Soja, Edward W.

Bio Sketch

Edward William Soja (May 4, 1940, New York City – November 1, 2015, Los Angeles) was an American urbanist, postmodern political geographer and urban theorist, and one of the central theorists of the late twentieth century's "spatial turn." PhD from Syracuse University; at UCLA's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning from 1972, where he was Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning (also visiting professor at the London School of Economics); awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2015 (web-verified via Wikipedia, citing the AAG memorial). He worked at the intersection of geography, political economy, and critical theory — a leading figure in what came to be called the "Los Angeles school" of critical urban and regional studies, collaborating most notably with Allen J. Scott, Michael Storper, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey. His project, stated in Postmodern Geographies (1989), was "the reassertion of space in critical social theory": the recovery of space as a co-equal dimension of social life alongside the long-privileged historicality and sociality. Thirdspace (1996) elaborated the trialectics of space (updating Lefebvre's spatial triad); Postmetropolis (2000) applied it to the contemporary city; Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) carried the political program into planning theory; My Los Angeles (2014) was his last major statement.

Key Works

Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989) — the manifesto: the reassertion of space against two centuries of historicism; the urban-form maps (1820–1970) reused in Postmetropolis; "the socio-spatial dialectic."
Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996) — the theoretical volume: Firstspace/Secondspace/Thirdspace; the citadel tours; "critical thirding-as-othering."
*Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions* (2000) — the applied sequel: the geohistory of cityspace, synekism, the six discourses, the Justice Riots, and spatial justice.
Seeking Spatial Justice (2010); My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization (2014).
"The Socio-Spatial Dialectic" (Annals of the AAG, 1980) — the founding essay of the dialectic; "Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis" (Urban, 1998) — the discourses' first statement.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

synekism — the stimulus of urban agglomeration; the geohistorical engine.
spatial-specificity-of-urbanism — the polemical core: spatiality as explanatory force.
postmetropolis — the term's author: the six discourses, restructuring-generated crises.
trialectics-of-space — Firstspace/Secondspace/Thirdspace; the Lefebvre triad elaborated.
urban-revolutions — the three-revolution geohistory and the "putting cities first" inversion.
exopolis, edge-city, fractal-city, metropolarities, carceral-archipelago — the discourse-naming vocabulary.
glocalization, postfordism, global-city — the causal discourses he cartographed.
spatial-justice — the normative terminus.
crisis-generated-restructuring, restructuring-generated-crisis — the periodization.

Relevance to the Core Research

Soja is the wiki's principal spatial-theoretist: his trialectic supplies an epistemology that can organize the whole vault (perceived/conceived/lived at every scale, from the room to the planet), and his concepts connect the wiki's city cluster (urbanism, post-suburbia, space-of-flows) to its critical-theory core (Lefebvre, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard). His Postmetropolis is the single largest bridge between the wiki's interior/domestic clusters and the urban-theoretical clusters: the Carceral Archipelago names the enclosure regime behind privatised-public-space and hostile-architecture; the Exopolis names the condition behind the suburbanism cluster's post-suburbia and planetary-suburbanization; synekism and the spatial specificity of urbanism give the everyday-architecture cluster a 10,000-year genealogy. Borden names him (with Augé, Harvey, Foucault, Lefebvre) in the lineage of the "space of flows."

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) — the full book.

Key Works linking rule: works with ingested source notes link via the source-notes/ prefix; others remain plain text.

Open Questions

Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Thirdspace (1996) remain un-ingested; a source note from either would give the trialectics and the spatial-turn argument primary grounding.
How does Soja's "raumgeist" (credited to Barbara Hooper) relate to the wiki's atmosphere and genius-loci cluster — is the spatial spirit of the age an atmospheric concept?
Soja's later work (Seeking Spatial Justice, 2010; Thirdspace's planning turn) — does the wiki's spatial-justice page need the planning-law register he developed after 2000?