Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

Author: Edward W. Soja Year: 2000 Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/soja_2000-postmetropolis.md

Summary

Postmetropolis is Edward Soja's "applied sequel" to Thirdspace (1996): a critical spatial history and theory of the contemporary city that traces a geohistory of cityspace from Jericho and Çatal Hüyük (c. 9000 B.C.) to the 1992 Los Angeles Justice Riots. Part I "remaps" this geohistory through three Urban Revolutions — the first an inverted, pre-agricultural urbanism ("putting cities first"), the second the Sumerian city-state (writing, governmentality, patriarchy), the third the urban-industrial capitalist metropolis (Manchester, Chicago) — introducing the book's signature concepts: the spatial specificity of urbanism, synekism (the stimulus of urban agglomeration), and the regionality of cityspace. Part II organizes the postmetropolitan transition through six discourses rooted in the Los Angeles "school": the Postfordist Industrial Metropolis (Scott, Storper), Cosmopolis (globalization; Friedmann, Sassen, Castells, Appadurai), Exopolis (urban form; Garreau, Davis), Fractal City (metropolarities; Wilson, the ethnic mosaic), the Carceral Archipelago (Davis, Foucault, gated communities), and Simcities (Baudrillard, hyperreality, the urban imaginary). Part III reads the 1992 Justice Riots as fully lived space, concluding that the postmetropolis has shifted from crisis-generated restructuring to restructuring-generated crises, and cataloguing the "new beginnings" of struggles for spatial justice and regional democracy (the Bus Riders Union, LAANE, Justice for Janitors).

Key Claims

Synekism. Adapted from Aristotle's synoikismos, synekism 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" (p. 12). It is a continuous motor force across all geohistory — "a vital part of the DNA of urbanism, a kind of presuppositional code for the generation, growth, and development of city-space" (p. 17) — not merely a one-off cause of city-state formation (against Maisels).
Putting cities first. The first Urban Revolution inverted the conventional sequence: Jericho and Çatal Hüyük were pre-agricultural urban settlements of hunters, gatherers, and traders; "it was cities that were necessary for the creation of an agricultural surplus," not agriculture that produced cities (p. 35). Jane Jacobs's "New Obsidian" thought-experiment (The Economy of Cities) is the prototype: import substitution, seed trading, and herding spun off from the city produce agriculture from urban economies ("Cities First — Rural Development Later," p. 45).
Çatal Hüyük's cityscape mural (ca. 6150 B.C.) may be "not only the first true landscape ever painted… but also an original example of a distinctively and self-consciously panoramic urban art form that brilliantly expresses a popular awareness of the spatial specificity of urbanism" — and it remained the only such painting for over 7,000 years until the Renaissance veduta (p. 40).
The second Urban Revolution (Sumeria, Ur) was fundamentally political: synekism's crystallizing moment was "the urban invention of the imperial state" (p. 59) — writing, bureaucracy, kingship, class, slavery, and "the apparent rise of a more definitively patriarchal social order" (p. 56), one of the profound differences between the first and second revolutions. Ur's ziggurat-palace-citadel complex formed "the world's first real-and-imagined citadel, a city within the city" (p. 65); suburbs are visible "almost as early as the city itself" (Mumford, quoted p. 66).
The third Urban Revolution made societal urbanization urban-industrial: Britain shifted "from being more than 80 percent rural in 1750 to being over 80 percent urban in 1900" (p. 77). Manchester was the "Ur-metropolis," "the chimney of the world" (p. 79): pauperization, "intentional urban slums," the reserve army, and an inverted prestige gradient (workers in the inner ring, bourgeoisie in gardened suburbs) produced Engels's segregated city — where "the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts… without ever seeing that they are in the midst of grimy misery" (p. 82).
Manchester 1850 ≈ Los Angeles 1990: both are moments where "an already established and expansive 'regime of accumulation'" outpaces its "mode of regulation" (p. 84, n. 11) — Soja's bridge between the third revolution and the postmetropolis.
The Chicago School made the first explicitly spatial urban theory but locked it into a depoliticizing "realist illusion" (Lefebvre's term): its urban ecology focused on surface patternings while "the most glaring absence in this modeling of cityspace was the industrialization process" (p. 88) — against which Castells ("The 'city' takes the place of explanation," p. 103) over-corrected by despatializing urban theory entirely.
The Lefebvrian inversion. "It is exactly this 'provocative inversion' of Marxist analysis, from the marxification of spatial analysis to the spatialization of Marxism, that was Lefebvre's most momentous contribution to urban studies" (p. 104). The trialectics of cityspace — Firstspace (perceived/spatial practice), Secondspace (conceived/urban imaginary), Thirdspace (lived/real-and-imagined) — structures the book's three Parts (pp. 10–12).
Harvey's urban process. The capitalist city is an "inequalities-generating machine by its very nature" (p. 107); capital "builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition… only to have to destroy it" (p. 95), producing the spatial fix (p. 99). Long-wave cycles (~50 years) of crisis-generated restructuring structure capitalist cityspace (pp. 110–112); the postmetropolis is the product of the third restructuring wave (post-1970).
Naming the postmetropolis. "Because we do not yet have a better or more specific term… I have chosen to call it the postmetropolis" (p. 115). It is "neither a complete break with nor a binary opposite" to the metropolis but "a selective deconstruction and still evolving reconstitution" (pp. 148, 170) — and possibly the threshold of a fourth Urban Revolution (a question deliberately left open, pp. 148, 197).
The six discourses are the "overlapping subdepartments" of the LA School (Preface, p. xvi): (1) the Postfordist Industrial Metropolis — Scott's vertical disintegration ("the general process of the fragmentation of different elements of the labor process into specialized but functionally interlinked units of production," p. 163), flexible specialization, technopoles, "lean and mean" inequality (Harrison), and Storper's regional worlds of reflexivity ("The economies of big cities… should be analyzed as sets of partially overlapping spheres of reflexive economic action," p. 179); (2) Cosmopolis — intensified globalization, the world city hypothesis (Friedmann's seven assertions, pp. 221–222), Sassen's global cities, Castells's space of flows vs. places ("People live in places, power rules through flows," p. 214), glocalization (Swyngedouw: scale as "the arena and moment… where sociospatial power relations are contested," p. 200), Appadurai's five -scapes, and deterritorialization–reterritorialization; (3) the Exopolis — megacities as "discontinuous constellations of spatial fragments, functional pieces, and social segments" (Castells, quoted p. 235), Outer Cities/postsuburbia, Garreau's Edge Cities, "City Lite" nostalgia, the simulated New Urbanism, the jobs–housing imbalance, and the stranded off-the-edge cities (Moreno Valley, Palmdale) of the "middle-class implosion"; (4) the Fractal City — metropolarities, the "surge in inequality," Wilson's spatial mismatch, the working poor, the ethnic mosaic with its niches and mobility traps, and the move "beyond equality politics" to the new cultural politics of difference; (5) the Carceral Archipelago — Davis's "fortress cities brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror'" (p. 300), Flusty's interdictory spaces, the panopticon mall, the LAPD as Space Police, CIDs/HOAs/gated communities as "association-administered servitude regimes"; (6) Simcities — Baudrillard's precession of simulacra (the four phases of the image), Olalquiaga's psychasthenia ("Bodies are becoming like cities"), cyberspace, Boyer's CyberCities, and the Orange County bankruptcy as SimCounty in crisis.
Glocalization and the politics of scale. Scales are not given but produced: "Scale becomes the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated" (Swyngedouw, quoted p. 200); the city-region emerges as "a fundamental unit of social life, comparable to the market, the state, and the family" (p. 179).
The implosion-explosion of scale. The postmetropolitan transition is "a simultaneous implosion and explosion in the scale of cities, an extraordinarily far-reaching turning of cityspace both inside-out and outside-in at the same time" (p. 152): the world urbanized, every city containing the world.
Restructuring-generated crises. The book's terminal thesis: after 1992 the postmetropolis "appears to be exploding under the weight of its newnesses" — "Those same innovative practices and restructured urban spatialities that proved most successful in restoring robust economic growth and in effectively controlling social unrest after the 1960s are now showing signs of disturbing dysfunctionality… moved from being solutions to become part of the problem" (p. 397). "Suddenly everywhere is Pomona" (p. 401): the crises of the Inner City now reach the off-the-edge cities.
1992 as lived space. The Justice Riots (Soja's preferred name) expose the postmetropolis: two parallel uprisings — the visible South Central one and the "largely invisible" Latino Mid-City/Pico-Union one (Davis, quoted pp. 386–387); Barbara Hooper's "somatography" reads Rodney King's body as the site where the "order in place" writes race onto flesh ("It is what I thought that matters," Koon at trial, p. 369); Korean Americans name it sa-i-ku (April 29, pp. 391–392); the Bloods/Crips reconstruction proposal and the truce are remembered as the riot's most hopeful archive (pp. 383–384).
Spatial justice and regional democracy — "terms which have rarely appeared in such explicit juxtaposition elsewhere" (Preface, p. xiv) — are the book's normative terminus: the Bus Riders Union consent decree linking civil rights to the geography of transit (p. 256); the Living Wage movement and LAANE's "Growth with Equity" (pp. 411–412); Justice for Janitors glocalizing a strike until it "stormed Century City as if it were a postmodern Bastille" (p. 414); Iris Marion Young's "togetherness-in-difference" and the urban confederalism of regional democracy (pp. 409–410).
Method: generalizable particularities. Los Angeles is "a symptomatic lived space, a representative window" — every reference "at once both an illustration… and an invitation to comparative analysis" (Preface, pp. xvii–xviii); the postmetropolis is readable in "Peoria, Scunthorpe, Belo Horizonte, and Kaohsiung," "never in exactly the same way."
Strategic postmodernism. Against both baudrillardian closure and modernist unmasking ("Demystification… tells us little more than that capitalism still exists," p. 348), Soja calls for "a strategically postmodern radical politics" of alternative imagery, intercultural coalition, and "the right to be different" — the postmetropolis is "neither utopia nor dystopia tout court, but both in heavy doses… and more" (p. 348).

Connections

Concepts: synekism, spatial-specificity-of-urbanism, postmetropolis, trialectics-of-space, urban-revolutions, postfordism, flexible-specialization, global-city, glocalization, hybridity, exopolis, edge-city, fractal-city, metropolarities, carceral-archipelago, interdictory-space, gated-community, ecology-of-fear, psychasthenia, crisis-generated-restructuring, restructuring-generated-crisis, spatial-justice, spatial-mismatch, new-cultural-politics-of-difference, urban-imaginary, space-of-flows, deterritorialisation, post-suburbia, implosion-explosion-dialectic, new-urbanism, right-to-the-city, urbanism, simulation-hyperreality, panopticon, privatised-public-space, hostile-architecture, palimpsest, postmodernism, corporeal-inscription, urban-sprawl, neoliberal-metropolis, planetary-suburbanization, governmentality, public-sphere, polycentrality

Authors: soja-edward-w (author); extensively engaged: lefebvre-henri, jacobs-jane, harvey-david, baudrillard-jean, foucault-michel, deleuze-gilles, massey-doreen, sudjic-deyan; referenced without pages (see log): Manuel Castells, Allen J. Scott, Michael Storper, Mike Davis, Saskia Sassen, John Friedmann, Arjun Appadurai, Iain Chambers, Celeste Olalquiaga, M. Christine Boyer, William Julius Wilson, Joel Garreau, Steven Flusty, Steve Herbert, Barbara Hooper, Neil Brenner, Erik Swyngedouw, Roland Robertson, Engin Isin, Leonie Sandercock, Iris Marion Young, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Bennett Harrison, Ian Hodder, Kathleen Kenyon, James Mellaart, Friedrich Engels, Lewis Mumford.

Debates: spatial-vs-social-explanation — the book's deep structure: the two-century suppression of the spatial (Chicago School ecologism, Castells's despatialization, the historicism of Marxism) against the Lefebvre–Soja spatialization; also touches postmodernism-vs-modernism and power-and-space.

Direct Quotes

"Synekism thus connotes, in particular, 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." (p. 12)

"Synekism can be seen as a vital part of the DNA of urbanism, a kind of presuppositional code for the generation, growth, and development of city-space and its metropolitan regionality." (p. 17)

"It was cities that were necessary for the creation of an agricultural surplus." (p. 35)

"We may therefore envisage pre-pottery Neolithic Jericho as a culture with all the attributes of civilisation, except that of a written language." (Kenyon, quoted p. 34)

"Urban space was designed and produced as a self-conscious expression of local and territorial culture, a materialized 'symbolic zone'… the beginnings of urbanism as a way of life, to use that famous phrase of the Chicago School of urban studies founded 10,000 years later." (p. 34)

"The crystallizing moment of this synekism was the urban invention of the imperial state and all its ancillary apparatuses." (p. 59)

"In the metropolis of Ur… this new centrality was celebrated monumentally in the construction of the ziggurat… It projected itself as the center of the world, the locus of creation, the fixed point of the cosmos." (p. 64)

"This revolutionary reorganization of cityspace required not only making room for the millions of new migrants… but also for the development of new ways to keep this emerging industrialized space economy of urbanism together." (p. 77)

"The separation between the different classes and the consequent ignorance of each other's habits and condition, are far more complete in this place than in any other country." (Engels on Manchester, quoted p. 81)

"In this sense at least, Manchester in 1850 is not unlike Los Angeles in 1990." (p. 84, n. 11)

"The most glaring absence in this modeling of cityspace was the industrialization process and its formative impact on urban geography." (p. 88)

"Under this 'realist illusion,' as Henri Lefebvre called it, the perceived space of the city… are made into the only real geography to be studied… What lies beneath the surface of social spatiality is either naturalized… or else it remains invisible and thus irrelevant to both theory and practice." (p. 93)

"Capital represents itself in the form of a physical landscape created in its own image… but at the same time it expresses the power of dead labour over living labour and as such it imprisons and inhibits the accumulation process within a set of physical constraints." (Harvey, quoted p. 95)

"The 'city' takes the place of explanation." (Castells, quoted p. 103)

"It is exactly this 'provocative inversion' of Marxist analysis, from the marxification of spatial analysis to the spatialization of Marxism, that was Lefebvre's most momentous contribution to urban studies and more broadly to all the human sciences." (p. 104)

"Every city has had its boom, but the history of Los Angeles is the history of booms." (McWilliams, quoted p. 122)

"The postmetropolis thus represents, in large part, an outgrowth or, better, an extension of that modern and modernist urbanism, a still partial and incomplete metamorphosis that will always bear traces of earlier cityspaces." (p. 148)

"Deterritorialization refers to the weakening attachments to place… there probably has never been a period in which its effects have been so intense and far-reaching." (p. 151)

"Still another way of describing the postmetropolitan transition is as a simultaneous implosion and explosion in the scale of cities, an extraordinarily far-reaching turning of cityspace both inside-out and outside-in at the same time." (p. 152)

"Like other posts, postfordism represents neither a complete break with nor a binary opposite to its central referent, but rather a movement beyond its established regime of accumulation and mode of regulation to a significantly different economic order. In other words: a deconstruction (not destruction or erasure) and reconstitution (still only partial, ongoing, and incorporating selective components of the older order) of Fordist and Keynesian political economies." (p. 170)

"The economies of big cities, in other words, should be analyzed as sets of partially overlapping spheres of reflexive economic action." (Storper, quoted p. 179)

"Spatial scale is what needs to be understood as something that is produced; a process that is always deeply heterogeneous, conflictual, and contested. Scale becomes the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated." (Swyngedouw, quoted p. 200)

"People live in places, power rules through flows." (Castells, quoted p. 214)

"Two terms are never enough … there is always an Other (Il y a toujours l'Autre)." (Lefebvre, quoted p. 215)

"The fundamental contemporary meaning of the dual city refers to the process of spatial restructuring through which distinct segments of labor are included in and excluded from the making of new history." (Castells, quoted p. 229)

"The cosmopolis also signifies the global character of the metropolis unbound … still a polis, albeit a fragmented, sprawling, and global one." (Isin, quoted p. 231)

"Megacities are discontinuous constellations of spatial fragments, functional pieces, and social segments." (Castells, quoted p. 235)

"The composite Exopolis can be metaphorically described as 'the city turned inside-out'… But it also represents 'the city turned outside-in,' a globalization of the Inner City that brings all the world's peripheries into the center." (p. 250)

"Very broadly defined, a fractal is anything that contains in its parts self-similar images of the whole." (p. 283)

"Los Angeles is now profoundly, irremediably ethnic." (Waldinger, quoted p. 289)

"[T]oday's pharaonic scales of residential and commercial security supplant residual hopes for urban reform and social integration … we live in 'fortress cities' brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror' where the police battle the criminalized poor." (Davis, quoted p. 300)

"In a sense, you could think of skid row these days as a lavishly financed, minimum security prison. A prison without physical walls, surely, but nonetheless a place that's hard to leave." (Jones, quoted p. 306)

"Interdictory spaces are those specifically designed to intercept and repel would-be users… 'stealthy'… 'slippery'… 'crusty'… 'prickly'… 'jittery'." (Flusty, quoted p. 306)

"Gated communities are residential areas with restricted access in which normally public spaces are privatized." (Blakely & Snyder, quoted p. 317)

"The new Enclosures cannot endure because they cannot sustain themselves… But at the same time it is possible for the emergence of a politics of deterritorialization and reconnection, a politics in which arguments over space – its enclosures, exclusions, and internments – become subjects for debate and discussion, and more important, for resistances and transgressions." (Dumm, quoted p. 321)

"Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA – it is the map that engenders the territory." (Baudrillard, quoted p. 326)

"To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't… simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false', between 'real' and 'imaginary'." (Baudrillard, quoted p. 328)

"Psychasthenia is a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory… Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense sea that circumscribes it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond." (Olalquiaga, quoted p. 151)

"Bodies are becoming like cities, their temporal coordinates transformed into spatial ones. In a poetic condensation, history has been replaced by geography, stories by maps, memories by scenarios." (Olalquiaga, quoted p. 330)

"Hyper-reality is what you get when a Panopticon evolves to the point where it can convince everyone that it doesn't exist; people continue to believe they are free, although their power has disappeared." (Rheingold, quoted p. 335)

"The postmetropolis is neither utopia nor dystopia tout court, but both in heavy doses … and more." (p. 348)

"The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body." (Lefebvre, quoted p. 359)

"I have named this order somatography, body writing, a hierarchical differentiating of flesh…" (Hooper, quoted p. 361)

"Oh I can if I put my perceptions in … It is what I thought that matters." (Sgt. Koon at the Rodney King trial, quoted p. 369)

"If interpretation is a never-ending task, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret because, when all is said and done, underneath it all everything is already interpretation." (Foucault, quoted p. 371)

"What happened in Los Angeles … was neither a race riot nor a class rebellion. Rather, this monumental upheaval was a multiracial, trans-class and largely male display of justified social rage." (West, quoted p. 380)

"Riot is the voice of the unheard." (Waters, quoted p. 382)

"The first, which riveted the attention of the world, occurred in South Los Angeles… The second, largely invisible, riot occurred in the preponderantly Latino Mid-City Area." (Davis, quoted p. 387)

"The full-grown postmetropolis has reached a stage when it appears to be exploding under the weight of its newnesses." (p. 397)

"Suddenly, everywhere is Pomona." (p. 401)

"We're all stuck here for awhile …" (Rodney King, quoted pp. 358, 392–393)

"I focus my critical studies of cities and regions on such achievable goals as spatial justice and regional democracy, terms which have rarely appeared in such explicit juxtaposition elsewhere in the literature. Without neglecting other critical social and/or historical approaches, I literally and figuratively 'put space first.'" (Preface, p. xiv)

Open Questions

Is the postmetropolis the onset of a fourth Urban Revolution — a question Soja deliberately "leave[s] open to alternative viewpoints" (p. 6)? What would confirm or refute a revolution-scale reading of the current transition?
Can the six discourses be held together without privileging one, as Soja insists — or does the Fractal City's empirical sociology quietly dominate the others in practice?
Does the "restructuring-generated crisis" thesis (1992 as turning point) survive the post-2000 wave of financialization and crisis — is the post-2008 period a second restructuring-generated crisis, or the completion of the first?
Soja's Carceral Archipelago closes with hope drawn from Engels's Manchester and post-apartheid South Africa — can the "synekism of identity, resistance, and struggle in the concentrated enclosures of the poor" be theorized as rigorously as the enclosures themselves?
How does synekism relate to contemporary "agglomeration economy" policy discourse — is Soja's concept a critical spatialization of a technocratic category, or its theoretical rehabilitation?
What would a trialectic reading of the interior (Firstspace/Secondspace/Thirdspace at room scale) add to the wiki's interior-architecture cluster?

Citation note: page numbers are the book's printed pagination (the raw file's PDF markers run 21 pages ahead: printed p. X = PDF page X+21).