Edward W. Soja

The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a Transformative Retheorisation

Tenacious layers of mystification have recently begun to be peeled away from our understanding of the spatiality of social life, from the ways in which we account for and act upon the socially-produced geographical configurations and spatial relations which give material form and expression to society. This process of critical reinterpretation is revealing what has been obscured in both social and spatial theory and in day-to-day practice: that spatiality situates social life in an active arena where purposeful human agency jostles problematically with tendential social determinations to shape everyday activity, particularise social change, and etch into place the course of time and the making of history.

Urban Restructuring: An Analysis of Social and Spatial Change in Los Angeles

I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California.… California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.

In different spaces: The cultural turn in urban and regional political economy

Abstract For many years, those involved in the fields of urban and regional political economy have called for increasing attention to cultural studies, both to add richness to contemporary interpretations of geographically uneven development and as a means of expanding class analysis to encompass more openly questions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and everyday life. What has happened recently, however, has not been simply the addition of cultural analysis to political economy but the beginning of a radical restructuring of the very foundations of urban and regional political economy to contend with the emergence of what is now being called a New Cultural Politics. I will explore three ways in which the New Cultural Politics differs significantly from what might be called the Old Economic Politics. The first difference arises from the epistemological restructuring that has marked the shift from modernist to post‐modernist critical theory. The second difference, growing out of the first, is a rethi...

Regional Planning and Development Theories

A historical look at the evolution of regional planning and regional development theories through four phases: early approaches based on resource development and environmental preservation, a second phase of welfare regionalism aimed at achieving efficient and equitable economic development at a national scale, the emergence after 1980 of a highly competitive entrepreneurial regionalism based on neoliberal ideas, and the contemporary development of a new regionalism as a cultural and political force and as the foundation for a new approach to regional planning and regional development theory. Particular attention is given to the close relations between the theory and practice of regional planning and the work of human geographers. Concluding the discussion of the new regionalism is the claim that the concepts of region and regionalism are today being given more serious attention than ever before in global, national, and urban politics and policy, as well as in the development of social, economic, and political theory.

Keeping Space Open

Forum on: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, by Edward W. Soja

Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-And-Imagined Places

List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction/Itinerary/Overture. Part I: Discovering Thirdspace: . 1. The Extraordinary Voyages of Henri Lefebvre. 2. The Trialectics of Spatiality. 3. Exploring the Spaces that Difference Makes: Notes on the Margins. 4. Increasing the Openness of Thirdspace. 5. Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness. 6. Re--Presenting the Spatial Critique of Historicism. Part II: Inside and Outside Los Angeles: . 7. Remembrances: A Heterotopology of the Citadel--LA. 8. Inside Exopolis: Everyday Life in the Postmodern World. 9. The Stimulus of a Little Confusion: A Contemporary Comparison of Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Select Bibliography. Name Index. Subject Index.

Resistance after the Spatial Turn

Radical politics changed dramatically in 2009. No matter what Barack Obama does in office, his election removed the easy target supplied by the arrogant imperialism and neo-conservative excesses of the Bush-Cheney regime, while the global financial meltdown that helped Obama win provided a new easy target, the possibility that the end of capitalism, or at the very least of its neo-liberal variant, is near. Whatever happens in the aftermath of these epochal events, radical politics today is shifting its focus, moving away from an all-embracing anti-neo-liberalism towards a renewed hope that radical change is possible.