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Urban Geography, 2011, 32, 4, pp. 451–469. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.4.451Copyright © 2011 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.

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BEYOND POSTMETROPOLIS

Edward W. Soja1

Department of Urban Planning University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: Three recent developments have created new challenges and opportunities for urban geography and geographers: the rediscovery of the generative power of cities, the cross- disciplinary diffusion of critical spatial perspectives, and rising interest in regions and regional-ism. With these new developments as background, I reflect upon some of the ideas and themes introduced in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, published in 2000. Like the book, this effort to move beyond Postmetropolis is divided into three parts: Remapping the Geohistory of Cityspace; Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis; and Lived Space: Remembering 1992 in Los Angeles. Some of the same themes are taken up, often with a different emphasis, in the accompanying essays by Robert Beauregard, Mona Domosh, and Deborah Martin. [Key words: urban agglomeration, the spatial turn, regional urbanization, metropolitan urbanization, spatial justice.]

INTRODUCTION

This may be the best of times to be an urban geographer. I do not necessarily mean the traditional disciplinary identity of AAG Specialty Groups, but rather anyone engaged in studying how urban space is socially produced and how this urban spatiality rebounds to affect individual and collective lives. Never before has a critical spatial perspective been so widespread, so focused on cities and urban life, and so generative of new ideas about economics, politics, culture, and social change more generally. Today, no scholar of any stripe can afford not to be, to some degree, an urban geographer.

This unprecedented intellectual spread of urban geographical perspectives happens to coincide with a surge of urban growth that has led the United Nations to declare that the majority of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. But more important than mere numbers in focusing scholarly and popular attention on cities and urban geographies have been three interrelated and extraordinary developments that have emerged in full force in the 21st century from earlier origins: (1) the rediscovery of the generative power of cities; (2) the cross-disciplinary diffusion of critical spatial perspectives; and (3) rising interest in regions and regionalism.

1. The (Re)discovery of Urban Spatial Causality, the Powerful Generative Force of Cities, and the Urbanization Process

Western social theory and philosophy, whatever its political stance, has rarely given significant explanatory power for understanding the urban condition. Things happen in cities, but very rarely because of specifically urban influences. Urban geography in this

1Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Edward Soja, Department of Urban Planning, Luskin School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095-1656; telephone: 310-825-4335; fax: 310-398-6550; email: [email protected]

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sense was little more than a reflection of social processes, with little autonomous effect in itself.2 Over the past decade or so, arising mainly from the rigorous work of a hybrid-ized subdiscipline of geographical economics, there has emerged a stunning realization that cities, urban geographies in particular, emanate a generative force that is the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity. In a revolutionary reversal, what I am crudely calling urban spatial causality has moved from being virtually ignored as an explanatory factor in individual and societal development to become, for some, the most important driving force shaping human history. Recent textbooks have begun to call this generative force Jacobs Externalities, honoring the work of the urbanist Jane Jacobs, whose The Economy of Cities (1969) is widely recognized by Nobel-laureate economists and others as promoting the original notion of the stimulus of urban agglomeration,3 or what I called “synekism” in Postmetropolis.4 Other terms used to describe this generative power of cities include urbanization economies (referring back to Alfred Marshall’s early theories of agglomeration economies and the formation of indus-trial districts) and buzz, Storper and Venables’s (2004) term for the stimulating role of face-to-face contact.5 Soon, I suspect, these notions of urban spatial causality will evolve into a new and more comprehensive concept of spatial capital, matching the recent development of the related notion of social capital.

2. The Transdisciplinary Spatial Turn in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Helping to create a wider audience for the new ideas about urban geography has been the remarkable and unprecedented diffusion of spatial thinking—especially about urban spatial causality—across nearly all the social sciences and humanities as well as into radi-cal socialist and Marxist thought. This so-called spatial turn was initially sparked in Paris, mainly by the transformative spatial perspectives of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, but was subsequently dimmed after the events of 1968 (a general strike plus student occu-pation protests) and dismissed as incomprehensible or, worse, as fetishist heresy mainly by Marxist spatial thinkers, whose new urban political economy left little room for spatial causality. These new directions in spatial thinking were revived in the English-speaking world in the early 1990s following the publication of the English translation of Lefebvre’s

2The great exception, of course, was the Chicago School of Urban Ecology with its emphasis on human behavior shaped by the urban environment. Here, however, the causal force was external to social behavior and general-ized as environmental or ecological. The more recent concept of urban spatial causality arises not from “natural” forces but from socially constructed (and therefore changeable) urban geographies.3The Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas Jr. (1988) praises Jacobs and uses her insights to reconstruct the field of development economics, while Richard Florida, the leading promotional entrepreneur of urban spa-tial causality via his work on the “creative class” (2002) also acknowledges Jacobs’s inspiration and claims that her breakthrough ideas on the generative power of cities were deserving of a Nobel Prize. Jacobs Externalities were first identified and discussed as such in Glaeser et al. (1992) and the term has more recently entered a few geographical economics textbooks, such as Brakman et al. (2009), although it is difficult to find many references to them in mainstream economics or economic geography textbooks.4Synekism (with a hard k) derives from synoikismos (pronounced sin-ee-kiz-mos), Greek for efficiently dwelling together (oikos = home, the root for economics, ecology, and ekistics—the study of human settlements). Synoiki-smos was used by Aristotle, Thucydides, and others to refer to the formation of the city-state or polis, a unifica-tion of diverse communities. In modern Greek, it can also mean “wedding.” For a more elaborate discussion of synekism and the stimulus of urban agglomeration, see Postmetropolis (Soja, 2000a) and Soja (2000b, 2003c).5The original subtitle of their article on buzz was the “economic force of cities,” a phrase they were reportedly asked to drop by a journal editor feeling that readers would not understand such a presumptuous and unfamiliar notion as cities generating developmental forces.

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The Production of Space in 1991, the year of his death, and then later would spread rapidly across several disciplines as a primary pathway for adopting and applying a critical and contemporary spatial perspective. Although it is still unclear why this revival took place when it did, it can be said today that never before, at least during the past 200 years, has a critical spatial sensibility been so widespread and so influential in contemporary popular and academic debates.6

3. The Resurgence of Interest in Regions and Regionalism

The widening relevance of spatial thinking not only carried with it renewed attention to urban issues, it both stimulated and was stimulated by a resurgence of interest in regions and regionalism. In one of the most ambitious expressions of this “new regionalism,” Michael Storper in The Regional World (1997) conceives of regions as comparable to markets, states, and kinship as fundamental organizational structures of human society; at the same time, the network of generative agglomerations that form the city region, itself a new con-cept, is claimed to be the primary driving force behind globalization and the new economy. After years of being captured by a viciously competitive entrepreneurialism, guided more by rampant city marketing than reducing poverty and inequality, regional welfare planning is currently being revived at the core of a redefined and multi-scalar spatial planning pro-cess, perhaps best exemplified by the European Union’s Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), now official policy in all EU countries.7 These new regional approaches are not an alternative to a focus on cities, but build into our understanding of the urbanization process and the changing modern metropolis a powerful and more explicit regional dimension, to the point that we can now speak of a regional urbanization process that is radically reshap-ing existing metropolitan structure.8

Despite the extraordinary opportunities they provide for intellectual leadership in the spatializing social sciences and humanities, geographers for the most part have not imme-diately embraced these extraordinary developments. The new emphasis on urban spatial causality, for example, often breeds among geographers a nervous remembrance of the intellectual wounds associated with earlier dabblings in the form of geographical-cum-environmental determinism and a wariness if not taboo against seemingly exaggerated forms of geographical explanation. Explanation in geography is fine, explanation by geog-raphy is something else. As for the spatial turn, instead of encouraging and extending its development, many geographers react by cynically asking: what turn? Haven’t we always been spatial? In any case, they say, the newcomers do not do geography as well as we do,

6Much of this history was discussed in Postmetropolis, but the depth and breadth of the spatial turn was not yet discernible. Since 2000, the growing transdisciplinary interest in space has reshaped my writing and lecturing. I have been invited to lecture more often outside geography, architecture, and planning than within these tradition-ally spatial disciplines, as ever more surprising audiences emerged, eager to learn more about space and spatial thinking. These increasingly diverse fields include urban anthropology, art history and practice, literary criti-cism and comparative literature, education and literacy studies, theoretical archeology, critical legal studies, film theory, postcolonial studies, eschatology and bible studies, political theology, poetry, accounting, organizational studies, and communications-media studies. For more on this, see Soja (2008; also 2010b) for theology and Blake (2002) for archeology.7The ESDP is discussed in Faludi and Waterhout (2002) and reflected upon further in Faludi (2009). See also Soja (2009c). It would have been almost inconceivable 15 years ago for anyone to actually utter the phrase “spatial development perspective,” much less see it adopted as formal EU policy.8I will return to this concept of regional urbanization later in this essay.

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dwelling on either old-fashioned and outdated geographical ideas or else on superficial if erudite metaphors, such as “mapping” this and that, missing the “real” geographies underneath.9 For these geographers the new regionalism is also seen as not so new, and its connections to regional welfare planning, some more radical geographers claim, are little more than the manipulations of neoliberal corporate and state powers. Even the revival of regional science, which has accompanied the renewed interest in regions, is seen by some geographers as just another aggrandizing attempt to absorb geography into its nominal and pseudo-scientific fold.10

One of my objectives here, as I explore again some of the ideas and themes I introduced more than 10 years ago in Postmetropolis , is to encourage more geographers to set aside their old taboos and reservations and enthusiastically engage in these exciting new devel-opments, not just as followers but as intellectual leaders.

A BRIEF LOOK BACK TO POSTMETROPOLIS 2000

Postmetropolis was roughly divided into three parts, intentionally reflecting Lefebvre’s triad of perceived spatial practices (things in space), conceived representations of space (thoughts about space), and the never completely knowable and often-undercover world of lived spaces, the spatial equivalent of lived times, as in individual biographies or social histories. With its emphasis on learning from material geographies, Part I revolved around a retrospective look back on debates on the origin of cities based on the arguments of Jane Jacobs (1969) and my own concept of synekism, the stimulating effects arising from urban agglomeration. This led to a radically revised geohistory of urbanization marked by three urban-generated revolutions, the first associated with the development of agriculture, the second with the rise of centralized states, and the third with the emergence of (urban) industrial capitalism. The basic idea was to see what new empirical discoveries might emerge from foregrounding a critical spatial perspective or, to rephrase Jacobs, putting urban spatial causality first. Inspiring all of Part I was Jacobs’s assertion that without cities we would all be poor, we would have remained nomadic hunters and gatherers as we had been during almost the entire history of homo sapiens.

Part II jumped to the present to examine the urban restructuring processes that have been reshaping the modern metropolis over the past 40 years. I elaborated upon my earlier discussion of what I called Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis, six different ways of looking at the profound urban transformations that have been taking place since the 1960s. The emphasis here was on thoughts about space (representations and interpretations) rather than material things in space (spatial practices). The term postmetropolis was used as a purposely vague portmanteau concept referring to the many different aspects of urban

9A rather futile debate that has diverted attention from advancing our understanding of urbanization economies and Jacobs Externalities has involved geographers criticizing geographical economists, especially Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman, for using outdated geographical ideas and engaging in a form of academic imperialism. For an introduction to these debates and Krugman’s most recent response, see Martin (1999), Mäki and Marchionni (2011), and Krugman (2010). Exemplifying how economic geographers look critically at the concept of clusters, virtually ignoring the closely related debates on the stimulus of urban agglomeration pioneered by geographical economists, see Asheim et al. (2006).10This suspicion by geographers of the new regional science relates to the worries concerning academic imperial-ism discussed in Mäki and Marchionni (2011), referred to in footnote 9.


change that have been identified and the specific and spatially rich literatures (discourses) that have emerged in the effort to make practical and theoretical sense of these changes.

The first two of these representational discourses were explanatory and causal, linking together ideas about the formation of a new flexible, information-rich, postfordist econ-omy; the globalization of capital, labor, and culture; and the complementary revolution in information and communications technology. The second pair of discourses looked at the social and spatial effects of these new urbanization processes, emphasizing increasing cultural diversity, rising economic inequalities and social polarization, and changing urban forms and functions. The final pair of discourses was concerned with the hard and soft adaptations to the new and increasingly volatile urban condition, one involving security-obsessed urbanism and the fortressing of urban life, the other focusing on the use of simu-lated hyper-realities to divert attention away from contemporary urban problems.

In 2000, I was not sure how best to describe what was emerging from these discourses on the “postmetropolitan transition.” That was why I identified six interwoven discursive rep-resentations of the contemporary city and argued that all six need to be understood together, with no one considered “most” important. Today, I am much more confident in describing the transition more specifically as a profound shift from a distinctive metropolitan mode of urbanization to what is best defined as regional urbanization. Like so much I discuss here, the identification of this profound sea change in the nature of the urbanization process arises from and is sustained by the three 21st -century developments mentioned above.

Part III of Postmetropolis posed to me a virtually impossible challenge: how to illus-trate the full meaning of “lived space,” or what I called “thirdspace” (Soja, 1996), drawing on Foucault as well as Lefebvre. Just as anyone’s biographical “lived time” would never be completely knowable, so too with (equally biographical) lived space. To say anything about lived space, one has to pick and choose from an infinite variety of features, events, and possibilities in the hope of producing new increments of knowledge. I chose to use the events of Spring 1992 in Los Angeles, today known as the Justice Riots, to open a contemplative window on everything that was discussed in earlier chapters. The discussion was scripted around carefully chosen and sequenced excerpts from many different sources, including a prose poem of my own.

The last chapter became a critical reflection on the postmetropolis in crisis, or as I described it, the shift from decades of crisis-generated restructuring to a new era of restruc-turing-generated crises, that is, uprisings, riots, and civil unrest that respond directly to the new postmetropolitan conditions or what some called postmodern urbanism. Looking back at the dark picture I was painting of the postmetropolis, and trying to avoid simplistic explanations blaming neoliberal capitalism for all the world’s problems, I tried to find some room for hope, some signs that the oppressions, injustices, and inequalities that had multiplied since the 1960s could be ameliorated if not erased. I did not realize at the time that this would become the trigger for 10 more years of research and writing, leading to the publication in 2010 of Seeking Spatial Justice (Soja, 2010c).

But enough looking back. What follows are some updates and revisions.

PART I: BEFORE—AND AFTER—ÇATALHÖYÜK

Building on recent archeological discoveries as well as a new appreciation for the generative effects of urbanization, it can be more confidently argued that what I called

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synekism—the stimulating effects of urban agglomeration—has been a primary factor in the development of all human societies for nearly 12,000 years, now increasingly recog-nized as the time the first urban settlements—the first intentionally created urban geogra-phies—began to form. Since the age of hunting and gathering bands, every human society has been influenced by the existence of permanent urban settlements, making the absence of significant urban spatial causality in Western social theory, philosophy, and science even more astonishing. Probing into the debates on the origins of cities is not just a con-test to find which city came first, but opens up an opportunity to add a significant spatial dimension to these debates and to better understand, for contemporary as well as historical purposes, the generative effects of urban agglomeration on economic development, tech-nological innovation, and cultural creativity.

Rigid canonical beliefs about the later Sumerian origins of cities persist, and they are associated with continuing assumptions that view urbanization more as effect than cause, linking the rise of cities to such explanatory factors as climate change, the emergence of written language (and hence written history rather than “prehistory”), the expansion of irrigated agriculture, the necessary accumulation of a food surplus, and the rise of (Eurocentrically defined) civilization. What is becoming increasingly apparent, however, is that urbanization and agricultural development (not simply plant domestication) evolved together in a mutually stimulating relationship at least 6000 years earlier than the Sumerian city-building period; that the earliest urban settlements were formed by relatively egalitar-ian hunters and gatherers with enormous skill in stone building and visual arts; that a leap in scale was made from short-term settlements at resource sites of at most 300 people to networks of trade-related urban centers of up to 10,000 inhabitants;11 and that the village evolution model, in which farming villages grew in size until they became cities, is pure mythology with little or no evidence. Rather than farming leading to urbanization, the reverse—or at least their co-evolution—is becoming much more likely.12

Were these early urban settlements cities? If one is locked into a rigid belief that cities and civilizations arose only with writing, large-scale irrigation, and more elaborate divi-sions of labor, then such large ancient sites as Jericho and Catalhöyük become anoma-lies, inexplicable but not quite successful experiments in creating cities. However, if one defines cities as sizeable and relatively permanent agglomerations that can generate new ideas in technology, economic activity, and the arts, then at least the largest of these early settlements deserve to be called cities. Even setting aside how cities are defined, always a controversial and confusing question, there is now little doubt that extraordinary inventive-ness and innovation—in agricultural production and animal husbandry, in the development of religious beliefs and distinctive human cultures, in metal working, personal adornment,

11It is tempting to call this scalar leap the first “big bang” in human societal development, a move away from accommodation to a raw natural condition to the “cooked” of transformed nature—the socially constructed space of permanent human settlements.12The more contemporary literature on hunters and gatherers can be projected back to this moment of urban origins. It is now widely accepted that hunter-gatherers often found sustenance fairly easily, especially in areas like the neolithic Anatolian highlands, where wild plants and animals were especially abundant. Almost surely, farming and animal husbandry were known to the earliest hunter-gatherer urban dwellers, but full-scale agri-cultural development became necessary only over time, when the reproduction of permanent urban settlements made finding new sources of food and other basic needs more urgent. Thinking spatially, it also does not make much sense for farmers (or for that matter, hunters and gatherers) to cluster together at one location. The primary advantage of agglomeration is related to trade, especially in such heavy goods as stones.


pottery-making, rug-weaving, plastic and representational arts—arose from the stimulus of urban agglomeration, and these generative effects have continued to operate up to the present as a primary source of societal development and change. This spatial explana-tion does not deny the importance of environmental factors such as climate change, but it does put urbanization first, insisting that the effects of environmental factors and “natural” events be seen in the social context of the production of urban space.

A new geography of the early urbanization process has been emerging from recent archeological evidence. The first settlements began well to the east of Catalhöyük, the focus of discussion in Postmetropolis, in an area of south-central Anatolia, where it appears that urban settlement and full-scale agricultural development went hand in hand, initiating a co-evolution of economic development and urbanization that would continue for 12,000 years. The starting point has now become clear, so much so that there are already claims that the Garden of Eden has finally been discovered, and that this widely held myth of ori-gins relates symbolically to the revolutionary shift from hunting to urban-based farming. Now considered to be the oldest known permanent human construction is Göbekli Tepe, a resplendent collection of at least 35 limestone columns standing high above more than a dozen stone circles.13 It is hard to imagine, but this site of extraordinarily advanced and large-scale stoneworking was built by increasingly sedentary hunters and gatherers, and predated the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by more than 8000 years, and the first city-states of Sumeria by at least 6000 years.

The remarkable and still controversial finds at Göbekli Tepe suggest that ceremonial places of worship, monumentally realized, preceded or occurred simultaneously with per-manent human settlement. What it also confirms is that the social transformation of natural environments associated with the creation of urban agglomerations was initiated by hunt-ers and gatherers, and led to rather than followed an agricultural revolution. It is interesting to note that not far from Göbekli Tepe were discovered the original “founder crops” for the earliest known cultivated species of several grains and legumes, including einkorn wheat, the predecessor of modern wheat. As I noted in Postmetropolis, this area of south-central Anatolia was also a leading site for the domestication of sheep, pigs, goats, and cattle as well as plant crops such as grapes, olives, barley, and emmer as well as bread wheat, peas, broad beans, lentils, and flax (Soja, 2000a, p. 22).

Despite the accumulating evidence for the co-evolution of urbanization and agriculture, there remains strong resistance to several key ideas: (1) that full-scale agricultural develop-ment and the production of a social surplus of food needed the stimulus of urban agglomer-ation rather than the other way around; (2) that egalitarian hunter-gatherers and traders, not farmers, produced the earliest cities not in a progressive growth of villages but via a scalar jump from small semi-permanent settlements; and (3) that settlements such as Jericho and Catalhöyük deserve to be called cities, not merely overgrown (agricultural) villages.

However, recent discoveries regarding the generative effects of cities combined with the unprecedented spatial turn and some aspects of the new regionalism are finally beginning

13Klaus Schmidt, the German archeologist who has taken the lead in the excavations and interpretations of Göbekli Tepe, does not identify any permanent settlement at the site, but close by is evidence of relatively dense human occupation and only 15 kilometers away is ancient Urfa, now Slanliurfa, settled it now seems 11,000 years ago and still existing today as a city of around half a million inhabitants. If there were no significant breaks in its existence, this is would make Urfa the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. For an overview of Göbekli Tepe and the speculative debates it has triggered, see Curry (2008).

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to weaken this canonical resistance. In a manner somewhat comparable to what happened in earth science when theories of plate tectonics revolutionized earlier thinking about con-tinental drift, growing research on the economic, political, and cultural forces emanating from urban geographies is likely to lead to radical changes in both contemporary develop-ment economics and critical human geography as well as in archeology, paleoanthropol-ogy, and the geohistory of human societies.

What happened in Sumeria 6000 years ago (and nearly 6000 years after Göbekli Tepe) was not the start of the first and only Urban Revolution, as the textbooks still report, but the urban-generated development of the centralized state and its accompaniment: hierarchi-cally organized society (Soja, 2009a). State formation—the emergence of the city-state or polis—was associated with another dramatic leap in urban scale, from the probable maxi-mum of 15,000 for neolithic cities to new centrally focused, walled, and expansive cities that, in their imperial form, could reach into the hundreds of thousands, as they would do in Rome, northern China, and central Mexico.14

Also becoming clear is that the city-based states (or state-based cities) of Mesopotamia were the product of a long evolution from the earlier urbanization zone that stretched west to east across Anatolia to the Indus Valley and south through the Levant toward the Nile Valley. Although there is no literature on this as yet, it will soon be possible to trace in the long transition between the first and second urban revolutions, as I have defined them, not just the emergence of the centralized state but also of class differences, patriarchy, the use of written language, defensive fortifications including city walls, the reorganization of urban geographies, and the earliest expressions of democratic principles. The start-ing points for this evolutionary process include Jericho in the Levant and Cayönü (and possibly Urfa) in southeastern Anatolia, each at least 11,000 years old, and founded by relatively egalitarian hunters and gatherers; but the largest and almost surely most genera-tive of all the known neolithic urban sites continues to be the synekistic agglomeration of Catalhöyük (Soja, 2000b, 2009a; Blake, 2002).15

There is much more to say about updating the discussions of the urban origins of the state, the later development of the industrial revolution, and the rise of what should always

14In many parts of the world, from old Mayan Central America to coastal Peru and Ecuador to China and South-east Asia, and even in North America and Eastern Europe, archeologists have been finding much earlier evidence of urbanization than has been traditionally thought possible. The idea that agriculture came first and was essen-tial to the formation of the first cities remains so strong, however, that discovering urbanization and agriculture co-evolving is still shocking to many archeologists and prehistorians.15I must add one final comment on Catalhöyük, which I visited for the first time in 2004. I had become aware of two arguments that contradicted what I discussed in Postmetropolis, both involving the extraordinary wall paint-ing that I claimed was the first conscious depiction of cityspace or urban geography, the created second nature that arises from permanent urban settlement. Some observers were saying that the mural could not have depicted the great volcano of Hassan Dag, which was too far away to be seen. Perhaps it was painted from memory, they said, by migrants from other settlements closer to the volcanic source of invaluable obsidian. Others, at times including the lead archeologist Ian Hodder, were claiming that the mural was not a picture of the settlement but rather an abstract design, perhaps of a leopard. After feeling some doubt, I became even more convinced that my earlier arguments were correct as I climbed to the highest point at the site of the Catalhöyük excavations and looked toward the south. The mound stretched to its maximum length to the right and left of where I was stand-ing, while directly in front of me would have been the roofs of dozens of households dipping down into the plains below. In the distance but seemingly close by was another volcano with two peaks looking very much like the wall painting. It was Kara Dag, not Hassan Dag, and I would discover later that it too was a source of obsidian or volcanic glass. What I saw in front of me was a scene that looked almost exactly like what had been painted in the mural. I never felt more convinced about what I had written in Postmetropolis.


be described as urban industrial capitalism. The key point, however, is the reinvigoration of these arguments arising from the three innovative and generative developments men-tioned earlier. After two centuries of relative neglect, spatial interpretations of human and societal development are being given at least equal attention vis-à-vis social-historical interpretations, and this is leading to radically innovative new discoveries about the impor-tance of urban geographies.

PART II: REGIONAL URBANIZATION AND THE END OF THE METROPOLIS ERA

Just as the debates on the geo-history of cityspace are leading to radical revisions in our notions of the earliest forms of urbanization, so too has our understanding of the urban restructuring processes of the past 30–40 years been leading to extraordinary new develop-ments in our thinking about contemporary cities and the urbanization process. At the fore-front of these developments in my view has been the identification of a polycentric regional urbanization process, accompanied by the relative decline of what can be described as a distinctly metropolitan model of urban growth and change.16 The mainstream urban litera-ture has not yet recognized this regional model explicitly, but there are signs that the shift from metropolitan to regional urbanization and the use of such associated terms as city regions and regional cities will significantly become an increasingly important focus in urban geographical analysis over the next decade.17

A new regionalism was recognized in Postmetropolis as a core feature of what I called the postmetropolitan transition, but the significance and direction of this regionalization of the urban was left open and unspecified. Today, I am convinced that what has been happen-ing to cities over the past 30 years can be best described as a paradigmatic shift in the very nature of the urbanization process. Although still in its early stages, the regional urbaniza-tion process has advanced far enough in some metropolitan areas for its defining features to be recognized and analyzed, and for urban scholars to begin to realize that the era of the modern metropolis may be ending, creating a growing need for new frameworks for understanding and studying cities and urban geographies. Before looking at the regional urbanization process in more detail, it is useful to start with the emergence of the metro-politan model from the early, more centralized, industrial capitalist city.

From Centralized to Metropolitan Urbanization

The metropolitan form of urbanization has been dominant for so long that many assume it to be the only mode of modern urban growth and change. This has locked into our urban imaginations the distinctive urban-suburban dualism that began to take shape only in the late 19th century. I am referring here to the conventional division of the metropolis into two worlds: a dense urban core, filled with heterogeneous cultures, thick layers of social

16My writings on this topic since 2000 include Soja (2005, 2009b, 2009c, 2010a, 2011a, and 2011b).17The United Nations now collects data on city sizes based on city regions and not on metropolitan areas or definitions using such terms as “Greater.” The U.S. Census Bureau has also been placing increased emphasis on “urbanized area” measurements as earlier categorizations of metropolitan statistical areas become complicated by the growth of regional networks of cities. If all the old rules were followed, many city regions as census-defined statistical areas would need to have seven or eight cities officially named. Also interesting and indicative, data on smaller cities in the U.S. are collected based on “clusters.”

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interaction, concentrations of entertainment and shopping opportunities, as well as crime, drugs, intrigue, and poverty; and an encircling and expansive suburbia, where a very dif-ferent way of life is found, much more homogenous in class and race, filled with detached houses, gardens, and families with children, with everyone dependent on vast numbers of automobiles and appliances for nearly every aspect of everyday living.

The urban studies literature directly reflects this dichotomous division of urban worlds. So great has been the tenacious influence of this urban-suburban dualism on how we think about the city that even when its essential features have begun to disappear, as they have over the past 30 years, the changes typically remain unnoticed or else are re-absorbed into the same old dualist categories. Interestingly enough, something very similar occurred a century ago, at a time when the metropolitan mode was itself emerging from the much more centralized 19th century industrial capitalist city.

Even as metropolitan development was advancing all around them, the scholars of the Chicago School developed innovative models that applied not to then contemporary Chicago but to the still surviving 19th century industrial capitalist urban form: compact, densely centralized, with centripetal and centrifugal forces emanating almost entirely from the residential and industrial agglomeration in the teeming downtown center. This was literally and figuratively “the city,” and it was this city that dominated urban studies and especially urban spatial theory and urban geography well into the era of the modern metropolis.18 Like the metropolitan model today, the Chicago School models were highly idealized and made to appear as if they were the only way cities grew.

I am arguing here, first, that metropolitan urbanization needs to be recognized as a distinct phase in the development of the industrial capitalist city; second, that it grew out of but never entirely erased an earlier phase of more highly centralized industrial urban-ism; and, third, that this metropolitan mode of urban growth is now being superseded and reconstituted in an emergent new phase of multi-scalar regional urbanization.

Regional Urbanization on the Rise

Leading this regional urbanization process has been a growing convergence between urban and suburban densities. The steep metropolitan density gradients extending out-ward from the old downtowns are flattening out as higher densities reach into the once sprawling low-density suburbs. This tilting upward of density gradients has usually meant a relative decline in density (and population numbers as well) in the inner cities while for-mer suburbia experiences a marked densification, more often through infill development rather than outward sprawl. As it densifies, once relatively homogenous suburbia is being increasingly differentiated, becoming more like the old urban core. In an almost oxymo-ronic turnaround, suburbia is being increasingly urbanized as the monocentric modern metropolis morphs into a polycentric regional city encompassing a broadly cast network of agglomerations of various sizes—a new urban geography.

18To be sure, urban geographers early on tried to develop variations on the classical Chicago School models, recognizing, for example, the multiple nuclei that were emerging, especially with mass suburbanization. The classical model with its concentric zones and radial sectors nevertheless persisted with little modification in most urban studies disciplines.


A different vocabulary has emerged to describe this postmetropolitan transition, as I called it in 2000. The emergent outposts of postsuburbia have been described as edge cities, outer cities, and metroburbs; at the same time, beyond the old hinterland boundary one now finds a confusing array of exurbs, rurban areas, and periurban settlements. As the density gradient tilts further upward, peripheral urbanization is bringing with it increas-ing economic and cultural heterogeneity, growing immigrant populations, and practically everything traditionally associated with central cities, erasing what was once a fairly easy to identify boundary between the urban and suburban worlds.19 In Postmetropolis, I used the term “exopolis” to describe this changing urban morphology, playfully noting its dou-ble meaning as both “outside” (peripheral urbanization) and “ex” as in “no longer,” the ex-city, a new urban form quite different from the old. Exopolis is now subsumed within the idea of regional urbanization.

Whereas outer cities are densifying nearly everywhere, inner cities are experiencing many different trends, although nearly all of the world’s major city regions have experi-enced some form of “hollowing out” or decreasing density in the early phases of restruc-turing and deindustrialization. Two contrasting extreme cases of outmigration from the central city are Detroit and Osaka, each having lost more than a half-million residents from the urban core. While Detroit has become a symbol of urban decay, Osaka’s urban core thrives despite having a limited residential population. In many other globalized city regions, after some emptying out of domestic inhabitants, the center has refilled with large numbers of immigrants, with Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, and Amsterdam among the most prominent examples.20

The highly variegated experiences of inner cities have been accompanied by increas-ing and often somewhat obsessive concern about declining downtowns and the seemingly endemic desire for renaissance and redevelopment. Polycentric regional urbanization has made inner urban cores much more unstable and unpredictable, leading to aggressive city marketing and city branding efforts, shifting public investment, policy, and planning from an emphasis on basic social needs to a hyper-competitive entrepreneurialism, des-perately using public resources to attract new private investment and tourist traffic. In one of the more ironic tragedies of regional urbanization, enormous public resources are being diverted from dealing with poverty, homelessness, and inequality just at a time when these have become greater problems than ever before. A dismal “planet of slums” (Davis, 2007) and a planning obsession with developing “creative cities” (Scott, 2006) and “Bil-bao effects” are among the many byproducts of regional urbanization.

19Rigorous comparative research is greatly needed today on the many different forms once-homogeneous subur-bia is taking, from defensive redoubts protecting their traditional suburban values and built environments through homeowners associations to areas where housing is entirely enclosed in gated and guarded “communities” to stranded “off-the-edge” boomtowns where workers must travel more than two hours each way to their work-places to what are in oxymoronic essence suburban cities. A few such postsuburban city clusters as Orange County (adjacent to Los Angeles) and Silicon Valley (with San Jose now the largest city in the broadly defined Bay Area) now reach several million in population size.20With pronounced population increases in both its inner and outer cities, Los Angeles has become a prototype of the regional urbanization process. In 1990, Los Angeles passed New York as the most densely settled urbanized area in the U.S., a remarkable shift given that L.A. was probably the least dense major American metropolis in 1960. Since 1960, the population of the L.A. city region has grown by nearly 8 million. For more information on urban densities, see Demographia, 1990 U.S. Urbanized Area Density Profile, http://www.demographia.com/db-porta.htm.

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There may be some residual concentricities and radiating sectors in the reconstituted city regions of the world and there certainly remain great swathes of traditional suburbia. The modern metropolis, however, has become increasingly “unbound,” with many of its former spatial structures as well as social and cultural boundaries seeing their defining force diminished. Old racial and class geographies are becoming more mixed and hetero-geneous while new enclaves of immigrant cultures emerge in a reconfigured urban geog-raphy that many feel is far more chaotic and threatening than ever before.21 An endemic sense of fear, bred in large part by the unsettled and unfamiliar new urban geography, has led to what Mike Davis (1990) dubbed security-obsessed urbanism, filled with fortresses, walls, electrified fences, gated and armed guarded communities, surveillance cameras, and a sense of imminent danger.

Aggravating these fearful conditions has been a continuation if not a heightening of social, economic, political, and cultural polarization. The concentration of wealth in the richest one percent of the population and the concurrent increase in populations living at or below the poverty line has reached unparalleled levels and has almost surely increased since 2000 in the U.S. and many other countries. So, too, have the antagonisms between immigrant and domestic populations increased in almost every one of the nearly 500 one-million-plus city regions that concentrate the world’s population, wealth, and innovative capacity. Leading the pack, the U.S. today exhibits the greatest gap between rich and poor in its history, and these and other polarizing forces have become even worse since the economic crash of 2008.

It has become increasingly clear since 2000 that the major city regions of the world are not only the primary motors driving the global economy but are also highly volatile and generate fundamental problems of inequality and injustice. However the new urbanization processes are defined, it can be argued that after 30 or so years of crisis-generated restruc-turing, we have entered an era of restructuring-generated crises, forms of social unrest and rebellion as well as deepening global recession and financial meltdowns that are stimu-lated most directly by what I have been describing as the regional urbanization process.

The Multiple Scales of Regional Urbanization

Extending the effects of regional urbanization has been an expansion in scale well beyond the old hinterland limits of the modern metropolis. Metropolitan urbanization occupied a singular scale, in between the urban or municipal and the subnational-regional. Not only is regional urbanization definable at multiple scales, from the local to the global, a persuasive argument can also be made that a peculiar scalar convergence has been occur-ring in the growth of city regions or regional cities. The urban, the metropolitan, and the subnational-regional scales seem to be blending together in many parts of the world, resulting in the emergence of huge regional networks of agglomerations that are variously called megacity regions, megaregions, megalopolitan regions, regional galaxies, or even regional states. In some cases, such as in Catalonia (around Barcelona), the newly defined

21All this confounds aggregate statistical measurement of segregation. Just as small rises in average income over time can mask pronounced income polarization, with massive increases in poor and to a lesser degree super-rich populations, so too are indices of changing levels of segregation often deceptive, as racial segregation increases and decreases simultaneously for very different reasons.


Gauteng region around Johannesburg, and in “Greater” Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles, the redefined megaregions range from 6 to 20 million inhabitants; but in the Pearl River and Yangzi deltas in China, Tokyo-Yokohama and Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto in Japan, and in what Richard Florida (2009) named the Euro-Lowlands (from the Dutch Randstad to the newly formed Grande Region around Luxembourg), the megaregional population now surpasses 50 million.22

Among the many effects of this extended form of regional urbanization and its associ-ated scalar restructuring has been an aggravated crisis of urban and regional governance (Brenner, 2005) The old administrative and political geography of national governments around the world have been among the slowest geographies to change over the past four decades, especially when compared to economic and cultural reorganizations of space. This governance crisis is also evident at the national and global scales, where there has been an explosion of what is called supranational regionalism, as nation-states form larger coalitions to deal with the impact of globalization, the new economy, and the IT revolu-tion. The basic model here has been the European Union; other examples include the many other international trading blocs such as NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and ASEAN.23

The regional urbanization process therefore extends across many different scales, from the local to the global. Indeed, the globalization process itself has been a carrier of regional urbanization, extending the influence of urban industrial capitalism nearly everywhere, from the 500 or so million-plus megacity regions, soon to contain the majority of the world’s population, to the NICs and NIRs, newly industrialized countries such as the Asian Tigers as well as newly industrialized regions that include California’s Silicon Valley and Orange County, and even further outward into the Amazon rainforest, Siberian tundra, Saharan wasteland, and Antarctic ice sheet. Not only has there been a globalization of the urban, bringing populations from everywhere in the world into globalized city-regions, there has also been an accelerating urbanization of the world (Soja and Kanai, 2008)

PART III – SEEKING SPATIAL JUSTICE

In the third and final section of Postmetropolis, I experimented with new ways of think-ing and writing about space and geography, and looked for new areas to spatialize. Inspir-ing me on was a realization that I had painted an exceedingly dark and depressing picture of the restructured modern metropolis, with its unprecedented inequalities, social polariza-tion, obsession with security and surveillance, abandonment of social welfare objectives, withering civil liberties, ecology of fear, and the rising incidence of homelessness and poverty. If I were teaching geography or sociology students I could pile on the endless condemnations of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and the neoliberal ascendancy. But I have been teaching in an urban planning department for several decades and needed to find some way to reach a classroom filled with serious activists committed to changing the world for the better. Some room had to be opened up for effective social action.

22Defining the outer boundary of the megaregion is likely to be difficult and controversial for years to come. One of the problems is that the hinterland of the megaregion is to a significant degree global.23If one enters the term “new regionalism” into a search engine, the majority of the many thousands of hits refer to these supranational regions. It is interesting to note that a similar process of coalition-building is beginning to happen at the local level, as labor and community-based organizations develop flexible alliances and specifically regional strategies in what some have called community-based regionalism (Soja, 2010b).

464 EDWARD W. SOJA

Were there any glimmers of hope in the story of urban restructuring, I asked myself, anything that could provide such an opening for progressive social activism? Putting together what I have been writing about for many decades, I came up with the idea that thinking spatially, seeing the world through specifically spatial lenses, might in itself pro-vide useful strategies for mobilizing new and more powerful social movements to deal with the accumulating inequalities, injustices, and oppressions of the contemporary world. Backed by the three new developments in spatial thinking and borrowing from the work of the postcolonial critic Edward Said, I brought attention to the endemic “struggles over geography” that have been created by urban restructuring and regional urbanization, and to what I described as the search for spatial justice, rethinking social justice and related con-cepts of democracy, citizenship, and egalitarianism from an assertively (i.e., causal) spatial perspective. But where could I find good examples of these struggles over geography and strategic search for spatial justice?

It is perhaps not surprising that I turned to Los Angeles for illustration and further inspi-ration. This was despite the fact that for the past 10 years Los Angeles–based research had become a target of criticism for its seemingly exaggerated claims. Many scholars inside and outside Los Angeles had reacted harshly to the assertions of the geographer-planner Michael Dear (Dear and Dallas Dishman, 2001; Dear, 2008) that there was a distinctive Los Angeles School that had replaced the old Chicago School of Urban Ecology at the representative core of contemporary urban studies.24 Most of the other geographers and planners associated with the expansive research cluster that had emerged in Los Angeles focused on assertively spatial analysis, especially from a regional perspective, had little interest in promoting this idea of a new school and some of the concepts Dear attached to it, although there was some general agreement that Los Angeles had generated a large body of innovative geographical research that compared favorably with that of any other urban-based research cluster in the past 40 years. I might also add that this local research played an important role in the rediscovery of urban spatial causality, the transdisciplinary spatial turn, and the new regionalism.

Because of the confusion and controversy surrounding this debate on the so-called L.A. School and the widespread negative reaction to Los Angeles entrepreneurialism, I hesitated to focus too much attention on Los Angeles. But again, L.A. provided unusually clear examples of what I was looking for. Backed by the rich academic literature that had accumulated and the new thinking about urban spatial causality fostered by the resur-gence and spread of interest in space and regional approaches, I began to explore the idea that Los Angeles was not just a productive laboratory for developing spatial theory and theory-informed empirical research, but was also a platform for a further extension of the spatial turn into what can be called spatial praxis, actual political actions and social move-ments built at least in part around an innovative spatial consciousness. By the year 2000, there were frequent claims that Los Angeles had become an innovative center for both the American labor movement and community-based organizations. New coalitions had been emerging, such as the Bus Riders Union and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and they were achieving some remarkable and groundbreaking successes.

24See Dear et al. (2008), and the entire Special Issue of Urban Geography, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2008: “Chicago and Los Angeles: Paradigms, Schools, Archetypes, and the Urban Process.”


I decided to write an easy-to-read book tracing the development of labor-community coalitions in L.A. from the United Farm Workers to the present, looking in particular at the relations of these coalitions with university faculty and students, and what role think-ing about space and specifically spatial strategies had played in these developments. To be sure, there were introductory chapters dealing with the spatial turn and such concepts as the socio-spatial dialectic, but I tried to write them so that the theory would be accessible to activist readers and students, my primary audience.

The new spatial consciousness that I argued was guiding the search for spatial justice can be presented in a series of basic geographical propositions: (1) human geographies are socially produced (reflecting Lefebvre’s notion of the social production of social space); (2) instilled with social power, these created geographies can be both oppressive and enabling (following Foucault’s conceptualization of the relations between space, knowledge, and power); (3) oppressive or unjust geographies can be changed, made less oppressive and more just, through concerted sociospatial action; and (4) the new spatial consciousness and collective struggles over geography can provide a unifying effect for coalition-building among diverse organizations and social movements, enhancing the strategic importance of seeking spatial justice.

Los Angeles, through the successes of such groups as the Bus Riders Union and its parent organization the Labor/Community Strategy Center, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), and the recently formed Right to the City Alliance, has become one of the most important centers for the American labor movement and an especially active cluster of community-based organi-zations (CBOs). In part, this national leadership has been stimulated by the particularly unjust and oppressive geographies arising from globalization and economic restructuring; income inequalities and social polarization are higher in Los Angeles than in almost any other city region in the developed world, and are approaching those of Kolkata or Mexico City.

In what can be described as the first major urban explosion against globalization, the riots and uprisings of 1992, now significantly called the Justice Riots after the mobilizing motto “No Justice—No Peace,” marked another turning point. Increasingly recognizing that government inputs (local, state, and federal) were never going to be enough to deal with the problems facing Los Angeles, activist organizations and the massive agglomera-tion of the working poor that had grown around the center of Los Angeles realized that new methods and innovative strategies were needed in the struggles for greater social and economic justice. Several features distinguished the movements that emerged in L.A. from their counterparts in other metropolitan regions. One was the creative synekism that emerged from the nearly 5 million immigrant working poor concentrated in the metropoli-tan core, reaching an urban density comparable only to that of Manhattan. New and urgent needs were generated by the poverty, homelessness, and housing crisis this induced. To a certain degree, the innovative labor-community coalitions that emerged can be seen as spillover effects or Jacobs Externalities arising from this huge concentration of the immi-grant working poor.

Another distinctive feature of the new labor-community coalitions was their heightened awareness of the politics of space and the potential strategic importance of seeking spatial justice and the right to the city. As I argued in Seeking Spatial Justice, the relatively higher spatial consciousness of the local movements and the emergence of specifically spatial

466 EDWARD W. SOJA

strategies of political activism derive in large part from well-established and continuing linkages between activist groups and university students and faculties involved in urban planning and, to a lesser extent, geography. To illustrate, at least 40 students from the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have been employed over the past 10 or so years by LAANE as interns, researchers, and organizers. Also important in providing an unusually rich channel between the university and the wider activist communities has been the Com-munity Scholars Program, whereby experienced labor and community activists connect with the department for a year, taking courses, engaging in project work with urban plan-ning students, and otherwise intensifying the two-way exchange of ideas and stimulation.

Finally, and providing an appropriate conclusion to an essay in this journal reflecting upon the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Postmetropolis, no other city in the country has seen such a rich flow of new ideas about spatial theory, regional economy, and urban geography between the university’s academic world and the wider community of the urban region. Los Angeles, as much if not more than anyplace else, stands out as an active focus for the translation of spatial theory into spatial practice.

POSTMETROPOLIS AND BEYOND: A BIBLIOGRAPHY25

Blake, E., 2002, Spatiality past and present: An interview with Edward Soja. Journal of Social Archeology, Vol. 2, 139–158.

Borch, C., 2002, Interview with Edward W. Soja: Thirdspace, postmetropolis, and social theory. Distinktion, Vol. 4, 113–120. (Danish journal of critical social theory)

Ehrenfurt, R., 2002, The new regionalism: A conversation with Edward Soja. Critical Planning, Vol. 9, 5–12.

Mulder, A., 2002, Restructuring the industrial capitalist city: Interview with Edward Soja. In J. Brouwer, A. Mulder, and L. Martz, editors, Transurbanism. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: V2 Publishing/NAi Publishers, 88–101.

Scott, A. J., Agnew, J., Soja, E., and Storper, M., 2001, Global city-regions. In A. J. Scott, editor, Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 11–30.

Soja, E., 2000a, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Soja, E., 2000b, Putting cities first: Remapping the origins of urbanism. In G. Bridge and S. Watson, editors, A Companion to the City. Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 26–34.

Soja, E., 2001a, Exploring the postmetropolis. In C. Minca, editor, Postmodern Geogra-phy: Theory and Praxis. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 37–56.

Soja, E., 2001b, Fractal Los Angeles: The restructured geographies of the postmetropolis. In A. Mayr, M. Meurer, and J. Vogt, editors, Stadt und Region: Dynamik von Lebenwelten (City and Region: Dynamics of Worlds). Leipzig, Germany, 255–260.

25This bibliography consists of references cited in the article and those not cited but directly pertinent to Post-metropolis. The reference list that follows the Postmetropolis bibliography includes additional references cited in this article but not part of the Postmetropolis bibliography.


Soja, E., 2003a, Tales of a geographer-planner. In B. Eckstein and J. A. Throgmorton, editors, Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibilitiy in American Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 207–224.

Soja, E., 2003b, Urban tensions: Globalization, economic restructuring, and the postmet-ropolitan transition. In L. Beneria and S. Bisnath, editors, Global Tensions: Challenges and Opportunities in the World Economy. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 275–290.

Soja, E., 2003c, Writing the city spatially. City, Vol. 7, 269–280.Soja, E., 2005, Borders unbound: Globalization, regionalism, and the postmetropolitan

transition. In O. Kramsch, H. van Houtum, and W. Zierhofer, editors, B/ordering Space. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 33–46.

Soja, E., 2006a, Designing the postmetropolis. Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 25, 43–49.

Soja, E., 2006b, Reflections on the concept of global city regions. Spanish translation in Ekonomiaz (Basque Journal of Economics), edited English version in “Glocalogue,” on-line magazine Artefact: Strategies of Resistance (Belgrade), http://artefact.mi2 .hr/_/_a04/lang_en/theory_soja_en.htm

Soja, E., 2006c, Writing geography differently. Response to critical commentaries by Elspeth Graham and Barney Warf on Postmodern Geographies, “Classics in Human Geography Revisited.” Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 30, 812–820.

Soja, E., 2007, Postmetropolitan psychasthenia: A spatioanalysis. In BAVO, editors, Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 78–93.

Soja, E., 2008, Taking space personally. In B. Warf and S. Arias, editors, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 11–35.

Soja, E., 2009a, Cities and states in geohistory. Theory and Society, Vol. 39, 361–376.Soja, E., 2009b, From metropolitan to regional urbanization. In De toekomst van de

metropool (The Future of the Metropolis). Erneus Heerma Lecture—de Alliantie, 3–15 (pamphlet).

Soja, E., 2009c, Regional planning and development theories. In R. Kitchin and N. Thrift, editors, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. New York, NY: Elsevier, 259–270.

Soja, E., 2009d, Resistance after the spatial turn. In J. Pugh, editor, What Is Radical Poli-tics Today? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 69–74.

Soja, E., 2010a, Regional urbanization and the future of megacities. In S. Buijs, W. Tan, and D. Tunas, editors, Megacities: Exploring a Sustainable Future. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: oio Publishers, 57–76.

Soja, E., 2010b, Seeing nature spatially. In D. Albertson and C. King, editors, Without Nature: A New Condition for Theology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 181–202.

Soja, E., 2010c, Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Soja, E., 2011a, From metropolitan to regional urbanization. In A. Loukaitou-Sideris and T. Banerjee, editors, Companion to Urban Design. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 552–561.

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Soja, E., 2011b, Regional urbanization and the end of the metropolis era. In G. Bridge and S. Watson, editors, The New Blackwell Companion to the City. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 679–689.

Soja, E. and Kanai, M., 2008, The urbanization of the world. In R. Burdett and D. Sudjic, editors, The Endless City. New York, NY and London, UK: Phaidon, 54–69.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

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