Edward Soja

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Edward Soja

Edward William Soja (1940, New York) is a post-modern political geographer and planner, currently working as a professor at the faculty of the University of Los Angeles (UCLA).

In his earlier work, Soja mainly focussed on Africa, and especially on planning in Kenya. For the past twenty years, “Soja has focused his research and writing on urban restructuring in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and regions”, bringing together traditional political economy approaches and more recent developments in critical cultural studies (UCLA, department of Urban Planning, n.d.). “Of particular interest to him [Soja] is the way issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality intersect with what he calls the spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of difference and identity that this generates” (UCLA, department of Urban Planning, n.d.).

Besides his focus on urban restructuring in Los Angeles , Soja also writes about the way “social scientists and philosophers think about space and geography, especially in relation to how they think about time and history” (UCLA, department of Urban Planning, n.d.).

Related to this, his main contribution to the fields of spatial theory and cultural geography consists out of his interpretation and ‘updating’ of the analytical spatial triad on the production of space (space is not something pre-given, an empty container, but is, instead, always a construction), as developed by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (consisting out of ‘perceived space’, ‘conceived space’ and ‘lived space’). His ‘trialectics of spatiality’ (three approaches of spatiality) consists out of spatial practices (Firstspace), representations of space (Secondspace) and spaces of representation (Thirdspace, the space of ‘othering’) (Soja, 1996). These three ‘realms of space (Gregory, Johnston, Pratt, Watts & Whatmore 2009), respectively, coincide with the notions of perceived, conceived and lived space, as developed by Lefebvre.

This triad of spatiality is one of the two basic ‘trialectics’, as he labelled them, that where developed by Soja. Whereas the triad of spatiality is concerned with epistemology, the other one is about ontology; ‘the trialecties of being’, consisting out of ‘historicality’, sociality, and spatiality (Gregory et al., 2009). Special attention is given to the (third) notion of space, which is an essential concept for Soja, arguing that it “is characteristically erased in conventional social theory” (Gregory et al., 2009, p. 776).

By developing these trialectics, Soja’s main goal was to make clear the importance of the ‘other’, ‘third term’ in order ‘to defend against any binary reductionism or totalization’ (dialectics) (Gregory et al., 2009).

References

Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M. & Whatmore, S. (2009). The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edition. London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

Soja, E.W. (1996) The extraordinary voyages of Henri Lefebvre, pp. 26-52; The trialectics of spatiality. In: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 53-82.

UCLA department of Planning (n.d.). Edward Soja. Accessed 13 october 2010, on http://www.spa.ucla.edu/dept.cfm?d=up&s=faculty&f=faculty1.cfm&id=251