ABSTRACT
One of the most important legacies of Castells’s assault on urban sociology in his early work has been the recognition that theorists and practitioners alike have tended to identify phenomena as ‘urban’ when their causes lie not in the existence of cities, but in the organization of society as a whole. Although Castells’s critique of such approaches was grounded in an epistemology which he and many others have subsequently come to reject, it is notable that, among all the changes in his work over the years since then, he has remained consistent in his view that such formulations are fundamentally flawed. In his reflections on The Urban Question, for example, he states that he still stands by the critique of urban sociology developed there: ‘It contains some mistakes but basically I would not change much’ (1985, p. 6).
