 1972. And if networks can be a productive force, then so can, to some extent, the urban?
Therefore sociology, or at least Castells himself, now have to come back to 'urbanity'. So in 'The Network Society', after working with urban issues for about 30 years, Castells finally starts to recognise the importance of urbanity. This is a new opening. Returning to Bellville in Paris, where he started his urban research career in the 1960s, he likes its urban vitality, its truly plural urbanity, its mixed and diverse uses, its wide range of functions and expressions, and its active street life, where people interact in the space, giving meaning to it, linking it up with the 'city of collective memory' a la Christine Boyer.
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He also mentions Barcelona's Rambla as an urban place and continues with a comparison of Barcelona's grid plan by Cerda to suburban Irvine in California based on his UC Berkeley colleague Allan B. Jacobs' studies in 'Great Streets'(1993).
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These studies show a difference in urban quality, e.g. on the basis of the number and frequency of intersections in the street pattern. In Irvine the space of experience shrinks inward toward the home, as 'flows' take over increasing shares of time and space, while the situation in Barcelona (though Castells doesn't say) is supposedly different. To Castells, the relationships between the space of flows and the space of places, between simultaneous globalisation and localisation are not predetermined in their outcome. Urbanity therefore is possible and important - though he doesn't discuss the very different situation for urban planning in Cerda's early industrial Barcelona of 1855-1861 from the late industrial Irvine of the 1950s and 60s.
(For a short introduction to Cerda's Barcelona plan see 'Visionas Urbanas' 1994 p 33-35. Cerda's own urban theory was first published in 1867 as 'La Teoria general de la urbanizacion'. Francoise Choay, 1980 p 284-311, has shown how Cerda fused the two traditions of architectural rules and social utopia in urban thinking.)
Simultaneously, and maybe for the first time, Castells now reckons 'that places are not necessarily communities' (Castells 1996 p 424-25, referring to Allan B Jacobs 1993 p 208, 221, and 262, and Boyer 1994).
Although, he doesn't say so, this, I think, has far-reaching consequences for our perspective on cities. It undermines not only Castells old one-sided view of organised collective action as the only politically important, but also the dogma of narrow-minded and hierarchical neighbourhood planning.
Space, flows, places and real virtuality (To be edited)
Informationalism - a new historical stage based on an information paradigm?
To Castells, all the major trends of change constituting the new, confusing world are related, if we take technology as a starting point. Castells therefore now focuses on the technological revolution centred on information technologies and the formation of a new global economy working as a unit in real time. For the first time in history, information and knowledge now become directly productive forces, and information becomes the critical raw material of which all social process and social organisations are made. Consequently material production, as well as services, becomes subordinate to the handling of information. (Also see Castells: ' European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy' in New Left Review 204, March/April 1994)
What can be seen in this perspective, is the emergence of a new mode of development, informationalism, historically shaped by the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production towards the end of the twentieth century. Continuing to build on a Marxist perspective, but also developing it, Castells now distinguish both between modes of production (of which there today are on the one hand the capitalist and on the other the statest) and - this is the new - between modes of development, where the industrial is now superseded by the informational. ('Statist' are economies dominated by the state, like in the 'communist' countries. With the Soviet block transformed and the Chinese economy racing rather freely into the 21st century, I think statism in a strict sense might soon be history, though many Western countires has elements of 'statism' too.)
Castells' terminology tries to establish a parallel with the distinction between industry and industrial. The term 'informationalism' therefore also to some extent means 'postindustrialism', while the term 'the information age' is used instead of 'the information society', not to take any specific concept of an 'information society' for granted from the outset (Castells 1996, p. 5, 14, 21-22)
'Informational' indicates a specific form of social organisation in which information generation, processing and transmission become fundamental sources of productivity and power. In the new, informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communication. The specific of this mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity, and while this by some is thought to undermine the labour market, there are now more jobs and a higher proportion of working-age people employed than at any time in history, not mass unemployment. Castells (1996, p 17 and 474) has now adopted 'the American view', that high level of unemployment in Western Europe compared to the US is not mainly caused by the economy, a view that I share, but by 'institutional' reasons, by which he might mean government regulations, political constraints, high minimum wages or the built in contradiction of some welfare provisions.
According to Castells, industrialism is based on cheap energy and oriented toward economic growth - that is toward maximising output - while informationalism is based on cheap information and oriented towards technological development - that is toward the accumulation of knowledge and towards higher levels of complexity in information processing. Or You could say, I think, that industrialism is oriented towards material growth, while informationalism is oriented towards the growth of knowledge and experience.
Where Lefebvre saw the main stages of human history as a triad of the agrarian, the industrial and the urban society, Castells now, like Toffler, see them as the agrarian, the industrial and the informational. In Castells' perspective, the triad is described in the following way:
"The first model of relationship between Nature and Culture was characterised for millennia by the domination of Nature over Culture...The second pattern of the relationship established at the origins of the Modern Age, and associated with the Industrial Revolution and with the triumph of Reason, saw the domination of Nature by Culture. ...We are just now entering a new stage in which Culture refers to Culture, having superseded Nature to the point that Nature is artificially revived ('preserved') as a cultural form ...Because of the convergence of historical evolution and technological change we have entered a purely cultural pattern of social interaction and social organisation. This is why information is the key ingredient of our social organisation and why flows of messages between networks constitute the basic thread of our social structure...History is just beginning, if by history we understand the moment when, after millennia of a prehistoric battle with Nature, first to survive, then to conquer it, our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organisation that will allow us to live in a predominantly social world. It is the beginning of a new existence, and indeed a beginning of a new age, the information age, marked by the autonomy of culture vis-à-vis the material bases of our existence" (Castells 1996, p 477-78; also see p 17).
In the current debate on the information age (e.g. Ian Miles review of 'The Informational City' in 'International Journal of Urban and Regional Research', 1991) it is questioned whether there actually is a profound societal change (there e.g. has been large technological changes with social consequences several times the last 200 years) and it is questioned if the concept of different modes of development within capitalism is clear enough or even necessary at all. Castells view is without doubt: the new technologies are different because the act on information itself, they are pervasive as the include all spheres of society, they have a new networked logic, they are extremely flexible, and they converge into highly integrated systems. Is this technological determinism? I think not. The new technological paradigm is not only about technology in a narrow sense, it is e.g. about the organisation of work, the informational workforce and its qualifications, and the media world of Real Virtuality as well. And it includes the biotechnology of DNA mapping and manipulation, that basically is a question of information too and now makes us able to intervene deliberately with the basic codes of life itself.
The first IC (integrated circuit) was developed by Texas Instruments in 1958, based on Bell Laboratories invention/discovery of the transistor in 1948 (Nobel Price 1956). The DNA double helix was discovered in 1953 and less than 50 years later the human genome is mapped, genetic engineering exploding, and cloned Dolly a reality.
Castells recognise that technology is not neutral and that we have to struggle about its use and openness. Castells here (1996 p 65) refers to Krantzberg's (1985 p 50) first law: technology is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral.
But hardware technology is also advancing rather predictably, I think, with high rates of change. It is actually possible to predict the continuation of the basic development of information technology (Moore's law) for at least the next 15-20 years, i.e. the dramatic technological changes of electronics during the last 40 years will continue, slowing down only a little. Moore's 'law' says that microchips double in performance at a given prise in 18 months (Castells 1996 p 40).
In Business Week, June 23, 1997 p 66, Gordon Moore of Intel says himself: 'This year, 1996, the industry will produce about 1 quintillion transistors. That's at least as many as all the ants on the earth. The transistor count will continue soaring for the next 15 to 20 years, as chipmakers shrink circuit linewidth from 0,35 micron today to 0,07 microns in 2011. That would enable Intel to make chips 200 times more powerful that its current speed champs'.
One example, I think, of the dramatic changes we live through at the moment in telecommunications, is that today's most capable fibre phone lines can carry a gigabit or two of information - roughly an Encyclopaedia Britannica - in a second. That is a 10.000-fold improvement on copper (BusinessWeek special issue on the Information revolution 1994 p 61).
'Real Virtuality', related to this enormous capacity of information transmission, is an important part of the informational development too. This is 'Castells' label for the networked multimedia world in which, as we stroll down virtual lanes, the electronic simulacra of existence, the games and virtual environments become the real data of our experience' (according to Cliff Barney's review of Dec. 27. 1996 of Castells 1996, posted on the Internet).
Real virtuality is a system in which reality itself (that is people's material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience. The space of flows and timeless time are the material foundations of a new culture, i.e. the culture of real virtuality. What is new is not that reality as experienced is virtual, which it has always been. Referring to Postman, Castells claims that 'we do not see reality as 'it' is, but as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture...'. Cultures are made up of communication processes and thus there are no separation between 'reality' and symbolic representation (Castells 1996 p 328, 372-73, 375; Postman 1985 p 15).
The new is, as I interpret it, that we now have a second parallel 'world' of another kind.
As informationalism to Castells is based on the technology of knowledge and information, he sees a specially close linkage between culture and productive forces, between spirit and matter, in the informational mode of development (Castells 1996 p 18).
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Network logic
One of the key features of information age is the networking logic of its basic structure. Networks, Castells says, constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture. What, then, is network logic, its social consequences and possible implications for the understanding of 'the urban'?
A network is a set of interconnected nodes, Castells says, and he continues: "What a node is, concretely speaking, depends on the kind of concrete networks of which we speak.....The topology defined by networks determines that the distance (or intensity and frequency of interaction) between two points (or social positions) is shorter (or more frequent, or more intense) if both points are nodes in a network than if they do not belong to the same network. On the one hand, within a given network flows have no distance, or the same distance, between nodes. Thus, distance (physical, social, economic, political, cultural) for a given point or position varies between zero (for any node in the same network) and infinite (for any point external to the network)". On the other hand, networks to Castells are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate with the network" (Castells 1996 p 470-71).
Considering the key importance of networks to Castells in the 1990s, you would like to know more about them, than he makes available, but to some extent Castells can be excused for not giving the network concept a more thorough coverage, as it today consists of often unrelated pieces of knowledge or theory here and there. I would like to add, that telecommunication networks are also related to switching technologies, to different form of network topologies (chain, ring, star, etc.), and to dependency on addresses, communication protocols (handshaking), error-checking, channel capacity, optimal coding procedures, etc. Network redundancy is extra links between nodes allowing continued operation in the event of one failing. The topology of networks can be described in network diagrams through a graphical representation of the interconnections of nodes. Theoretically, telecommunication networks, because of increasing complexity and crowding, have led to the development of information theory that is related to probability, but also to operations research, game theory, queuing theory, decision theory and mathematical graph theory.
My search on 'network' in three encyclopaedias on CD-ROM shows that only one had 'network' as primary key word entry (and only with simple dictionary kind of information). All other references were to a range of other primary key word entries than the word network itself. If we go to other scientific concepts and uses than telecommunications, networks also concerns what is inside our brains, as we think with and remember by neural networks. Like other networks, neural networks do not follow rigidly programmed rules, and in this way differs both from traditional hierarchical structures and conventional digital computers. Rather, they build an information base through a trial-and-error method. Pathways between individual circuits are "strengthened" (resistance turned down) when a task is performed correctly and "weakened" (resistance turned up) if performed incorrectly. In this way a neural network "learns" from its mistakes and gives more accurate output with each repetition of a task. Neural networks can now be simulated with computers, using parallel processing instead of serial, and will supposedly be of great importance for the developing of artificial intelligence, including pattern recognition, voice recognition, etc. On the semantic level, networks have connotations of communication, distribution, fencing, fishing nets, grids, mix, sociability, spiders, unification, weaving, etc. (Sources: Microsoft Encarta 1996, Grolier 1995, and Crompton's 1995 - three common encyclopaedias for computer users; Microsoft Bookshelf 1994, Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary on CD-ROM 10th edition, and Peter Collin's Dictionary of Information Technology 1996).
In encyclopaedic knowledge, electronic networks are supposed to have the advantage of speed, reduced costs, increased worker productivity and convenience. Castells sees their importance in the following way:
"A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance...Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalisation, and decentralised concentration; for work, workers and firms based on flexibility; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public moods; and for a social organisation aiming at the supersession of space and the annihilation of time" (Castells 1996 p 470-71).
When Castells talk about this dynamic, open, innovative, expandable, integrating, and flexible character of networks, he doesn't not say immediately why networks have these properties, although you can get some hints here and there in the book, e.g. because of the increased randomness of contacts and information. He refers to Kelly (1994), but without using Kelly's strongest points about networks: distributed decisions and rather autonomous subunits, exponential growth of interacting possibilities, the availability of alternative paths, high connectivity, and non-linear causality. To Kevin Kelly, the network concept is closely linked not only to the fields and applications related to telecommunications, but to living systems generally, and their way of functioning and development. Networks are difficult to understand, though, Kelly says, as they are counterintuitive, e.g. networks can be shortened by adding nodes (Castells 1996 p 61-62 on Kelly 1995 p 25-27; also see Kelly 1995 p 21-23).
If I should try to place 'the network logic' in relations to other 'logics', I would say that it is different from linear or simple hierarchical logic. This doesn't mean that networks can't contain elements of linearity or a structured hierarchy, only that they are more complex, and that complexity might result in other types of processes and understanding at a new and 'higher' level.
(For more on information techology and networks see e.g. Bo Grönlund: Framtidens närvaro - översiktsplanen och internettet (text in Swedish))
The networked Self - experience, identity and the city
To Castells networks have far reaching consequences. In the information age the space of flows and the networking logic changes peoples experience and the perception of self as well, Castells says. Our societies becomes increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self (Castells 1996, p 5).
This focus on the self becomes increasingly important and necessary to him as informational work disaggregates labour, which loses its collective identity and becomes increasingly individualised in its capacities, in its working conditions, an in its interests and projects, or as he also says, because 'social relationships of production have been disconnected in their actual existence' (Castells 1996, p 279 and 472).
As a consequence Castells has to expand his perspective to include not only the systemic spheres of 'production' and 'power', which he has had since the 1960s, but also the sphere of 'experience' related to the life world and the individual, defined in the following way:
"Experience is the action of human subjects on themselves, determined by the interaction between their biological and cultural identities, and in relationship to their social and natural environment. It is constructed around the endless search for fulfilment of human needs and desires....Experience is structured around gender/sexual relationships, historically organised around the family, and characterised hitherto by the domination of men over women. Family relationships and sexuality structure personality and frame symbolic interaction." (Castells 1996, p 14-15).
I think this focus on gender/sexuality may be too narrow, though. To me the experiential lifeworld also includes e.g. creative work as a desire in itself.
Maybe Castells also want to make Touraine's and Barglow's views his own (Touraine 1994, p 168 'Qu'est-ce que la démocratie?; Barglow 1994, p 6, 'The Crises of the Self in the Age of Information, Computers, Dolphins, and Dreams. See Castells 1996, p 23).
Touraine argues that 'in a post-industrial' society, in which cultural services have replaced material goods at the core of production, it is the defence of the subject, in its personality and in its culture, against the logic of apparatuses and markets, that replaces the idea of class struggle. Taking the argument further, Castells also mentions the Barglow socio-psychological perspective, which points to the paradox that while information systems and networking augment human powers of organisation and integration, they simultaneously subvert the traditional western concept of a separate, independent subject, built on the notions of sovereignty and self-sufficiency that have provided an ideological anchoring for individual identity since Greek philosophers elaborated the concept more than two millennia ago. A new feeling of absolute solitude, different from the classic Freudian representation, is also mentioned (Castells 1996 p 23). In the second volume of his new work ('The Power of Identity'), Castells analyses the formation of the self, and the interaction between the net and the self in the crises of two central institutions of society: the patriarchal family and the nation state.
Giddens seems to agree, that the search for identity becomes acute and difficult, and Toffler emphasises that with a strong increase in speed of social and cultural change, the identification the individual look for will often be temporary (Giddens 1996; Toffler 1980).
The question of the self and the net is now so complicated, that it has created at least one new kind of decease. When Castells wrote 'The rise of the Network Society', he couldn't know, that the 1997 congress of psychology in Chicago would discuss PIU ('Pathological Internet Use'), where people, both men and women, in average are on-line 38 hours a week because of a gambling mania or for social reasons, playing with their identity. This pathology is already recognised by WHO under the name of IAD ,'Internet Addiction Disorder' (The Danish newspaper Politiken, August 21. 1997, the Computer Section, p 5).
But there might be more at stake here. Ian Miles writes in his review of 'The Informational City', that in the long run, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence may pose Copernican-type challenges to our conceptions of what it is to be human (Miles 1991).
Kelly adds that the duality of body/mind and whole /part evaporates when holistic behaviour emerges in a complex way from the limited behaviours of networked parts. And Castells himself can see a cancelling of the discontinuity of humans and machines, and maybe as mentioned in his reference to Barglow above, of the subject/object dichotomy as well.
Castells own conclusion is, that the new social order, the network society, increasingly appears to most people as a meta-social disorder, namely, as an automated, random sequence of events, derived from the uncontrollable logic of markets, technology, geopolitical order, or biological determination (Castells 1996, p 477).
To me the similarities with negative perceptions of the city during the last 150 years are striking. I therefore suggest that the issues discussed above are also related to street networks and urbanity. Street systems in cities (or systems of publics spaces and access) can be seen as networks too, i.e. as material networks supporting a multitude of different social networks, where the latter are more or less randomly interconnected or confronted with each other in space and time. Such a perspective can possibly come to grips with at least some of the properties of urbanity supported by street systems of pre-modern cities, as well as some of the 'lack' of urbanity related to fractal road systems of the modern city, having a topology of reduced connectivity, and a weaker network character. On connectivity Kelly says: "Kauffmann found that at the low end, with less than two connections per agent or organism, the whole system wasn't nimble enough to keep up with change...(but) Kauffmann's law states that above a certain point, increasing the richness of connections between agents freezes adaptation. Nothing gets done, because to many actions hinge on too many other contradictory actions". It is best with less than 10 connections per member (Kelly 1994 p 399-400 on Stuart Kauffmann 1991a, 1991b and 1993). What we have in modern fractal road networks is a spatial structure branching out to a large number of spaces with only one connection, i.e. with less than Kauffmann's low level of two connections, while the deformed grid of the pre-modern city have few street spaces with only one connection and on average a connectivity well within Kauffmann's range of 2 to 10, e.g. my calculations show an average connectivity of 1325 street lines in inner Copenhagen of 4,6. (Also see Batty & Longley 1994) 'Fractal Cities').
One of the results of the reduced connectivity of the modern city might be, that you e.g. see much less 'handshaking' here - to use contemporary computer terminology metaphorically related to traditional bodily practice, taking the network concept full circle.
Hillier's axial maps in 'Space Syntax' is e.g. about street systems seen as networks, including the concept of nodes, though Hillier's view of networks is more elaborated than Castells', as he also works with the property of varying depth (i.e. steps) between nodes, not just zero vs. infinite (Hillier & Hanson 1984, 'The Social Logic of Space' and Hillier 1996, 'Space is the Machine'). To me the networking logic might also be a factor in the bipolar opposition between the city and the home, and the city and the self, as e.g. expressed in Sennett (1990).
The informational mode of development - theoretical questions on typologies
In the end, the theoretical status of the concept of the information age and the informational mode of development is one of basic societal typologies. When Castells compare his work to Weber's, he doesn't mention this.
Castells' modes of development as wells as Marx' different modes of production and Toffler's "Waves" can be seen as typologies in the Weberian sense of ideal types. An ideal type is any conceptualisation (idealisation) of a general or particular phenomenon which for analytical and explanatory purposes, represents this phenomenon only in its abstract or "pure" (hence "idealised") form(s). The foundations of ideal-type analyses in sociology derive from Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904-05). Most clearly apparent is what Weber did not mean by ideal types: a) they do not state an ethical ideal; b) they do not state an "average" type; c) they do not "exhaust reality", i.e. they do not correspond exactly to any empirical instances. What Weber has to say more positively about ideal types is that: a) they are mental constructs which are ideal in the "logical sense", i.e. they state a logical extreme, b) they "distort" and abstract from reality, c) they can be used to formulate an abstract model of the general form and the interrelated causes and effects of a complex recurring phenomenon. A further requirement is that these concepts must be "objectively possible", in that they must approximate to concrete realities and also be "subjectively adequate", i.e. be understandable in terms of the subjective orientations of a hypothetical "individual actor" (Collins' Dictionary of Sociology 1991, p 293-94. For an elementary introduction in Swedish to ideal-types as one of several qualitative scientific methods, see Eneroth 1984).
The difficulty that arises from Weber's as well as Castells' approach is that it renders ideal-type analyses in sociology essentially arbitrary. Talcott Parsons (1937) has in "The structure of social action" argued that ideal-type analyses only can become coherent by seeking the cumulative development of general concepts and the development of a potentially unitary theory in sociology, avoiding "type atomism".
Provisional conclusion
Many other issues ought to be discussed thoroughly concerning the information age, including aspects largely left aside by Castells, like the different and strangely monopolistic character of a software knowledge economy based on 'intellectual property rights' and 'intellectual capital', the hardware economy of cyberspace, the role of multinational corporations and electronic money markets, etc., but this will have to do for now. Writings about a new social typology and broad paradigm shifts, while changes take place, will always have to be questioned anyhow. Only time can tell whether new typologies becomes generally accepted and whether deep and long lasting paradigm shifts actually happen.
For now, in his systemic analyses, I think Castells basically is on the track in 'The Rise of the Network Society', i.e. that we are entering an information age and experiencing an increasing importance of network logic.
Literature: (to be edited)
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