Spatial Specificity of Urbanism

Definition

The spatial specificity of urbanism is Edward Soja's name for what is distinctively urban in the production of social life: "the particular configurations of social relations, built forms, and human activity in a city and its geographical sphere of influence… It actively arises from the social production of cityspace as a distinctive material and symbolic context or habitat for human life" (Soja 2000, p. 8). It has two aspects — as urban form (the "relatively fixed qualities of a built environment," the mappable patternings of land use, wealth, identity, class) and as urban process (the generative, dynamic role cityspace plays in shaping social life). The claim is polemical: against two centuries of scholarship in which cityspace was "typically seen as fixed, dead, socially and politically ineffectual, little more than a constructed stage-set for dynamic social and historical processes" (p. 9), Soja insists that the spatial specificity of urbanism has explanatory power in itself — that social processes do not merely operate in and on cities but "to a significant degree also emanate from cities."

The concept carries a double history. Positively, it is the "socio-spatial dialectic" Soja theorized in 1980: social relations shape spatial specificities but are simultaneously shaped by them, against the despatializing tendencies of both scientific socialism and the new social sciences. Negatively, it names the blind spot of the disciplines: the Chicago School's "realist illusion" reduced the city to measured surface appearances; Castells's structuralism reduced spatial forms to outcomes with "no independent effect"; and most urban sociology dissolved the urban into pure sociality. Against both, Soja's Postmetropolis is a sustained demonstration — from Çatal Hüyük's urban agriculture to Storper's reflexive city-regions — that "thinking spatially makes a difference."

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the concept's author: the spatial specificity as the book's interpretive foregrounding ("I literally and figuratively 'put space first,'" Preface p. xiv); the socio-spatial dialectic ("The Socio-Spatial Dialectic," Annals of the AAG, 1980); Postmodern Geographies (1989).
• Henri Lefebvre — the affirmative source: "the most insightful and affirmative conceptualization of this complex but distinctively urban process of social configuration" (p. 9); the urban problematic, views from above and below, the production of space.
• Jane Jacobs — the economic form: "Cities are the mothers of economic development… because of the conditions of density" (1997 interview, quoted p. 15).
• Michael Storper (referenced, not paged — see log) — the proximity thesis: conventions and relations "only work in the context of proximity."
• Manuel Castells (referenced, not paged — see log) — the negative pole: spatial forms with "no independent effect, and, consequently, there is no systematic link between different urban contexts and ways of life" (The Urban Question, quoted p. 103) — the position Soja's concept exists to refute.

Related Concepts

• synekism — the stimulus that arises from and activates the spatial specificity: the concept's generative twin.
• trialectics-of-space — the epistemology through which the specificity is studied: Firstspace (form), Secondspace (imaginary), Thirdspace (lived).
• postmetropolis — the current historical expression of the specificity; the six discourses as its contemporary configurations.
• Practiced Place — the Lefebvrian space/place production the specificity presupposes.
• urbanism — "urbanism as a way of life" — the specificity's human content since Wirth.
• crisis-generated-restructuring — the long-wave rhythm that repeatedly reconfigures the specificity.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the concept's founding source: the definition (p. 8), form-and-process (p. 8), the "fixed, dead" diagnosis via Foucault (p. 9), the Lefebvrian affirmation (pp. 9–10), the socio-spatial dialectic (pp. 8, 69, 161), and its deployment through every chapter (the Çatal Hüyük fresco as "a popular awareness of the spatial specificity of urbanism," p. 40).

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

• Does the concept survive its own generalization — if every scale from body to planet is spatially specific, is "urban" specificity distinguishable from spatiality tout court?
• Soja's polemical target is the despatialized social science of the 1970s–90s; does the concept need updating for a scholarship (planetary urbanization, infrastructure studies) that has over-asserted the spatial in its turn?
• What is the relation between the spatial specificity of urbanism and the spatial specificity of interiors — does the wiki's domestic cluster presuppose a parallel "spatial specificity of dwelling"?