We are living in a moment of historical transformation, characterized by the bipolar opposition between techno­ economic globalization and socio-cultural identity. As in all major processes of social change, the new paradigm is characterized by new forms of time and space. The compression of time in electronic circuits leads to the emergence of timeless time, in a relentless effort to annihilate time in human practice. The de­ localization of communication and exchanges leads to the space of flows as the spatial dimension of instrumentality in .the Information Age. However, against the logic of the space of flows and of timeless time, the roots of culture and the search for meaning continue to emphasize the space of places, biological time, and clock time as the lasting categories of most human experience.

On October 25, 2013, the Berkeley Planning Journal hosted Professor Manuel Castells in a round-table discussion with doctoral and master’s students from the Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Castells is a leading expert worldwide in the social sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he taught from 1979 to 2003. The Spanish sociologist is a prominent scholar globalization, and information society, and currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California.

The round-table discussion coincided with Professor Castells’s lecture at the College of Environmental Design entitled “Space of Flows and Space of Places in Networked Social Movements” and follows the publication of his most recent book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). Both the lecture and the discussion focused on Castells’s most recent work on new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting across the world, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas of Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. Jake Wegmann served as the discussion moderator.