This is a presentation of second generation urban thinkers-EDWARD+SOJA.pptx

This is a presentation of second generation urban thinkers-EDWARD+SOJA

1. EDWARD SOJA

2. Biography Born in 1941 (Bronx, New York) Street geographer by the time he was 10. Doctoral student in Geography at Syracuse University just after turning twenty-one. For 2 decades he specialized in the political geography of modernization and nation building in Africa.

3. After seven years of teaching at Northwestern University, he joined the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Now he is teaching urban planning, political economy and planning theory at the UCLA (University of public Affairs). Soja focuses his critical postmodern analysis of space and society, or what he calls spatiality, on the people and places of LA. For the past 20 years, he has been writing about the postmodernization of LA, urban restructuring and more broadly on the critical study of cities and regions.

4. Of particular interest to him is the way issues of class, race, and gender, intersect with what he calls the spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of difference and identity that this generate.

5. Approaches Soja focuses his critical postmodern analysis of space and society, or what he calls spatiality, on the people and places of LA. Edward Soja is interested in investigating methods of studying spatial disciplines. The last decades , after the failure of modernism, cities have been restructured, with cities like Los Angeles as a testing ground. These changes ask for new ways of studying the city.

6. Thirdspace . . . . “ Thirdspace ,” a notion of space that combines spatiality with sociality and historicality

7. Thirdspace . . . . “My objective in THIRDSPACE can be simply stated. it is to encourage you to think differently about meanings and significance of space and those related concepts that compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life : place , location , locality , landscape , environment , home , city , region , territory, and geography.”

8. “In encouraging you to think differently, I am not suggesting that you discard your old and familiar ways of thinking about space and spatially , but rather that you question them in a new ways that are aimed at opening up and expanding the scope and critical sensibility of your already established spatial or geographical imaginations.”

9. Thirdspace . . . one of the major obstacles to this rethinking is the practice whereby space is simply added in to history and the social as an afterthought, Soja wishes to give spatial conceptions an equal primacy as the `third existential dimension'

10. “And this three sided sensibility of spatiality - historicality - sociality is not only bringing about profound change in ways we think about space, it is also beginning to lead a major revisions in how we study history and society.”

11. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles brought together: traditional political economy approaches recent trends in critical cultural studies

12. He defined 6 kinds of restructuring which together define the region’s contemporary urban process: 1. Flexcity (rise of information technology, deindustrialization). 2.Cosmopolis (globalization and multicultural diversification). 3.Exopolis (growth of edge cities and postsuburbia , metropolis is turned inside-out and outside-in). 4.Metropolarities (social mosaic of LA, extreme forms of social, economic and political polarization). 5. Carceral City (mix of violence and police surveillance). 6.Simcity (the term Soja uses to describe the new ways of seeing the city that are emerging from the study of Los Angeles – increasing hiper reality of every day life.

13. References : Soja , E.W. Thirdspace : Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996. Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja , eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996.

14. THE END THANK YOU