Manuel Castells has some great things to say about Citilabs, a digital cultural center in Cornella, Barcelona, which I had the occasion to visit two months ago, and fell in love with, because of the enthusiasm and solidarity of the staff, and the great combination of high digital culture with an integration in the working class neighborhood where they are located. A place full of grandparents and grandchildren and teenagers, not just the postmodern artistic community which usually naturally flocks to such places.

(I’m not sure who conducted the interview, the video version is here). The second part of the interview is here.

Manuel Castells also mentions other experiences of the same kind, like the rural community centers in Finland:

What is your opinion of the first year of the Citilab project?

The first thing is to congratulate the power of ideas. Which means the initiative of the innovative group of Cornellä who had the idea of Citilab as well as the enthusiasm and capacity for work needed to put it into practice. For this reason I think that the founders and developers of Citilab are innovators in the strictest sense of the term, people capable of changing reality with their imagination and their ideas and knowing how to put ideas into practice through hard work, effort, and a whole lot of patience.

This, to start with, is a kind of ode to human creativity and the capacity of thought. At the beginning opinions went from scepticism to negative criticism, in the sense of, “What’s the point of this?!” The most important thing is that we are talking about a dream turned into reality..

Secondly, Citilab is an exact expression of an urban project in which the city is a space where people live, which has to be reconstructed starting from the past and maintaining continuity with the past while at the same time living in a technological and global society. It represents the continuity of the old industrial structure of Cornellá, reorganised under a new urban form starting with the building itself which is an excellent architectural design that I recommend seeing as an example of a functional and beautiful solution.

We are seeing a new type of urban project which also expresses a continuity of urban economy (passing from the space of manufacturing to the space of technological creativity and innovation) and also combines the functions of a civic centre or social space where people go to do things. What is important is that there is the same cultural diversity and range of ages as that of a city. The city is diverse and interesting because all these types of people live together. In Citilab we can see grandparents and kids at the same time, each doing their own thing and getting together afterwards or people doing very technologically advanced things while others are playing. In the same space you can find innovative companies which are producing advanced services, consultancies, technology and groups which organise to see how to manage their city and how to debate the urban project. That is to say, bringing together technological modernity and cultural continuity in one building is a pretty exemplary experience.

The problem of Citilab is that it is fragile because it is a prototype which, if it doesn’t develop, will end up consuming itself: there could be economic problems, fights over scarce resources…Citilab is like a great bird launched into cyberspace: it has to keep flying and generate more examples, it has to join networks internationally and in Catalonia in which there are similar centres. Citilab must be both a prototype and a cultural vanguard at the same time and, if it can achieve this, someday it will enter the urban history of cities.

Which other centres have you seen which share this philosophy?

In some ways the Tech Museum of San José, in California, in the centre of Silicon Valley incorporates many of these elements. It has more capacity in terms of technological exhibition but much less capacity of permanent integration in the urban and civic fabric. It’s great for kids, but much less so for the society in general. This centre belongs to a society in which people have much more advanced technology in their homes. Therefore, the case of Citilab in this aspect is pretty exemplary.

Another, more modest example is the Community Centres that I discovered in rural Finland five years ago. Everybody talks about the developed Finland, about Nokia, but in fact the Finnish countryside is quite backward, the 60 year olds have very little or practically no technological culture. For this reason the Finnish government started a programme to integrate the whole population into the Information Society, by creating a number of centres.

And finally the centres which have this civic character like Citilab, but on a larger scale, are the Brazilian tele-centres. Especially in the area of Sao Paulo, these centres integrate hundreds of young (and not so young) people carrying out projects of digital literacy, civic organisation or the struggle against violence. We’re talking about hundreds of people in hundreds of centres, an enormous programme which some of my colleagues are investigating at this moment and which shows how the introduction to technology can be an element of social cohesion and, for example, an alternative to gang violence.

The youths meet-up, but to create technology and through this they create culture. The experiences are even more powerful because they show that very creative experiences occur at any level of technological development so long as there is political will and some minimum economic resources which later are multiplied by ten in terms of social benefits.

Is Citilab an easily exportable model?

As Citilab, not necessarily, because every situation is unique. If we understand the Citilab model as putting together the local society, technological innovation and the construction of a bridge between generations together with centres of innovation for companies which strengthen the local productive fabric, if this is the form of Citilab, then yes it is a model which can be replicated but always in the local circumstances and situation.”

Manuel Castells is Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia and Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley