Postmetropolis

Definition

The postmetropolis is Edward Soja's term for what the modern metropolis has become after thirty years of intense urban restructuring — "a working title for what might otherwise be called the new urbanism, had not this term been taken up by architects and designers" (Soja 2000, Preface, p. xii). It is "best understood by combining all six of these interpretive discourses, without privileging any one over the others" (Preface, p. xvi): (1) the Postfordist Industrial Metropolis — a flexibly specialized, reflexive world of production (Scott, Storper); (2) the Cosmopolis — a globalized, culturally heterogeneous city-region (Sassen, Castells, Appadurai); (3) the Exopolis — a restructured urban form, the city turned inside-out and outside-in (Garreau, the Outer Cities); (4) the Fractal City — a social mosaic of intensified metropolarities and new hybridities; (5) the Carceral Archipelago — fortressed, policed, enclosed space (Davis, Foucault); (6) Simcities — a hyperreal restructuring of the urban imaginary (Baudrillard, Olalquiaga).

The term is deliberately post- without being post-: "Like other posts, postfordism represents neither a complete break with nor a binary opposite to its central referent" — the postmetropolis is "a selective deconstruction and still evolving reconstitution of the modern metropolis" (p. 170), "a still partial and incomplete metamorphosis that will always bear traces of earlier cityspaces" (p. 148). The least applicable posts, Soja insists, "are post-urban, post-industrial, and post-capitalist" (p. 147). What is genuinely new is the intensification: of globalization, of inequality, of enclosure, of simulation — and, after 1992, the shift from crisis-generated restructuring to restructuring-generated crises: "the full-grown postmetropolis has reached a stage when it appears to be exploding under the weight of its newnesses" (p. 397).

Methodologically, the postmetropolis is studied through Los Angeles as a symptomatic lived space — the exemplar whose "generalizable particularities" invite comparative analysis everywhere ("what has been happening in Los Angeles can also be seen taking place in Peoria, Scunthorpe, Belo Horizonte, and Kaohsiung… never in exactly the same way," Preface p. xvii). The book's six discourses are, Soja proposes, the "overlapping subdepartments" of a distinctive Los Angeles "school" of critical urban and regional studies. And the transition may be epochal: the speculative question of a fourth Urban Revolution is deliberately kept open (pp. 148, 197).

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the concept's author: Postmetropolis (2000) as the term's fullest elaboration; earlier statements in "Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis" (1997) and Thirdspace (1996).
• Manuel Castells (referenced, not paged — see log) — megacities, the space of flows, the Dual City; the most comprehensive of the six discourses' sources.
• Allen J. Scott & Michael Storper (referenced, not paged — see log) — the industrial-urbanist first discourse: vertical disintegration, technopoles, regional worlds.
• Mike Davis (referenced, not paged — see log) — City of Quartz as the Carceral Archipelago's defining text.
• Iain Borden — Soja named (with Augé, Harvey, Foucault, Lefebvre) in Borden's lineage for the "space of flows" — the wiki's prior Soja connection.
• Roger Keil — the postmetropolis echo: Quinby's "spatiotemporal ecology of the postmetropolis" quoted in Keil 2015 (pp. 591–592).

Related Concepts

• synekism — the geohistorical engine beneath the transition.
• trialectics-of-space — the epistemology: Part I tilts Firstspace, Part II Secondspace, Part III Thirdspace.
• exopolis, edge-city, post-suburbia — the urban-form discourse.
• fractal-city, metropolarities, spatial-mismatch — the social-mosaic discourse.
• carceral-archipelago, gated-community, ecology-of-fear — the governance discourse.
• simulation-hyperreality, psychasthenia, urban-imaginary — the imaginary discourse.
• postfordism, global-city, glocalization, space-of-flows — the causal discourses.
• crisis-generated-restructuring, restructuring-generated-crisis — the periodization.
• spatial-justice — the normative terminus.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the concept's founding source: the naming (p. 115), the six discourses (Preface pp. xii–xvi; Part II), the continuities thesis (p. 148), the implosion-explosion (p. 152), the restructuring-generated crisis (pp. 397–401), and the spatial-justice terminus (pp. 407–415).
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the concept's downstream echo: Quinby's "spatiotemporal ecology of the postmetropolis," displacing the traditional city's logic "within a suburban-like order of horizontality and dispersal" (pp. 591–592 of Keil's article).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Is the postmetropolis a period, a form, or a transition — and if the latter, what is it a transition to? Soja's fourth-Urban-Revolution question is deliberately left open.
• The six discourses are Los Angeles-derived; Soja insists on "generalizable particularities" — what does the postmetropolis look like when read from Lagos, São Paulo, Bombay, or Singapore, the cities Soja names as equally revealing windows (p. 153)?
• Does the 1992 turning point (restructuring-generated crisis) survive the post-2008 financialization era, or has the postmetropolis entered a further phase the six discourses cannot name?
• What is the architectural consequence of the six discourses — does the wiki's interior-architecture cluster map onto them (the carceral interior, the simulated interior, the fractal interior)?