Manuel Castells

network society / space of flows.

Emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Castells built his reputation over decades of empirical and theoretical work on cities, power, and communication. His three-volume 'The Information Age' trilogy (1996–2004) argued that the internet era produces a new social structure organised around networks rather than territories. His concept of the 'space of flows'—where power resides in electronic circuits rather than places—became a foundational idea in urban studies and systems thinking.