Informational urban planning
Introduction
Manuel Castells Oliván (Hellín, Albacete, February 9, 1942) is a Spanish sociologist and university professor, who served as Minister of Universities between January 2020 and December 2021.
He is an academic of the Royal Academy of Economic and Financial Sciences,[1] of the British Academy, of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences of the United States "National Academy of Sciences (United States)"), of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and of the European Academy. According to the Social Sciences Citation Index 2000-2017, he is the sixth most cited academic in the field of social sciences in the world and the most cited communication scholar in the world.[2].
He was awarded the 2012 Holberg Prize for having "shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society." In 2013 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Sociology. He is especially associated with research in information society, communication and globalization.
Biography
He was born in Hellín (Albacete), where his parents were Treasury officials, on February 9, 1942. He is married, has a daughter and two grandchildren. He studied Law and Economics at the University of Barcelona from 1958 until, due to his disagreements with the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, he went into exile in 1962, settling in Paris, where he studied sociology with Alain Touraine. At 24 he became the youngest professor at the University of Paris. It was in his classes that Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other students supported the protests of May 1968, for which the University fired him. He later moved to the United States, where he focused on the development of information technologies and their social impact.
He was coordinator of the Catalunya Internet Project (2001 to 2007).[3].
He is a professor of Sociology at the Open University of Catalonia, in Barcelona. He is also University Professor and full professor of the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, in Los Angeles; Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years; Fellow of St. John’s College, University of Cambridge and holder of the Network Society Chair at the Collège d’Études Mondiales, Paris.