Showing papers by "Manuel Castells published in 1978"

City, Class and Power

Abstract: Urban problems are increasingly at the heart of political debate in industrial capitalist societies. The Italian Left obtained a majority in the 1975 municipal elections in all the large towns, in part on the basis of urban protests and partly on the strength of being an alternative form of local government. The same phenomenon occurred in Japan, where socialists and communists, because they have given priority to urban and environmental issues, govern the most important cities. In the United States, the crisis of New York is only the most spectacular manifestation of a series of social contradictions which question a model of urban development which nevertheless remains indispensable for the organisation of an existence centred around the dominant interests of American society. In France, urban and regional policies are one of the clearest indicators of the cleavages and struggles between different political forces, as could be observed during the debate on the Galley Bill (which in 1975 tried to tax more heavily speculative use of land and triggered widespread opposition from the business circles), or yet still, in the successive measures which have been adopted with respect to public transport and urban-renewal programmes. The middle classes are living increasingly in the grands ensembles and some observers have gone as far as to attribute the success of the Left in the 1976 district elections to their dissatisfaction with the lifestyle in these new residential milieux. As we shall see, this process is in fact more complex.

Collective Consumption and Urban Contradictions in Advanced Capitalism

Abstract: Social inequality is the most obvious expression of any class society in so far as the place occupied in the system of production determines the distribution of the product among social groups, for, from the moment that we deny the inherent connection between the system of social stratification (related to the economic and symbolic distribution of the product) and the system of social classes (based on the system of production and, hence, on the power relationships between the classes), and make the former depend on the latter, it becomes necessary to spell out the specific form of this social inequality according to the phases of a mode of production and the historical formation of a social system. Thus the history of eternal disparity between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’, based on a fatalism with perfect results for the dominant classes, gives way to the precise analysis of the social production of differentiation at the level of consumption and to the study of the basic logic of a certain type of social relations which are experienced in the form of oppressive daily life.

Urban social movements and the struggle for democracy: the Citizens' Movement in Madrid*

Abstract: La crise urbaine en Espagne et la crise politique de la Dictature franquiste ont suscite dans la plupart des villes espagnoles, entre 1971 et 1977 des associations de quartier qui groupent des centaines de milliers de citoyens et qui representent l'un des mouvements sociaux urbains les plus importants dont on a connaissance a l'heure actuelle. Sur la base d'une enquete sociologique effectuee en 1977 dans les quartiers de Madrid, cet article tente de degager les composantes essentielles du mouvement, d'etablir une typologie des situations urbaines ou il surgit et d'esquisser des hypotheses sur les rapports entre mouvements urbains et action politique.

Urban Renewal and Social Conflict

Abstract: ‘Urban problems’ are increasingly becoming a political issue as the socialisation of the means of production is accompanied by the increasing socialisation of the means of consumption, or, if one prefers, from the moment collective facilities begin to play a strategic role in the structure and rhythms of everyday life.