Synekism

Definition

Synekism — Edward Soja's adaptation of the ancient Greek synoikismos (literally "the condition arising from dwelling together in one house," oikos), used by Aristotle in his Politics to describe the formation of the Athenian polis — names the stimulus of urban agglomeration: "the economic and ecological interdependencies and the creative – as well as occasionally destructive – synergisms that arise from the purposeful clustering and collective cohabitation of people in space, in a 'home' habitat" (Soja 2000, p. 12). Soja deliberately respells the archaeological "synoecism" as synekism, to foreground the word's kinship with oikos's descendants — economics ("household management"), ecology, ecumene, ekistics — and to rescue a concept that has been "infrequently recognized and rarely theorized explicitly" despite being, on his argument, one of the most important dynamics in human history.

Synekism is both form and force: as form it describes the nucleated, hierarchically nested regional network of settlements (the city-region, kin to "agglomeration economies" and central-place hierarchies); as force it is the generative stimulus — innovation, growth, societal development — that dense propinquity and interdependent co-presence produce "from within its defined territorial domain." Crucially, Soja frees the concept from its scholarly confinement to a single moment (the crystallization of the Sumerian city-state, per Maisels) and generalizes it: "a vital part of the DNA of urbanism, a kind of presuppositional code for the generation, growth, and development of city-space" across the entire geohistory of urbanism (p. 17). In its ancient sense synekism also connoted the union of settlements under a capital city — hence a regional concept, kin to metropolis ("mother-city"), and the reason Soja insists on the regionality of cityspace: even the first cities were regional agglomerations, and the region, not the isolated bounded city, is urbanism's natural unit.

Soja's exemplars: Jane Jacobs's "spark of city economic life" (The Economy of Cities) — the city as "a settlement that consistently generates its economic growth from its own localized economy and resources"; and Michael Storper's "reflexivity" and "untraded interdependencies" (The Regional World) — "certain conventions and relations only work in the context of proximity" — the rediscovery of synekism in the "regional worlds of production" literature. Soja's boldest extension: "the innovative reflexivity that arises from the spatial specificity of urbanized regions – what I have defined as synekism – may be one of the most important driving forces behind every major innovative surge in human history, from the discovery of agriculture and the creation of the state to the Industrial Revolution" (p. 180).

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the concept's author and name-giver: Postmetropolis (2000), Introduction and throughout; synekism as the geohistorical engine and the book's own closing term ("the synekism of Los Angeles will be worth watching," p. 415).
• Jane Jacobs — the prototype: "the spark of city economic life"; New Obsidian and the "cities first" theory of agricultural origins; the city as self-generating economy.
• Michael Storper (referenced, not paged — see log) — the contemporary economic-geographic formulation: reflexivity, untraded interdependencies, "regional worlds of production," city-regions as "a fundamental unit of social life."
• Charles Keith Maisels (referenced, not paged — see log) — synekism's confinement to city-state crystallization, which Soja criticizes and generalizes.
• Ian Hodder (referenced, not paged — see log) — the postprocessual excavation of Çatalhöyük; "Çatal Hüyük and I, we bring each other into existence" — the agency/structure debate at the origin-site.
• Kathleen Kenyon & James Mellaart (referenced, not paged — see log) — the archeological ground: Jericho and Çatal Hüyük as the first cities.

Related Concepts

• spatial-specificity-of-urbanism — the concept's ground: the configurations of social relations, built forms, and activity from which synekistic stimulus arises.
• urban-revolutions — the three (possibly four) epochal transformations synekism drives: agriculture (first), the imperial state (second), urban-industrial capitalism (third).
• postmetropolis — the current phase of the geohistory synekism organizes; the six discourses as its contemporary expressions.
• urbanism — the "way of life" whose 10,000-year genealogy synekism rewrites.
• post-suburbia — the regionality thesis's contemporary registration: the polycentric city-region as urbanism's form.
• planetary-suburbanization — the explosion-side of synekistic agglomeration at planetary scale.
• crisis-generated-restructuring — the long-wave rhythm through which synekistic innovation repeatedly reorganizes cityspace.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Soja 2000) — the concept's founding source: the etymology and definition (pp. 12–13), the regionality of cityspace (pp. 16–18), the "DNA of urbanism" (p. 17), the Jacobs/Storper recoveries (pp. 14–15, 177–180), the inverted agricultural origins (pp. 24–46), the rediscovery of synekism in the industrial-regionalism discourse (pp. 175–180), and the carceral enclosure's synekism of resistance (p. 322).

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 synekism inherently tied to urban density, or does it describe any intensive co-presence — and what would a dispersed, networked synekism (the creative synergies of the Net) do to the concept? (Soja himself notes Storper never defines reflexivity as exclusively urban.)
• Soja asks but leaves open: "is the innovative stimulus of dense proximity inherently greater in more concentrated rather than dispersed agglomerations?" (p. 55) — the Egyptian anomaly and the città diffusa remain test cases.
• Does synekism have a dark side that can be theorized at the same depth as its creativity — the "occasionally destructive synergisms" of dense enclosures (ghetto, citadel, carceral city)?
• How does synekism relate to the wiki's informal-urbanism cluster — Dovey's and Neuwirth's productive informal settlements are synekistic par excellence, yet absent from Soja's account.