Soja, Edward (1941–)

One of human geography's most passionate and articulate advocates, Edward Soja has long been an aggressive voice for the inclusion of space in contemporary social thought. He is widely regarded as one of the leading theoreticians in urban and political geography. His work has long been characterized by an abiding concern for issues of social justice and inequality as well as for deciphering the ways in which spatial relations are naturalized as well as contested.

From his origins in the Bronx, Soja developed a highly urban-centered geographical imagination. Following a PhD at Syracuse University, he taught briefly at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he briefly pursued a positivist line of thought. His early work concerned Africa, including a dissertation on Kenya and applications of modernization theory. However, soon after, Soja joined the faculty of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has remained since 1972.

Deeply affected by the events of the 1960s, Soja became a committed Marxist and was a major force in encouraging the discipline to see space as a social construction, that is, as made rather than simply given. Soja's works convinced many readers that space was filled with politics and meaning, that its production and reproduction lay at the core of capitalism's survival and expansion, and that spatial transformation was every bit as significant as social transformation. His early work sought out a simultaneous transformation: the “Marxification” of geography and the spatialization of Marxism. In this light, society and space were inseparable, forming a seamless “sociospatial dialect.” He was profoundly influenced by the flowering of spatial thought unleashed in France by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, playing a major role in introducing their ideas to geographers, and was one of the architects of the “spatial turn.”

At the core of Soja's intellectual project lay cities in all their glorious, messy complexity. For Soja, urban life—its everyday rhythms, the division of labor, public policy, struggles over places, and the relations among distant locales—could only be comprehended meaningfully through the conceptual lens of spatiality. In this regard, he became a firm opponent of historicism, which privileged time over space, arguing that the two dimensions necessarily held equal ontological status. But Soja was also something of an urban flaneur, a storyteller seeking to capture the richness of space. Soja's insistence in this regard led him into postmodernism and away from orthodox Marxism's relegation of spatiality to the periphery: A postmodern geography was one that by definition put space on a par with time. In this regard, he faced vociferous objections that he had lapsed into a form of spatial determinism.

His book Postmodern Geographies, published in 1989, drew enormous favorable attention worldwide and established him as one of the discipline's leading theoreticians. Rather than simple dichotomies, such as those that pervaded most Enlightenment thought, Soja advocated a “trialectics” consisting of time, space, and meaning. In this reading, the production of spatiality was always open-ended and contingent, never preordained. Empirically, the heart of Soja's agenda lay in Los Angeles, the globalized, post-Fordist, enormously diverse metropolis in which social inequalities are inevitably matched by equally appalling spatial inequalities. He was thus a founding member of the “Los Angeles School” of urban studies, which took as its point of departure that city's experiences in the late 20th century.

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