Edward Soja

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Soja in Singapore in January 2013

Edward William Soja (/ˈsoʊdʒə/; born 1940,[1] in Bronx (New York City), U.S.) is a postmodern political geographer and urban planner on the faculty at UCLA, where he is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and the London School of Economics. He has a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. His early research focused on planning in Kenya.

In addition to his readings of American feminist cultural theorist bell hooks (b. 1952), and French intellectual Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Soja's greatest contribution to spatial theory and the field of cultural geography is his use of the work of French Marxist urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), author of The Production of Space (1974). Soja has updated Lefebvre's concept of the spatial triad with his own concept of spatial trialectics which includes thirdspace, or spaces that are both real and imagined.

Soja focuses his critical postmodern analysis of space and society, or what he calls spatiality, on the people and places of Los Angeles. In 2010 the University of Minnesota Press has released his latest book, focused on Spatial justice.[2]

Soja has collaborated on research and writing with, most notably, Professor Allen J. Scott (UCLA), Michael Storper (UCLA, LSE), Fredric Jameson (Duke University), David Harvey (Johns Hopkins, CUNY), and various faculty in the departments of Urban Planning, Architecture, Policy Studies, and Geography at UCLA. Soja's research assistants for his latest work, Seeking Spatial Justice (2010), include Mustafa Dikec, Joe Boski, Tom Kemeny, Walter Nichols, Alfonso Hernandez-Marquez, Stefano Bloch, Ava Bromberg, and Konstantina Soureli.

Professor Edward Soja has served as the academic advisor to, most recently, Dr. Mustafa Dikec (Royal Holloway University), Dr, J. Miguel Kanai (University of Miami), Dr. Walter J. Nicholls (University of Amsterdam), Dr. Mark Purcell (University of Washington), and Dr. Stefano Bloch (Brown University).

Thirdspace

Soja developed a theory of Thirdspace in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” [3] As he explains, “I define Thirdspace as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectices of spatiality–historicality–sociality.” [3] Soja constructs Thirdspace from the spatial trialectics established by Henri Lefebvre in Production of Space and Michael Foucault's concept of heterotopia. He synthesizes these theories with the work of postcolonial thinkers from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to bell hooks, Edward Said to Homi K. Bhabha.

Like Lefebvre, sometimes called a mystical Marxist, Soja demonstrates leanings towards a monadic mysticism in his Thirdspace. He formulates Thirdspace by analogy with the Aleph, a concept of spatial infinity developed by Jorge Luis Borges.[4] Thirdspace is a radically inclusive concept that encompasses epistemology, ontology, and historicity in continuous movement beyond dualisms and toward “an-Other”: as Soja explains, “thirding produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge.” [5] Thirdspace is a transcendent concept that is constantly expanding to include “an-Other,” thus enabling the contestation and re-negotiation of boundaries and cultural identity. Soja here closely resembles Homi K. Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridization, in which “all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity,” that “displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives… The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.” [6]

Visions for Los Angeles

Soja has introduced six visions for the City of Los Angeles.[7] These are the following:

  • Flexicity: Deindustrialization has been occurring alongside a potent reindustrialization process built not just on high technology.
  • Cosmopolis: The primacy of globalization. Globalization of culture, labor and capital. Reworlds the city.
  • Expolis: The city that no longer conveys the traditional qualities of cityness. No cityness about Los Angeles. Growth of the outer city and city edges. More urban life.
  • Metropolarities: Increasing social inequalities, widening income gaps, new kinds of social polarization and satisfaction that fit uncomfortably within traditional dualisms based on class or race, as well as conventional. New underclass debate.
  • Carcereal Archipielagos: A fortified city with bulging prisons. The City of Quartz. More surveillance.
  • Simcity: A place where simulations of a presumably real world increasingly capture and activate our urban imaginary and infiltrate everything urban life. An electronic generation of hyper reality.

Selected publications

  • Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989.
  • Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996.
  • Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996.
  • Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
  • "Writing the city spatially", City, November, 2003.
  • "The city and spatial justice", Justice spatiale | Spatial Justice, n° 1 September 2009.
  • Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Gould, Peter (1985): The geographer at work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 323
  2. ↑ Soja Edward W., 2010, Seeking Spatial Justice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996. Print. p. 57.
  4. ↑ Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996. Print. p. 57
  5. ↑ Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996. Print. p. 61
  6. ↑ Rutherford, Jonathan. "The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998. Print. P. 211
  7. ↑ http://www.opa-a2a.org/dissensus/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/soja_edward_w_six_discourses_on_the_postmetropolis.pdf

Further reading

  • Bell, Thomas L.; Muller, Peter O. (March 2003). "Book Review". Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (1): 248–250. ISSN 0004-5608.  (A review of Soja's Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, ISBN 1-57718-001-1.)

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