Peter Merholz did yeoman's duty taking notes on a lecture by Manuel Castells, given back in late October at UC Berkeley. The focus was on "Cities in The Information Age". It's taken me 3 or 4 reads just to digest Merholz's notes, much less the actual lecture.
There are lots of interesting nuggets, but I was struck by the numbers regarding the urbanization of the world, the continued importance of cities, the intertwingling of virtual and urban spaces, and last but not least, the two dominant models of building urban spaces. One, the Mexico City model, lawless, ad hoc informal construction of the metroplex. Two, the Barcelona model, managed urban development, with an emphasis on government development of quality public spaces.
Just a gut feeling, but the 'Net in general, Web in particular seem to be moving from the first model to the second model, except under purely, private commercial motivation, at least in the US. In the long run, this may actually contribute to a collapse of American leadership in technology innovation. Think of it as the malling of our virtual sphere. Not exactly a horrible death, but a slow slide into mediocrity.
Then again, I could be wrong.