Manuel Castells, born in Spain in 1942, is Professor ofCity and Regional Planning at the University of California,Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979. In the 1970s he directedthe seminar on urban sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes enSciences Sociales, Paris. He has also been a visiting professor ofurban planning at the Universidad Catlica de Chile, Ecoled'Architecture de l'Universit de Genve, the RoyalDanish Academy of Fine Arts, the University of Hong Kong, and theUniversity of Southern California. Among other awards, he hasreceived the Silver Medal in Urbanism from the City of Madrid in1999 and the 2001 Kevin Lynch Award in Urban Design and Planningfrom the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1998 he acceptedthe Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American SociologicalAssociation for his life-long contribution to urban sociology.