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Oxford, UK and Malden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-1317Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006March 200630
121923Original ArticlesDebates and DevelopmentsDebate

Volume 30.1

March 2006

21923 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Changer la Ville: A Rejoinder

MANUEL CASTELLS

I am deeply grateful to the colleagues who took the care and the effort to analyze and
debate the contribution of the book that remains my favorite research contribution to
the understanding of urban social transformation. My main purpose in joining the
discussion is to correspond to their kindness and scholarship by elaborating on the issues
they have pointedly raised.
I took 12 years to research and write The City and the Grassroots, between 1970
(first theoretical formulation of a framework for the study of urban social movements)
and the field work in San Francisco in 19802, with the actual writing taking place in
my first years in Berkeley, between 1979 and the fall of 1982. Throughout the process,
I transformed my own theory and I constantly adjusted my methodology, on the basis
of my findings, research practice and human and political experiences. Moreover,
I learned to distrust ideology (including my own) without rejecting the political
implications of my research. Indeed, I considered, and still do, that good analysis unveils
the forms of domination and helps people to take control of their lives. And of their cities.
Yes, as several of the contributors state, this is a book about cities, about how cities
are produced and transformed by collective actions of protest, resistance and project
building. Not that these are the only sources of urban social change (real estate interests
or the transportation industry are as important, not to mention technology). But the
decisive contribution of social struggles to the actual forms and meaning of urban space,
and to the cultural construction of cities throughout history, was generally overlooked
in social sciences, as well as in the planning and architectural practice. Citizens were
considered to be consumers of the city, not its producers. I believe the historical record,
when carefully examined, provides evidence to the contrary, and I tried to find additional
evidence for the argument in a series of case studies on which I could provide an analysis
based on my own research, conducted within the usual standards of social sciences. I
did select the fields of research on the basis of my capacity to investigate each one of
them, but with the condition that each one of the four fields of observation would
highlight one of the dimensions proposed by my theory as being one of the axes of
urban transformation with the case of Madrid giving me the opportunity to observe
the articulation between the three dimensions.
The intended outcome was exactly the one identified by Lynn Staeheli: to build a
grounded theory through empirical analysis of movements that span several empirical
foci, places and time periods. As always, the degree of success of the enterprise (it is
always a relative matter) can only be established by how useful the work is or has been
for researchers working on cities and social change, and for people at large when trying
to understand the environment of their lives. Judging on the small sample of the
contributors to this debate (and regardless of their judgment on the quality of the work)
I could be encouraged by the results of a rather strenuous effort. On the other hand,
judging by the low level of citations of the book in some related disciplines, according
to the remarks in this debate, I should be disappointed. I will return later to the matter
of citations, but disappointed I am not. Besides my own discussions over the years with
students, colleagues and citizens around the world, the fact that we are having this most
interesting exchange shows that the issues are relevant, and that the research approach
taken in The City and the Grassroots is not to be discarded.
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Which brings me to the issue of methodology. In fact, the methods used in the studies
that compose The City and the Grassroots are highly diverse, with different levels of
formalization. But, altogether, this is a book based on ethnography, mixing hundreds of
in-depth interviews of actors and informants, extensive participant observation, and a
collection of documents generated by the movements themselves together with some
analyses of socio-spatial structure (including a factor analysis of Madrids urban
structure, and a statistical analysis of the location of gay households in San Francisco),
and with documentation to set up the urban context of each one of the fields of
observation. In some instances, I simply elaborated as systematically as I could on what
I observed and knew. In other instances, particularly in San Francisco and Madrid, I did
try some formalization of the data, so that they could be systematically related to the
hypotheses. Yes, I could not demonstrate anything, but I did provide the body of
observation, particularly in the case of Madrid, with the possibility of falsifying my
interpretations and the hypotheses held. This is the most social sciences can usually
do. I did include a long methodological appendix (it was a real battle with the publisher)
that gave minute details of the coding of each one of the characteristics of each one of
the collective actions. In the end, I think I produced a formal analysis of sorts that made
sense of the observations in terms that are theoretically meaningful. The intention was
never comparative, but cross-cultural. The causal implications are different of course.
A cross-cultural approach means that if similar mechanisms are observed in very
different cultures, there is some plausibility in the argument put forward. As for the
critique of contextual determination, I never understood it, frankly, and I do not think
it is reinstated by any of the contributors to this debate. A social process exists in itself.
It may be contextually conditioned, but if the context has an effect on the process, this
effect has to be internalized; it becomes a source of variation in the characteristics that
define one aspect of the process. In other words, social action is shaped by the context
but does not reflect or reproduce the context. It may vary between contexts, but, if it
does, then we should not be able to find similar mechanisms in very different contexts.
So, while acknowledging the importance of context, each context must be translated in
the specificity of the language of social action taking place in the context, and analyzed
as a component of the process itself.
Is this discussion, and my approach in The City and the Grassroots, an indicator of
positivism? Probably yes. Because I am a positivist, I have never had anything against
positivism, and I was always focused on doing empirical research, as coded and formal
as possible, while trying to make sense of it. In this sense, I am, and always was, very
different from all the noble names cited in this debate as points of comparison. I never
considered myself a theorist; I am a researcher, and I am only interested in theory as a
useful tool for research. This was not the case with Lefebvre, with Foucault, with
Bourdieu, and so many others in France and elsewhere. For them, the power of ideas
(more than formal theory) comes first. Intellectual influence is more important than
scientific relevance. I always took exception to the social model of the matres penser.
I always tried to understand the world, not the books, and then to use books, methods
and observation to actually do research that could be trusted. Trusted by at least some
in the scholarly community, and trusted by enough of us to tell people our sense of what
was making their lives one way or another. In my romantic period of studying social
movements from the trenches, I always told the militants that in exchange for their help
in my research I would give back some level of knowledge and consciousness of their
actions. I always tried to do this, and fed the results of my writing back to the movement,
where they were usually well received, albeit I do not think I was terribly helpful to
their fate. By the time I finished my careful research they were usually too tired to reflect
on their struggles.
Now, could I have been a positivist Marxist in the years preceding The City and the
Grassroots? Well, it could be: life is full of contradictions, but in my case, I do not think
this was so. First, not that it matters, but to keep straight my biographical record: I was
never a member of or even a sympathizer with the French Communist Party. In fact,
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during my years in France, the French Communists were my political enemies because
I was a radical leftist, an anarcho-Maoist, linked to grassroots militant groups, always
in opposition to the mainstream of the left. Yes, I was friendly with the urban researchers
who were French Communists, but this is because I always made a point of not
confusing political adversaries and colleagues or friends. However, for a few years I
was an Althusserian, and I was a structuralist Marxist, as expressed in The Urban
Question, my only Althusserian book, albeit an influential one that had an impact well
beyond my intention (although I fully acknowledge this book, and any other of my
works. My intellectual life is by definition diverse, and cannot have an ex-post,
reconstructed coherence).
But the way I came to Althusserianism was through my closest friend and colleague,
Nicos Poulantzas. And Nicos was focused on class struggle, and on the theory of the
state, on ideology, on politics. He was a political scientist, whereas Althusser was a
philosopher, en epistemologist and an interpreter of the Holy Texts (to the point of
declaring the true Marx to be the young [implicitly, non-rigorous and romantic] Marx
of the Manifesto). Furthermore, at heart, and in much of my research, my main
theoretical influence came from Alain Touraine (my dissertation director). Particularly
in the analysis of social movements I could not think in terms of Marxist theory. But
the Althusserian framework was formally more rigorous, and the fact that it was Marxist
lent the research couched in such terms political credibility among the left. Thus, from
these contradictory influences, I developed intellectually as a Tourainian obsessed with
using American-style methodology within a rigorous Marxist framework that could
speak to the people in the left to whom I wanted to relate in priority (meaning the real
left, not the communists).
Now, The City and the Grassroots was essential for my development as a researcher
because, when I used this explosive mixture in the practice of research, Althusserianism
vanished as irrelevant; Touraine remained as a powerful influence, but not his
excessively abstract theory; social movements appeared as largely autonomous subjects;
and I had no theoretical way to relate structure and agency, so I decided to concentrate
on agency and leave structure, and their interaction, for a later work (I tried in my trilogy
many years later). In the process, I abandoned the Marxist reference, because it was
more ideological than theoretical, while still using Marxist concepts and traditions of
inquiry whenever I needed, as I do with any other theoretical tool box. Thus, I never
became anti-Marxist or even post-Marxist, but theoretically agnostic.
What does all this mean for the practice of social and political change? The main
lesson, from The City and the Grassroots, and from my entire span of work, is that
conflict and protest and purposive social action are essential components of all social
dynamics and a most relevant, if complex, matter for research and theory. If we were
to state the first law of social organization it would be that where there is domination
there is resistance to domination. And because domination, under all its forms, and in
all contexts, has intensified in the last two decades, so has resistance, in spite of
appearances. And so it will always be. The problem is that resistance changes its forms
with context, and history. There is not much likelihood of seeing communism emerge
from its historical oblivion as a totalitarian system, or socialism assert itself beyond the
prudent management of the welfare state in wealthy societies. Thus, it becomes essential
to identify the new forms of resistance and the new projects of social change, in their
ideological diversity. Also, it is essential to keep our minds open to the variety of forms
of social protest. Byron Miller is absolutely right in pinpointing the importance of
studying conservative social mobilizations, in the suburbs and beyond, something I did
overlook in my early studies, given my concentration on understanding progressive
social change. But there are even more poignant questions to address. When I studied
the American militia, or the murderous cult of Aum Shinrikyo, or Islamic
Fundamentalism, including Al Qaeda, I did find terrorist utopias, and a critique of the
established, global order, that have to be considered as part of our study of social
movements because they do challenge the domination of economic, cultural and
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political elites in our world, however distorted their perception may be. Thus, social
protest, and social movements in all their expressions and values, are probably the most
fundamental dimension of human practice nowadays, and we need to study them with
tools that transcend ideology and go beyond the empty, formal schemes of rational
choice theory and the like.
And, yes, space, and urban space, is a fundamental component in the process of
formation of social movements, as well as the expression of those movements that aim
at the transformation of the urban environment. Margit Mayer is right when she criticizes
the loss of emphasis on the local base of social movements in my volume on The
Network Society. I must say that this analysis was linked to the structural opposition
between the space of places and the space of flows, and not to the movements
themselves, because I placed the analysis of social movements in the second volume
of my trilogy, The Power of Identity. But even there, I clearly privileged cultural
movements over place-based movements, and the continuing struggles over collective
consumption. Ida Susser correctly argues that there is a need to root the current
discussion on identity politics in material conditions. Identity is not a chimera or a purely
cultural construction. It is made of lives, and peoples lives are made of political and
economic processes as well processes that do have a space, thus reconnecting the
problematic that I presented in The City and the Grassroots with current debates on
cultural contradictions as the source of urban social change and political conflicts.
Robert Lake has well seen the centrality of understanding the city as a project of a
different way of life, one closer to the needs and values of social actors engaged in the
process of transformation. Not the city as a metaphor of society, but the city itself, in
its materiality, in its specificity as a living environment. It is true that I started my
urban sociology by a critique of urban culture. But this was aimed at the idealist,
functionalist notion of the Chicago School that identified the culture of cities to a given
spatial form. But urban culture as a project of connecting living space to living
experience is the fundamental finding of The City and the Grassroots, and the light at
the end of the current tunnel for the urban poor and the alienated citizens around the
world.
So, if the themes and issues of The City and the Grassroots do relate to some of the
major fears and hopes of our troubled time, and if the book is as ignored by scholars as
some of the contributors observe, then the situation may indeed be disappointing, not
just for an author who, at this point, has a considerable personal distance vis--vis
indicators of professional prestige, but, more importantly, for all those who care about
a political, yet analytical, perspective on the relationship between social movements,
cities and new projects involving space and society in a world threatened by fear and
social exclusion. For this reason, and only for this reason, I would like to comment on
the effort (that I very much appreciate) by Lynn Staeheli to quantify the influence of
the book based on the evolution of academic citations. To do so, allow me to report
another measurement, not related to this book but to my work at large.
This year, for an internal administrative matter, my school at the University of
Southern California, compiled from the Social Science Citation Index, the number of
citations of my work in the last five years, comparing it to a pool of some of the 25
best-known living social scientists in the world (excluding economists). My name came
third in the rankings, behind Habermas and Giddens, but ahead of the usual suspects,
such as Daniel Bell, Huntington, Derrida (before his death), Beaudrillard, Wallerstein,
Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen, Alain Touraine, etc. The reason, of course, is that most
citations refer to my trilogy on The Information Age. So, my urban work is rarely cited,
while my work on the overall process of social transformation (because my trilogy is
not about technology, it is about global social change) is currently one of the most cited
books everywhere, including in the US. Two hypotheses may be advanced concerning
this dissonance in the current perception of my research. The first one is that urban
problems are not perceived as major sources of change and conflict, the main concern
in the world nowadays. The second is that the kind of approach I proposed in The City
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and the Grassroots (emphasizing the relationship between social movements and cities
in a multidimensional matrix) does not seem to be relevant for current issues of both
social movements and urban affairs. Probably there is a combination of both.
The first reason is clearly a mistake, and I may have contributed to it, as urban
problems remain essential in the fabric of society and in the process of social change.
The second reason is less serious (only relevant for myself, and I already have my peace
of mind). But it does require that the current generation of urban researchers create a
new, similarly political approach to the relationship between people, space and society.
It demands that contemporary researchers, and their graduate students, produce the
theory and the research necessary to alert citizens, and people at large, to the
fundamental challenges they again face: individualization and commodification of their
consumption needs; cultural isolation and alienation; and the loss of the meaning of
democracy in their everyday lives.
Manuel Castells (castells@usc.edu), Annenberg School for Communication, University of
Southern California, 3502 Watts Way, ASC 102C, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0135, USA.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1

2006 The Author. Journal Compilation 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.