ABSTRACT
Professor Manuel Castells argues that the organization of society in the information age involves both centralization and decentralization as cities are simultaneously structured and destructured by the competing logics of the space of flows and the space of places. This chapter proposes some elements of theory of urbanism in the Information age. It also highlights the main issues arising in cities in the information age, with particular emphasis on the crisis of the city as a socio-spatial system of cultural communication. The major challenge for urbanism in the information age is to restore the culture of cities. The chapter argues the power of identity that it is an essential feature of the information age. The transformation of cities in the information age can be organized around three bipolar axes. The first relates to function, the second to meaning, and the third to forms. The chapter concludes by drawing some of the implications of analysis for planning, architecture and urban design.
