From the Publisher:
Manuel Castells describes the origins, purpose and effect of proactive movements, such as feminism and environmentalism, which aim to transform human relationships at their most fundamental level; and of reactive movements that build trenches of resistance on behalf of God, nation, ethnicity, family, or locality.
The fundamental categories of existence, the author shows, are threatened by the combined, contradictory assault of techno-economic forces and transformative social movements, each using the new power of the media to promote their ambitions. Caught between these opposing trends, he argues, the nation-state is called into question, drawing into its crisis the very notion of political democracy. The author moves thematically between the United States, Western Europe, Russia, Mexico, Bolivia, the Islamic World, China, and Japan, seeking to understand a variety of social processes that are, he contends, closely inter-related in function and meaning.
This is a book of profound importance for understanding how the world will be transformed by the beginning of the next century.

The power of identity

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.

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Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.

Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.

A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Uses of heritage

As advances in transportation and information obliterate distance, cities and regions face a tougher time anchoring income-generating activities. In probing the conditions under which some manage to remain “sticky” places in “slippery” space, this paper rejects the “new industrial district,” in either its Marshallian or more recent Italianate form, as the dominant paradigmatic solution. I identify three additional types of industrial districts, with quite disparate firm configurations, internal versus external orientations, and governance structures: a hub-and-spoke industrial district, revolving around one or more dominant, externally oriented firms; a satellite platform, an assemblage of unconnected branch plants embedded in external organization links; and the state-anchored district, focused on one or more public-sector institutions. The strengths and weaknesses of each are reviewed. The hub-and-spoke and satellite platform variants are argued to be more prominent in the United States than the...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/144402.pdf

Sticky Places in Slippery Space: A Typology of Industrial Districts*

Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

A Space for Place in Sociology

En estos dias de aceleracion global por un lado e intensificacion de los nacionalismos locales por otro, ?como deberiamos pensar en el espacio y el lugar? Este nuevo libro reune los escritos clave de Doreen Massey sobre este debate. En el argumenta que hemos visto algunas lecturas problematicas de ambos terminos en los ultimos anos, y propone un enfoque alternativo mas adecuado a los problemas que enfrentan las ciencias sociales en la actualidad. Massey ha organizado estos debates en torno a los tres temas de espacio, lugar y genero. Ella rastrea el desarrollo de ideas sobre la estructura social del espacio y el lugar, y la relacion de ambos con cuestiones de genero y ciertos debates dentro del feminismo. Comenzando con la economia y las estructuras sociales de produccion, Massey desarrolla una nocion mas amplia de espacialidad como producto de la interseccion de las relaciones sociales. Sobre esta base propone un enfoque de los "lugares" esencialmente abierto e hibrido, pero siempre provisional y controvertido. Los temas se entrecruzan con gran parte del pensamiento actual sobre la identidad dentro del feminismo y los estudios culturales. Los capitulos van desde estudios de los conceptos de lugar empleados en debates sobre desarrollo regional desigual y problemas del centro de la ciudad hasta argumentos sobre la relacion entre la conceptualizacion del espacio / lugar y la construccion social de las relaciones de genero.

Space, Place and Gender

But is that necessarily so? Can’t we rethink our
sense of place? Is it not possible for a sense of place
to be progressive: not self-enclosing and defensive,
but outward-looking? A sense of place which is adequate to this era of time-space compression? To
begin with, there are some questions to be asked
about time-space compression itself. Who is it
that experiences it, and how? Do we all benefit and
suffer from it in the same way?

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A Global Sense of Place

Part 1 Issues. Part 2 Social relations and spatial organization: the debate characterizing capital social structures and capitalist relations of production the social and the spatial - an impossible dichotomy an example. Part 3 Uneven development and spatial structures: the approach spatial structures of capitalist production spatial structures of production and geographical inequality the uniqueness of space. Part 4 Some changing spatial structures in the United Kingdom - setting the scene: electronics and instruments industries clothing and footwear services. Part 5 The effects on local areas - class and gender relations: the general and the unique the coalfield areas a different kind of "Periphery" - the case of Cornwall. Part 6 Class, politics and the geography of employment: spatial structures and spatial divisions of labour uneven development and national politics changes in the geography of class relation.

Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production

Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.

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Geographies of Responsibility

Much of what is written about space, place and postmodern times
emphasizes a new phase in what Marx once called ‘the annihilation of
space by time’ The process is argued, or more usually asserted, to have
gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage It is a phenomenon
which Harvey (1989) has termed ‘time-space compression’ And the
general acceptance that something of the sort is going on is marked by the
almost obligatory use in the literature of terms and phrases such as speedup, global village, overcoming spatial barriers, the disruption of horizons
and so forth

Doreen Massey

Papers

Space, Place and Gender

A Global Sense of Place

Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production

Geographies of Responsibility

Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place