The City and the Grassroots

Abstract

The discussion in these few pages could not possibly indicate the totality of the vast canvas that Castells paints in his new text. It is a work of some 300,000 words. The methodological appendices, endnotes and bibliography alone cover 100 pages. The substance of the book presents case studies of historical and contemporary urban movements and urban social movements, ranging from the revolution of the Communidades in sixteenth-century Castille, to the 1871 Paris Commune, to the Glasgow Rent Strike in 1915, the protests in the Parisian Grandes Ensembles in the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural movements and gay communities in San Francisco, the Madrid Citizens’ Movement of the 1970s, and much more besides. At the end of all this Castells’s new theoretical perspective is summed up into a ‘cross-cultural theory of urban social change’.