Manuel Castells Quotes

The urban renewal programme is one of the most spectacular urban programmes to have been undertaken in Paris; it is certainly the one which has provoked the biggest public outcry. The renewal programme in the strict sense of the term, has two essential characteristics:

1) It concerns an already structured social space, of which it changes the form, the social content and/or function.

the Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age: the network.

In sum, all the key technological developments that led to the internet were built around government institutions, major universities and research centers. The Internet did not originate in the business world. It was too daring a technology, too expensive a project, and too risky an initiative to be assumed by profit-oriented organizations.

Beyond the realm of radical protests, there is also fear among many citizens about what this new society, of which the Internet is the symbol, will bring about in terms of employment, education, social protection, and lifestyles.

In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous in the communication networks, thus installing society in structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.

[Urban planning] must be interpreted on the basis of the social effect produced by the political instance in the urban system and/or in the social structure.

"The city" is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux the more it becomes an issue, the more it is a source of contradictions and the more its social manipulation is linked to the ensemble of social and political conflicts.

Societies change through conflict and are managed by politics.

traditional media companies are not generating any profits from their Internet ventures.

The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.

This book was born out of astonishment. At a time when the waves of the anti-imperialist struggle are sweeping across the world, when movements of revolt are bursting out at the very heart of advanced capitalism, when the revival of working-class action is creating a new political situation in Europe, ‘urban problems’ are becoming an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media, and consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population.

The Internet culture is characterized by four layer-structure: • The Techno-Meritocratic Culture • The Hacker Culture • The Virtual Communitarian Culture • The Entrepreneurial Culture

The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. I think, therefore I produce. In so doing, we will have the leisure to experiment with spirituality, and the opportunity of reconciliation with nature, without sacrificing the material wellbeing of our children. The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach.

At its core, the new economy is based on culture: on the culture of innovation, on the culture of risk, and the culture of expectations, and, ultimately on the culture of hope in the future.