Urban theology

Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. This volume documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric.

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1.

This book, the first in Castells' ground-breaking trilogy, is an account of the economic and social dynamics of the new age of information. Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, it aims to formulate a systematic theory of the information society which takes account of the fundamental effects of information technology on the contemporary world.

"We live today in a period of intense and puzzling transformation, signalling perhaps a move beyond the industrial era altogether. Yet where are the great sociological works that chart this transition? Hence the importance of Manuel Castells' multivolume work, in which he seeks to chart the social and economic dynamics of the information age ... [It] is bound to be a major reference source for years to come."
Anthony Giddens, The Times Higher Education Supplement.

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 2.

This second volume of Manuel Castells' trilogy deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy.

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 3.

The final volume in Manuel Castells' trilogy is devoted to processes of global social change induced by interaction between networks and identity.

Castells studies empirically the collapse of the Soviet Union, tracing it back to the incapacity of industrial statism to manage the transition to the Information Age. He shows the rise of inequality, polarization, and social exclusion throughout the world, focusing on Africa, urban poverty, and the plight of children. He documents the formation of a global criminal economy that deeply affects economies and politics in many countries. He analyzes the political and cultural foundations of the emergence of the Asian Pacific as a critically important region in the global economy. And he reflects on the contradictions of European unification, proposing the concept of the network state.

In the general conclusion of the trilogy, included in this volume, Castells draws together the threads of his arguments and his findings, presenting a systematic interpretation of our world.

The acceleration of the phenomenon of urbanization constitutes one of the challenges of our time. In a world redefined by communication networks and by the progressive erasure of borders lead by economic forces, Mutations reflects on the transformations that the acceleration of these processes inflicts on our environment, and on the space left for architecture to operate.

The politics of the past must be rethought. They were designed for a world where the U.S. manufactured at home, and where portions of U.S.-based labour had traded social stability for high wages. In this thought-provoking work, David Ranney shows how our world has changed and offers a plan for remaking progressive politics to meet the crises brought about by what George H. W. Bush first termed 'the new world order'.

In this ground-breaking contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world. If sociology is to make a pertinent contribution to the post societal era it must forget the social rigidities of the pre-global order and, instead, switch its focus to the study of both physical and virtual movement.

Essays discuss the effects of globalization on the nation-state, looking at dealings that both strengthen and weaken the national idea, creating a concentration of resources and a diminishing of responsibility.

This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

This third edition presents sociologists with a new perspective on the study of urban sociology. The decentralization and privatization of the world's economies has radically altered such things as the organization of labour, the structure of consumption and the distribution of earnings in ways that have yet to be fully realized. In a world economy that is truly more global than it has ever been, Saskia Sassen addresses the need to account for the global economies increasing influence on the social structures of cities.

In her pioneering book The Global City, Saskia Sassen argued that certain cities in the post-industrial world have become central nodes in the new service economy, strategic sites for the acceleration of capital and information flows as well as spaces of increasing socio-economic polarization. One effect has been that such cities have gained in importance and power relative to nation-states. In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished group of contributors expand on the author's earlier work in a number of important ways, focusing on two key issues. First, they look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become 'global' through the networks they participate in. Second, they investigate emerging global cities in the developing world-Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Beirut, the Dubai-Iran corridor, and Buenos Aires. They show how these globalizing zones are not only replicating many features of the top tier of global cities, but are also generating new socio-economic patterns as well. These new patterns of development promise to lead to significant changes in the structure of the global economy, as more and more cities worldwide are integrated into globalization's circuitry.

Includes contributions from: Linda Garcia, Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink, Peter Taylor, David Smith, Michael Timberlake, Stephen Graham, Sueli Schiffer Ramos, Christoff Parnreiter, Felicity Gu, David Meyer, Pablo Ciccolella, Iliana Mignaqui, Eric Huybrechts, Ali Parsa.