Edward Soja

American urban planner and geographer (1940–2015)

Edward William Soja ('/s//oʊ//dʒ//ə/; 1940–2015) was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio spatial dialectic and spatial justice.

Edward Soja received his Ph. D. degree from Syracuse University. He worked for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA since 1972, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning. He had also been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. which was followed in 2014 with his My Los Angeles published by the University of California Press. He also published in the critical urban theory journal City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. Soja collaborated on research and writing with, most notably, Allen J. Scott (UCLA), Michael Storper (UCLA, London School of Economics), Fredric Jameson (Duke University), David Harvey (Johns Hopkins, CUNY), Kurt Iveson (University of Sydney), and various faculty in the departments of Urban Planning, Architecture, Policy Studies, and Geography at UCLA. Soja served as the doctoral academic advisor to many leading scholars in the field of urban theory and geography including Professor Mustafa Dikec (École d'Urbanisme de Paris), Dr. Walter J. Nicholls (University of California, Irvine), Dr. Mark Purcell (University of Washington), Dr. Diane Davis (Harvard University), Dr. Juan Miguel Kanai (University of Sheffield) and Dr. Stefano Bloch (University of Arizona). In 2015 he was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize, the highest honor for a geographer and often called the Nobel Prize in the field of geography. As he explains, "I define Thirdspace as an Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality." Thirdspace is a radically inclusive concept that encompasses epistemology, ontology, and historicity in continuous movement beyond dualisms and toward "an Other": as Soja explains, "thirding produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge." Thirdspace is a transcendent concept that is constantly expanding to include "an Other," thus enabling the contestation and re negotiation of boundaries and cultural identity. Soja here closely resembles Homi Bhabha's Third Space Theory, in which "all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity," that "displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation." Soja's work on Thirdspace has inspired thinking in the field of Geography Education, specifically utilising the spaces of Firstspace, Secondspace and Thirdspace to help school aged students to learn about urban geography. This work has been extended to look at how Thirdspace might be of use as a concept to help students in urban fieldwork.

Soja introduced six visions for the City of Los Angeles. These are the following:

Flexicity: Deindustrialization has been occurring alongside a potent reindustrialization process built not just on high technology. Cosmopolis: The primacy of globalization. Globalization of culture, labor and capital. Reworlds the city. Exopolis: The city that no longer conveys the traditional qualities of cityness. No cityness about Los Angeles. Growth of the outer city and city edges. More urban life. Metropolarities: Increasing social inequalities, widening income gaps, new kinds of social polarization and satisfaction that fit uncomfortably within traditional dualisms based on class or race, as well as conventional. New underclass debate. Carcereal Archipelagos: A fortified city with bulging prisons. The City of Quartz. More surveillance. Simcity: A place where simulations of a presumably real world increasingly capture and activate our urban imaginary and infiltrate urban life. An electronic generation of hyperreality.

Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989. 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. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000. "Writing the city spatially", City, November 2003. "The city and spatial justice", Justice spatiale | Spatial Justice, n° September 1, 2009. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010. "Towards a regional democracy? ",Métropolitiques, March 2011. "Spatial Justice and the Right to the City: an Interview with Edward Soja", Justice spatiale | Spatial Justice, n° March 3, 2011. My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014.