City and Regional Planning

Duane teaches environmental planning and policy, infrastructure planning, environmental impacts of energy systems, land use planning, environmentally sustainable community development, and the impacts of urban development on fragile natural systems. He is particularly interested in how institutional structures can be modified to address competing social values. He is therefore studying law and legal institutions in greater detail, since they dominate decision-making in the modern administrative state. His primary institutional focus is domestic, but has also worked in or traveled in over thirty countries and has supervised graduate students in over a dozen other countries. He has published on a wide variety of topics from electricity regulation in California to community participation in ecosystems management.

Manuel Castells was one of the intellectual founders of what came to be known as the New Urban Sociology. His main publications in this field are The City and the Grassroots, a comparative study of urban social movements and community organizations based on his field work in France, Spain, Latin America, and California, that received the C.Wright Mills Award in 1983, and The Informational City (Blackwell, 1989), an analysis of the urban and regional changes brought about by information technology and economic restructuring in the United States. In 1983 Castells undertook the study of economic and social transformations associated with the information technology revolution. The results of this work were published in his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell): 1st volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, revised edition 2000); 2nd volume, The Power of Identity (1997); 3rd volume, End of Millennium (1998, revised edition 2000). The trilogy is translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and German. In 1998, Manuel Castells received the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution in the field of community and urban sociology.