Exopolis

Exopolis (from the Greek exo “outside” and polis “city”) is one of many surnames given by the ancient Greeks to the goddess Athena because of the location of a statue in her honor outside the city walls of Athens. In urban studies, Edward Soja has used exopolis to refer to the edge city and other developments taking place outside of the city in what used to be called the suburban fringe, but it also refers to what comes after the city (thus ex “after” and polis “city”). Exopolis is the city without, but also the noncity, the city without a center, “a kaleidoscopic social-spatial structure of geometric fragmentation, increasingly discontinuous, orbiting beyond the old agglomerative nodes.” Exopolis is a simulacrum—an exact copy of a city that never existed—where image and reality are “spectacularly confused.”

Exopolis has had an interesting history in the Soja canon. It has not yet been born in “Los Angeles: Capital of the 21st Century,” the programmatic essay introducing the Los Angeles School, in which Soja and Scott describe the new peripheral agglomerations around Los Angeles as “the nodes of the new technopolis.” And in Postmodern Geographies[Page 262]Soja describes decentralized urban and suburban growth in the Los Angeles region as peripheral urbanization for the suburbs (producing techno-poles in the “outer city”) and as peripheralization of the urban core of the city (following the increased internationalization of the regional labor market). Soja first introduces us to exopolis in “Inside Orange County” (published in Michael Sorkin's influential Variations on a Theme Park, in which he describes “improbable cities where centrality is nearly ubiquitous and the solid familiarity of the urban melts into the air.” The new urban spaces—based upon what elsewhere are described as edge cities—require new methods of observation to “take apart those deceptively embracing similarities and reconstruct a different topography of power mapped out inside exopolis.” Yet by the time this article was revised for inclusion in Thirdspace, exopolis had become simply another label for “the anonymous implosion of archaic suburbia”—the outer cities, edge cities, technopoles, technoburbs, postsuburbia, and metro-plexes of urban disciplines.

In Thirdspace Soja is celebrating Baudrillard, and so exopolis has become “infinitely enchanting; at its worst it transforms our cities and our lives into spin-doctored ‘scamscapes,’ places where the real and the imagined, fact and fiction, become spectacularly confused, impossible to tell apart.” Soja argues that exopolis “stretches our imaginations and critical sensibilities in much the same way that it has stretched the tissues of the modern metropolis: beyond the older tolerances, past the point of being able to spring back to its earlier shape” and that we must acquire a new language to capture the multidimensional urban-scape. But exopolis—the city and the noncity, and the city in-between—has been relegated to a minor place in this interrogation, becoming yet another name for standard discussions of inner city and outer city, theme parks and Disneylands, edge cities on the suburban fringe. Indeed, in his essay on Amsterdam, Soja notes that “Greater Amsterdam” corresponds to the Randstad and may be seen as Europe's largest exopolis—or edge city.

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