Professor Manuel Castells will give the inaugural lecture of the USC Urban Initiative's lecture series "Metropo[latinization]: The Emerging City."

Professor Castells' lecture is titled "Globalization, Multiethnicity and Multiculturalism." A reception will follow the talk.

The Urban Initiative's lecture series centers on the effects of "Latinization" in the US. This significant and complex issue requires multidisciplinary understandings, collaborations, and solutions. Accordingly, the lectures will examine "Latinization" from the perspective of sociologists, historians, demographers, economists, educators, and political scientists. Manuel Castells begins this conversation with a discussion of the tremendous economic and cultural upheavals underlying "Latinization."

Castells is a preeminent urbanist. He holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also a Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the author of 21 books and editor or co-author of 15 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture" was published by Blackwell in 1996-98 in the first edition and in 2000-2003 in its second edition. It has been translated into 21 languages. His most recent books are "The Internet Galaxy" (Oxford University Press, 2001), which has now been translated into 15 languages, "The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model" (Oxford University Press, 2002, with Pekka Himanen), "La societat xarxa a Catalunya" (Mondadori, 2003, co-author), and "The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" (London: Edward Elgar, 2004, editor and co-author).