118 DEBATES
Urban sustainability in the
information age 1
Manuel Castells
W
hat is sustainability? A city or
ecosystem, or complex structure
of any kind, is sustainable if its
conditions of production do not destroy
over time the conditions of its reproduc-
tion. It’s a simple, almost purely logical
formula, but it has all kinds of implications.
In more practical terms, a sustainable city
is one in which the conditions under which
I live make it possible that my children and
the children of my children will live under
the same conditions. It’s a very personal
matter. It’s not an abstract utopian ideol-
ogy. It’s maybe difficult to reach but the
meaning is extremely precise and it goes to
the heart of our own blood and flesh.
Sustainability, therefore, to some extent
in broader sociological and political terms,
can be defined as intergenerational sol-
idarity. In more analytical terms, in The
Information Age I have tried to put forward
the notion that sustainability implies the
fight for control over space and the fight
for control over time.
Over space, how what I have called the
space of places, that is a space of experience
and a space where people organize their lives,
may retain its autonomy and its meaning
independently from the evolution and
dynamics of the space of flows where most
dominant functions and power are orga-
nized. So it is a defence of the place versus the
flows, not necessarily to eliminate the space
of flows or to eliminate its function but to
avoid it taking over the meaning, the func-
tion, the autonomy, ultimately the political
capacity of decision making in the space of
places.
It is also a struggle over the meaning of
time. I have characterized a new category of
time, a new construction of time in the
information age, in terms of the dominant
functions as the effort to create what I call
timeless time, that is the annihilation of time,
like reducing the turnover of capital world-
wide to the minimum possible. Therefore
time can eliminate time. Or, in a different
sense, you don’t necessarily have to eliminate
time but you may desequence time. This
means that there’s no tradition, there’s noth-
ing, there’s simply moments and a huge
piecemeal patchwork of different sensations,
feelings, images like in most of the video clips
that populate our imagination.
In contradiction to timeless time, I have
proposed that the environmental movement
is organized on the notion of what Lash and
Urry (1994) conceptualized as glacial time.
Glacial time is the slow motion of time in
which nature and the planet and the species
live. Glacial time means that I measure my
time, not only in my life span, but in terms of
what my species and nature evolve towards
and that is very slow motion time, slow from
our point of view of course, of little ants in
one particular moment of the planet’s life.
This cosmological consciousness is not too
different from the religious experience. It’s a
connection. It is the materiality of spirituality
which is looking at what is going on over
time and not just in terms of my own interest
but in terms of the children of my children
and solidarity with nature at large.
So glacial time is the idea that we, to some
extent, as a collectivity, may be eternal. This
is in opposition to the idea that we are

nothing, that we are an explosion in an
instant in which everything, all our savings
may disappear or appear, that our collage of
images has to be consumed immediately
because it’s going to disappear in two min-
utes. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy because it’s gone.
This cultural battle, which is a fundamental
cultural battle, undermines the notion of
sustainability.
The implications of this view, however,
would be that sustainability is somewhat
static, or conservative in terms of the con-
cept. Conservative is not necessarily bad. The
problem in conservative parties is that they
want to conserve the bad things and not the
good things, but to conserve in general is not
such a bad thing. But this may not be a
problem necessarily for the natural environ-
ment but for cities. It’s not necessarily a
satisfactory concept because we don’t want
to conserve some of the things that happen in
cities, so therefore we would need a concept
of dynamic sustainability which is both
conservation and improvement leading to an
enhanced quality of life including social
justice (so that what is sought as sustainable
is not only given by the expansion of human
needs and aspirations). I would propose the
very simple, very obvious idea that the
concept of sustainability for cities should be
not simply the conservation or the preserva-
tion of the conditions of the reproduction of
what it is, but an expanded reproduction, if
you wish, that addresses the issues of the new
aspirations and corrections of illnesses of
cities as they are today. Otherwise we would
be absolutely static. So it’s obvious, but I
want to emphasize it because otherwise the
homology between environmental sustain-
ability and cities’ sustainability would be
tricky.
How does sustainability manifest itself
today in cities and in the information age? I
would try to emphasize some aspects for
three different dimensions, economic, social
and ecological. Economic sustainability for
cities in the information age means the ability
to generate wealth and resources and, for the
moment, as the planet is now entirely capital-
DEBATES 119
ist and will be so for the foreseeable future, it
also means the ability to create wealth by
increasing productivity and increasing com-
petitiveness of the city in a market environ-
ment. The economic sustainability of cities
depends fundamentally on two character-
istics, on two features. One, connectivity,
that is being in the networks and everything
that means in terms not only of infra-
structure but ability to link up etc. etc. And,
second, to have a stock, and a renewal of that
stock, of human resources capable of creating
added value in the information economy.
In social terms, I think the critical issue for
the sustainable city in the expanded version
that I propose has several subdimensions that
I will simply enumerate. One is the ability to
acknowledge plural identities which will
increasingly characterize our cities and
bridge them over. Acknowledge and create
bridges. If you simply acknowledge but let
them separate we go into the tribal commune
system that I’m very concerned about. But
you cannot bridge them if you deny them. So
it is the two things together —acknowledge
and bridge.
Second, avoiding social exclusion. Active
policies to avoid social exclusion, because
social exclusion is not a necessity in the
information economy and in the new net-
work in society, but it is embedded in the
logic of the system. The system is highly
dynamic and highly selective, links up, con-
nects to a network what is valuable and this
disconnects from the network what is not
valuable. This requires correction. So the
system can be very dynamic and very pro-
ductive and very creative if it is, at the same
time, constantly corrected to reconnect on
other grounds, on other criteria what has
been expelled from the dynamic elements of
the system. To be not necessarily assisted but
reorganized, let’s say, humanly recycled, if
you want. I propose the notion of human
recycling.
The third element is the ability to make co-
operation and competition compatible
within society. That is the idea that we are in
a competitive society, and that is not neces-
120 DEBATES
sarily bad, but the task is to bridge these two
elements which are at the source of a
dynamic notion of urban progress.
Fourth, a deliberate policy of social mobi-
lization against structural violence. Our cit-
ies, all cities, are generating violence at this
point, even when crime goes down. I’m not
only talking about crime, I’m talking about
violence, I’m talking about interpersonal
aggressiveness, I’m talking about a sub-
stantial proportion of people quite ready to
blow up things because they cannot take it
any longer. Of course, a city which is not
able to tame violence is not sustainable.
Retrenchment in protected, secluded com-
munities, in walled communities, as it is
happening in many countries in different
forms, ends urban life. In the USA, it has
always the advantage, particularly in Cal-
ifornia, which is a libertarian society with no
rules, and therefore no one is ashamed of
anything (which is exactly the contrary of
puritan England), and people say: ‘Okay, we
don’t like poor, we don’t like blacks, we
don’t like Hispanics, so we retrench’, and the
people who say so, then they buy, they invest
their savings in retrenching themselves in
walled communities with machine guns and
electrified gates. That’s the fastest growing
segment of Californian real estate today. But
my argument is that many other cities in the
world are doing the same thing in a less
openly cynical way. So that’s one way to fight
against violence, look at the implications:
neo-tribalism, starting from the top.
The fifth dimension of social sustainability
is sustainable governments. What happens
when governments are unable to do some-
thing in an age in which identities are plural
and flows of information and power are
global and certainly are not controlled by the
government, what happens then? When the
current situation in which local and regional
governments are kept powerless by central
governments, and at the same time central
governments are powerless themselves, it’s
not sustainable. On the one hand it’s paraly-
sis; on the other hand it’s powerlessness. So
clearly sustainability here is major effort of
decentralization of power and resources, not
because this is going to make local and
regional governments more powerful, but it’s
going to produce two things: greater
accountability and possible control of what
happens; and, second, much greater flex-
ibility in the process of endless negotiation,
adaptation and restructuring in the relation-
ship between government, economy and
society.
Ecological sustainability, that is the third
dimension, meaning the fight against the
apparently irreversible deterioration of the
environment and of the quality of life. This
includes the idea of nature in the city—what
does it mean? It includes also the idea of
fighting against the end of meaning of the
localized space, the meaninglessness of space,
which is a major challenge. These endless,
endless suburbs, absolutely undifferentiated,
which unfortunately is not any more just an
American feature, areas of the central city
which all look alike, such as the mass
generation of post-modern buildings. All this
is in fact the faking of everything —and
therefore the losing of singularity, of identity,
meaninglessness in spatial forms and
processes.
I think the main issue in ecological terms,
including in ecological terms not just nature,
not just quality of life in general, but again
meaning, the meaning of a space in relation to
the emergence of a form that I have called,
with many other people, mega cities, that is
an idea which is not simply a matter of scale.
It is an idea of an agglomeration of activities
and population which doesn’t have begin-
ning or end, which doesn’t have internal
structures, a juxtaposition of a number of
urban nuclei which are destructured from the
inside, that are unstructured in their relation-
ships. In addition, this collapse of the public
sector in many societies leads to the increas-
ing of the piece-meal nature of this urban
constellation, because there is no co-ordina-
tion, no authority, no public responsibility.
Size by itself is not the matter. You can
have 10 million people together and yet no
city. Or we have to redefine what we used to

understand by city, not the medieval city
notion of Max Weber. Santa Monica in
southern California is a city today. But
around Santa Monica and beyond, in the San
Fernando Valley, in San Bernardino County,
this is not a city. No one knows where he or
she lives, no one knows what’s going on, no
one knows where one place ends and another
starts, it’s a wide constellation of people and
activities scattered around the space and
making individual exchanges from here to
there. Cities are not so sure to survive, so the
main problem for urban sustainability is the
sustainability of the notion of city in itself.
So, in a nutshell, it’s possible to attack
these negative processes, so we reinforce the
social trends and economic trends that are
pushing for sustainability. Strategic and flex-
ible planning. Old-fashioned city and
regional planning, although more flexible and
strategic and less master-planned. It’s still not
only a necessity but an absolute necessity. So
the idea that planning has gone with the
Soviet Union is simply not understanding
what the Soviet Union was about: it was
about planning and something else.
Second, environmental sustainability
includes a systematic ecological filtering of
all economic strategies. By ecological filter-
ing, I mean that no one makes an investment
without some serious cost–benefit analysis.
Environmental sustainability means that this
variable is part of the business plan of
anything and of any economic strategy
(which is not exactly what in ‘the business’ is
called environmental impact assessment).
Third, the idea of monumentality, mon-
umentality in cities, but not as the central
monuments of the eternal values, but as the
meaningful signs of people’s life, and in this
sense the Barcelona planning practice is truly
innovative because everyone can make a nice
monument here and there, but what Barce-
lona has been doing is systematically going
into the peripheral neighbourhoods in the
poorest sections of the city and creating
squares and little statues and little aesthetic
games. I generally hate most of them, and so
do most of the neighbours, but that’s not the
DEBATES 121
issue. We are very culturally conservative,
but the idea is that you bring art, design,
squares, parks to what Barcelona calls the
new peripheral centrality. Peripheral central-
ity, that is the centrality of each periphery
until the point that you regroup the mean-
ingful structure of the city.
Renewed citizen participation: here the net
and telematic instruments could really help,
not substitute for, but help considerably the
development of grass roots democracy and
interactive democracy in real time.
In an issue of City, there is a wonderful
article by Graham and Aurigi (1997) on these
telematic networks and citizen participation
also, etc. etc., with two cases, Iperbole in
Bologna, and the Digital city in Amsterdam,
and I knew about the digital city, but his
article got me even more interested. Recently
they invited me to Amsterdam to discuss
networks. I spent the day with the people
who are doing digital cities and it’s really a
wonderful programme in terms of the rela-
tionship to the citizens, how they connect,
how they organize themselves, how it inter-
acts, the digital city and the real city, in a very
meaningful way with all kinds of political
pay-offs.
The one thing I didn’t know and got me
really enthusiastic was about the cultural and
historical meaning of the digital city project.
I spent several hours with the two women
who are the leaders of the project, in charge
of the project, and we had dinner in the
building where their headquarters organiza-
tion is, which is the old building in Amster-
dam called the Waag, which was, in the 16th
century, the building that closed the entrance
to the canals that go into Amsterdam. In that
building, and it’s symbolic, was where the
forbidden experiments on anatomy lessons
on dead bodies were being done. There is one
room in that building, on the top of the
building, where Rembrandt’s painting The
Anatomy Lesson was painted. That precise
room is now the headquarters of the digital
city. These women were at the same time
among the leaders of the 1970s squatters’
movement in Amsterdam, the New Market
122 DEBATES
struggles. They were telling me, you know,
it’s a continuity. Rembrandt, the squatters
movement, the digital city, it’s a continuity. I
think it’s a great example of how grass roots
politics with citizen participation can interact
in the information age.
Local governments, I think, are critical
elements in re-establishing the legitimacy and
efficiency of the democratic state. We should
not give up on the idea of a democratic state
because that’s all we have. But it has to be
shifted, not that the nation state is going to
disappear, not that the European Union’s
going to disappear, but there has to be a
shifting of the emphasis increasingly towards
local government.
And then, finally, the criterion to know if
we are constructing sustainable cities is what
happens to children. For me, the greatest
tragedy of the current information age is that,
when you look at the data, as I unfortunately
had to go through them, what happens to
children in the world in general, not only in
poor countries, but also in advanced coun-
tries, and in terms of the actual conditions of
living, is terrifying. All these potentials of
creativity, all the world possibilities created,
have to be contrasted with what is happening
to the life of children, and you see exactly
what we are doing. Because that’s how we are
constructing the information age, through
our children. So the idea of a city that is safe
for children, fun for children, open to chil-
dren, is where you could build most legiti-
macy, and at the same time the most vitality
of life, because then we start thinking con-
cretely about what makes a city safe, fun,
interesting and dynamic for the children.
So, what is a sustainable city? A sustain-
able city is a city which will allow Molly,
who is seven, to grow up happy.2
Notes
1 This is a transcript of a lecture at the ‘Sustainability
and the Information City’ conference at University
College, London (see report following).
2 Molly was the only child at the conference. The
theme of children in cities is taken up in the last
paragraph of the following report. It is also the
concern of a chapter in Vol. 2 of The Information
Age.
References
Graham, S. and Aurigi, A. (1997) ‘An urbanising
cyberspace? The nature and potential of the virtual
cities movement’, City 7, pp. 18–38.
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economics of Signs and
Space. London: Sage.
Manuel Castells is Professor of Sociology at
the University of California, Berkeley. A
second edition of Vols I and III of The
Information Age is to be published by Black-
well in June 2000.