The Space of flows

In The Rise of the Network Society Castell's reports on the cancelling of the proposed World City Fair in Tokyo in 1997 when a Japanese TV comedian got elected as mayor on the sole issue of stoppping its construction.

For Castell's, "The local logic of civil society was catching up with, and contradicting, the global logic of international business."

He continues, "Thus, people do still live in places. But because function and power in our societies are organized in the space of flows, the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being related to places, becomes abstracted from power, and meaning is increasingly separated from knowledge. There follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes. Unless cultural, political, and physical bridges are deliberately built between these two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace." 458-459

Basically consciousness raising. And what does that entail? Harvey at the end of his book on Post-Modernity quotes Poggioli,

"...the present is valid only by virtue of the potentialities of the future, as the matrix of the future, insofar as it is the forge of history in continued metamorphosis, seen as a permanent spiritual revolution."
(R.Poggioli The Theory of the avant-garde 1968 pp73)

Spiritual revolution : consciousness : awareness