“To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.”

—  Manuel Castells

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 115

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary a…" by Manuel Castells?
Manuel Castells photo
Manuel Castells59
Spanish sociologist (b.1942) 1942

Related quotes

“My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstract space…
The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving… Physical space is a common space because it is the only space in which all concrete systems, living and nonliving, exist (though some may exist in other spaces simultaneously). Physical space is shared by all scientific observers, and all scientific data must be collected in it. This is equally true for natural science and behavioral science.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living systems, 1978, p. 9-10; As cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (1994) Sociology and the New Systems Theory: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis. p. 262

Italo Calvino photo

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

Paul Carus photo

“The truth is that other systems of geometry are possible, yet after all, these other systems are not spaces but other methods of space measurements. There is one space only, though we may conceive of many different manifolds, which are contrivances or ideal constructions invented for the purpose of determining space.”

Paul Carus (1852–1919) American philosopher

Science, Vol. 18 (1903), p. 106, as reported in Memorabilia Mathematica; or, The Philomath's Quotation-Book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/81/mode/2up, (1914), by Robert Edouard Moritz, p. 352

Pierre Louis Maupertuis photo

“I must now explain what I mean by the quantity of action. A certain action is necessary for the carrying of a body from one point to another: this action depends on the velocity which the body has and the space which it describes; but it is neither the velocity nor the space taken separately. The quantity of action varies directly as the velocity and the length of path described; it is proportional to the sum of the spaces, each being multiplied by the velocity with which the body describes it. It is this quantity of action which is here the true expense (dépense) of nature, and which she economizes as much as possible in the motion of light.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Histoire de l'Academie (1744) p. 423; Les Oeuvres De Mr. De Maupertuis (1752) vol. iv p. 17; as quoted by Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain, The Principle of Least Action https://books.google.com/books?id=y3UVAQAAIAAJ (1913) p. 5.

Eric Hobsbawm photo

“The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Chap. 2 : The Sense of the Past
On History (1997)

Aurelius Augustinus photo

“For if they imagine infinite spaces of time before the world, during which God could not have been idle, in like manner they may conceive outside the world infinite realms of space, in which, if any one says that the Omnipotent cannot hold His hand from working, will it not follow that they must adopt Epicurus’ dream of innumerable worlds? with this difference only, that he asserts that they are formed and destroyed by the fortuitous movements of atoms, while they will hold that they are made by God’s hand, if they maintain that, throughout the boundless immensity of space, stretching interminably in every direction round the world, God cannot rest, and that the worlds which they suppose Him to make cannot be destroyed. …neither does it follow that we should suppose that God was guided by chance when He created the world in that and no earlier time, although previous times had been running by during an infinite past, and though there was no difference by which one time could be chosen in preference to another. But if they say that the thoughts of men are idle when they conceive infinite places, since there is no place beside the world, we reply that, by the same showing, it is vain to conceive of the past times of God’s rest, since there is no time before the world.”

Aurelius Augustinus book The City of God

XI, 5
The City of God (early 400s)

Nicholas Wade photo

“There are two important factors to consider in the emergence of social change. One is that a society develops through changes in its institutions, which are blends of culture and genetically shaped social behavior. The other is that the genes and culture interact. This may seem paradoxical to anyone who considers genes and culture to be entirely separate realms. But it is scarcely surprising from an evolutionary perspective, given that the genome is designed to respond to the environment, and a major component of the human environment is society and its cultural practices.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Leonardo Da Vinci photo

“The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object; and this being its nature it occupies no space. Therefore an infinite number of lines may be conceived of as intersecting each other at a point, which has no dimensions and is only of the thickness (if thickness it may be called) of one single line.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), II Linear Perspective

Naomi Klein photo

“In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture's most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular —with their residences, libraries, green spaces and common standards for open and respectful discourse - play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived. And however imperfectly we may have protected these institutions in the past, at this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Four: "The Branding of Learning"

Abraham Joshua Heschel photo

“Being points beyond itself.
Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression "being points beyond itself" may be taken to denote a higher point in space. What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

Related topics