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 1970s, 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 Tnnies, 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 noncontinuos 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. 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 technonatural 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). 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.