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Manuel Castells
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Manuel Castells

1942

Spanish sociologist who explained the city first as a conflict over public services and later as a node in a world network.

In his early work Castells defined the city by «collective consumption»: schools, transport, healthcare, housing. Things the market does not provide well and that the state has to guarantee. Hence urban conflicts — over a bus route, over a health centre — are political conflicts in the full sense.

He later turned to the network society and coined the «space of flows»: the idea that what organises territory today is not so much physical proximity as connection. Two financial districts ten thousand kilometres apart work more closely together than a district and the neighbourhood next door.

A Spanish sociologist born in 1942, exiled to France under the dictatorship, Castells taught in Paris, at the University of California, Berkeley, for twenty-four years and at the University of Southern California, and was Spain's minister of universities between 2020 and 2021. The Urban Question (1972) founded Marxist urban sociology with the idea that the city is the place of collective consumption, housing, transport, schools, which the state organises to reproduce the labour force, and The City and the Grassroots (1983) studied the urban movements that contest that consumption.

The Informational City (1989) and the trilogy The Information Age (1996-1998) described the network society: a space of flows connecting elites and global nodes against the space of places where most people live. Communication Power (2009) and Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012) followed that logic to social networks and the squares of 2011. He is one of the most cited social scientists in the world, and his space of flows remains the framework for thinking about the global city.

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