This document discusses the process of urban social change and how cities change over time. It defines urban meaning as the structural performance and role assigned to cities, which determines urban functions. Urban social change occurs when this urban meaning is redefined, often through conflicts between different groups over how cities should be defined and developed. Cities are shaped by processes of social change, where a new urban meaning emerges either through the dominant class reshaping the city, revolution by dominated classes, social movements developing alternative meanings, or social mobilization imposing new meanings against the dominant class.

1. Presentation by Ola Faworaja
Author: Manuel Castells

2. The Process of Urban Social Change
Societies only exist in time and space. The spatial form of a society is, therefore, closely linked to its
structure and urban change is intertwined with historical evolution.
The goal is to explain how cities change. But what are cities?
Cities, like all social reality, are historical products, not only in their physical materiality but in their cultural
meaning, in the role they play in the social organisation, and in peoples lives.
Urban is the social meaning assigned to a particular spatial form by a historically defined society.
We define “urban meaning” as the structural performance assigned as a goal to cities in general.
The historical process of defining urban meaning determines the characteristics of urban functions.

3. 1. Conflicts over the definition of urban meaning.
2. Conflicts over the adequate performance of urban functions. These conflicts can arise both
from different interests and values, within the same accepted framework, or from different
approaches about how to perform a shared goal of urban function.
3. Conflicts over the adequate symbolic expression of urban meaning and (or) functions.
We call urban social change the redefinition of urban meaning. Needless to say since defining
urban meaning is a conflictive process so is urban planning and urban design.
Urban social change conditions all aspect of the urban praxis. The theory of urban social change
therefore lays the ground for any other theories of the city.
Cities are shaped by three different, though inter-related,
processes:

4. Urban social change happens when a new urban meaning is produced by one of the four
following processes:
1. The dominant class is given society, having the institutional power to restructure social
forms according to its interests and values.
2. The dominated class accomplishes a partial or total revolution and changes the meaning of
the city.
3. A social movement develops its own meaning over a given space in contradiction to the
structurally dominant meaning.
4. A social mobilization imposes a new urban meaning in contradiction to the institutionalized
urban meaning and against the interest of the dominant class.

5. It has been a custom in recent literature of urban studies to use the formula according to which
space is the expression of society.
Space is not contrary to what others may say, a reflection of society but one of society’s
fundamental material dimensions. Therefore spatial forms will be produced by human action
and will express and perform the interests of the dominant class.
Summary: The city and the grassroots is a major study of people and urbanization and of the
relationship between citizens and cities. The ties between the two are most evident when people
mobilize to change their city, and so the author focuses on urban social movements, the core of a
broader theme of urban social change.
The new historical relationship between space and society.