Critical evaluation and assessment of the contribution of Castells in urban studies

1. Critical evaluation and assessment of the
contribution of Castells in Urban Studies
International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai
Presented by,
Rahul Kumar Jha
M.Phil in Population Studies
Presented to,
Professor Archana K Roy
Department of Migration and Urban Studies

2. Introduction:
Urbanization refers to the population shift from rural areas to urban areas, the gradual
increase in the proportion of people living in urban areas, and the ways in which each
society adapts to this change.
Preindustrial cities-which first arose on fertile lands along rivers in the Middle East,
Egypt, and China
Industrial cities-Between 1700 and 1900, increasing numbers of people moved into
cities, resulting in an urban revolution. The industrial city was larger, more densely
populated, and more diverse than its preindustrial counterpart.

3. Today, 55% of the world’s
population lives in urban areas,
a proportion that is expected to
increase to 68% by 2050
Source: World Urbanization Prospects, Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA)

4. Concept of Urbanization:
 Kingsley Davis, a pioneer of historical urban demography and world urbanization, in his
1965 Scientific America piece "The Urbanization of the Human Population, explains that
"urbanization" is a term that describes not merely the growth, in population, of cities
but a relative change between the urban and rural (read: farming) population.
 David Harvey’s book ‘Social Justice and the City’ (1973) looks at questions of urban
social inequalities and their remedies by focusing on conditions of commodity
production underpinning social and spatial differences in urbanisms.
• Part 1 -Liberal Formulations, Part 2 -Socialist Formulations, Part 3- Synthesis

5.  Louis Wirth (the famous sociologist ) wrote his landmark paper entitled 'Urbanism as a
Way of Life'. Wirth published this piece in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938, as
major transformations were occurring
 More and more people were moving into cities and the world was rapidly urbanizing,
and Wirth argued that urbanism, or the condition of living in a city, was becoming the
way of modern life.

6. Critical evaluation and assessment of the
contribution of Castells’s in urban studies

7. Manuel Castells
Marxist sociologist Manuel Castells critiques the Chicago School researchers for their
deterministic assumptions about urbanization and urban problems. Castells (2002)
argues against the view that urbanization is a natural process and that urbanization
leads to a certain urban culture.
He dismisses their argument that the ‘urban problem’ results from urban life. What are
framed as urban problems (crime, poverty, or civil unrest, over population) are in fact
biases that stem from environmental determinism theories and urban space is a
determinant of behaviour and culture.

8. Critique Of Urban Sociology
Castells's critique of urban sociology, in essence, is that it is wrong to consider the city (or
the "urban", or urban agglomerations, as the terms are interchangeably used) as an
independent and autonomous entity. He argues that the city should, more correctly, be
analysed as dependent upon and determined by the society (or "social formation") within
which it is located
• The work of Manuel Castells purports to provide, in various ways, a Marxist/historical
materialist analysis of cities. He assesses and examines four most central concepts,
namely, collective consumption, the urban system, urban planning, and urban social
movements.

9. Urban Agglomerations as Units of Collective Consumption
The Causes and Consequences of Collective Consumption within Capitalism
Castells begins his historical materialist analysis of urban agglomerations by defining the latter
as units of collective consumption. By collective consumption. Castell’s means and refers to
such facilities as schools, hospitals, transport, housing, leisure, etc. which are said, in some
sense or other, to be "collective".
The growth of collective consumption is part of the overall growth of consumption in capitalist
society.
1. COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION

10. 2. THE URBAN SYSTEM
Social structure is reflected and expressed in space, and hence in urban agglomerations.
Thus urban agglomerations are said to represent a particular "specification" of the social
structure.
This concept derives from his attempt to apply the basic categories of the Althusserian
formulation of historical materialism to the analysis of urban agglomerations.
Castells's "urban system" contains five elements: Production (P), Consumption (C),
Exchange (E), Administration ( A ) and Symbolic ( S ).

11. 3.URBAN PLANNING
There are two noteworthy features of Castells's "theoretical" analysis of urban planning
1. The Typology of Urban Actors
• Castells adds four other "sub-elements", namely, Authority (A), Organisation (0),
Local (L) and Global (G), without, providing any definition of these "sub-elements"
or justification for their selection.
2- The Causes of and Constraints upon urban Planning
• Most of the problems to which planning responds are, "in general" economic
problem.
three elements are, following Althusser, labour, means of production and non-labour (or
capitalists), which are combined by the relations of property (or ownership) and real
appropriation

12. 4. URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Two criteria which distinguish an urban social movement.
The first is that an urban social movement must have the effect of producing a "structural
transformation" in the social structure and, secondly, that it can only produce this effect if
it is related to other practices or movements.
The second defining characteristic of urban social movements is that they must be related
to and fused with other practices or movements.
According to Castells, "there is no qualitative transformation of urban structure that is not
produced by an articulation of the urban movements with other movements, in particular
(in our societies) with the working class movement and with the political class struggle

13. Conclusion:
• The examination of Castells's application of historical materialism to the study of urban
agglomerations has revealed certain serious and fundamental weaknesses and
inadequacies. The overall conclusion of this examination is that the conceptual core of
Castells's Work is, in general, unconvincing, unrigorous, and uninformative.
• In short, Castells's historical materialist analysis of urban agglomerations is deficient, not
only according to the criteria of historical materialism, but according to the criteria of any
analysis.

14. Thank You…!!!
For your Patience Listening and Questions…