Postmetropolis

This completes Ed Soja's trilogy on urban studies, which began with Postmodern Geographies and continued with Thirdspace. It is the first comprehensive text in the growing field of critical urban studies to deal with the dramatically restructured megacities that have emerged world-wide over the last half of the twentieth-century.

List of Illustrations x

Preface xii

Acknowledgments xix

Part I Remapping the Geohistory of Cityspace 1

Introduction 3

Outlining the Geohistory of Cityspace 4

Defining the Conceptual Framework 6

The spatial specificity of urbanism 7

The trialectics of cityspace 10

Synekism: the stimulus of urban agglomeration 12

The regionality of cityspace 16

1 Putting Cities First 19

Re-excavating the Origins of Urbanism 19

The conventional sequence: hunting and gathering – agriculture – villages – cities – states 20

A provocative inversion: putting cities first 24

Learning from Jericho 27

Learning from Çatal Hüyük 36

James Mellaart and the urban Neolithic 36

Learning from New Obsidian 42

Learning more from Çatal Hüyük 46

2 The Second Urban Revolution 50

The New Urbanization 51

Space, Knowledge, and Power in Sumeria 55

Ur and the New Urbanism 60

Fast Forward >> to the Third Urban Revolution 67

3 The Third Urban Revolution: Modernity and Urban-industrial Capitalism 71

Cityspace and the Succession of Modernities 72

The Rise of the Modern Industrial Metropolis 76

Made in Manchester 78

Remade in Chicago 84

4 Metropolis in Crisis 95

Rehearsing the Break: the Urban Crisis of the 1960s 95

Manuel Castells and the Urban Question 100

David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City 105

Summarizing the Geohistory of Capitalist Cityspace 109

5 An Introduction to the Conurbation of Greater Los Angeles 117

Los Angeles – from Space: A View from My Window 120

A Perpetual Alternation Between Vision and its Forgetting 121

1870–1900: the WASPing of Los Angeles 123

1900–1920: the Regressive–Progressive Era 127

1920–1940: roaring from war to war 129

1940–1970: the Big Orange explodes 131

Looking back to the future: Los Angeles in 1965 135

1970 and beyond: the New Urbanization 140

Part II Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis 145

Introduction 147

Border Dialogues: Previewing the Postmetropolitan Discourses 147

Conceptualizing the New Urbanization Processes 148

Grounding the Discourses 154

6 The Postfordist Industrial Metropolis: Restructuring the Geopolitical Economy of Urbanism 156

Representative Texts 156

Pathways into Urban Worlds of Production 157

The geographical anatomy of industrial urbanism 157

Production-work-territory: reworking the divisions of labor 160

Manufacturing matters: against postindustrial sociology 164

Crossing industrial divides 166

Post-ford-ism 169

The empowerment of flexibility 171

Getting lean and mean: the surge in inequality 173

Into the regional world: the rediscovery of synekism 175

Localizing Industrial Urbanism 180

Postfordist industrial cartographies 181

Developmental dynamics of the industrial complex 185

Concluding in the realm of public policy 187

7 Cosmopolis: The Globalization of Cityspace 189

Representative Texts 189

Recomposing the Discourse on Globalization 191

The globality of production and the production of globality 192

Regional worlds of globalization 197

New geographies of power 202

Adding culture to the global geopolitical economy 208

The reconstruction of social meaning in the space of flows 212

Globalized neoliberalism: a brief note 216

Metropolis Unbound: Conceptualizing Globalized Cityspace 218

The world city hypothesis 219

Commanding our attention: the rise of global cities 222

Urban dualism, the Informational City and the urban-regional process 227

The turn to cosmopolis 229

8 Exopolis: The Restructuring of Urban Form 233

Representative Texts 233

Metropolis Transformed 234

Megacities and metropolitan galaxies 235

Outer Cities, postsuburbia, and the end of the Metropolis Era 238

Edge Cities and the optimistic envisioning of postmetropolitan geographies 243

City Lite and postmetropolitan nostalgia 246

Simulating the New Urbanism 248

Exopolis as synthesis 250

Representing the Exopolis in Los Angeles 251

Starting in the New Downtown 251

Inner City blues 254

The middle landscape 258

Off-the-edge cities 259

9 Fractal City: Metropolarities and the Restructured Social Mosaic 264

Representative Texts 264

Manufacturing Inequality in the Postmetropolis 266

Normalizing inequality: the extremes at both ends 267

Variations on the theme of intrinsic causality 268

Describing metropolarities: empirical sociologies and labor market dynamics 272

Moving beyond equality politics 279

Remapping the Fractal City of Los Angeles 282

An overview of the ethnic mosaic 283

Mono-ethnic geographies: segregating cityspace 291

Multicultural geographies: mapping diversity 294

10 The Carceral Archipelago: Governing Space in the Postmetropolis 298

Representative Texts 298

Conceptualizing the Carceral Archipelago 299

Fortress L.A. and the rhetoric of social warfare 300

The destruction of public space and the architectonics of security-obsessed urbanism 303

Policing space: doing time in Los Angeles 307

Entering the Forbidden City: the imprisonment of Downtown 309

Homegrown Revolution: HOAs, CIDs, gated communities, and insular lifestyles 312

Beyond the Blade Runner scenario: the spatial restructuring of urban governmentality 319

11 Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary 323

Representative Texts 323

Re-imagining Cityspace: Travels in Hyperreality 324

Jean Baudrillard and the precession of simulacra 326

Celeste Olalquiaga and postmodern psychasthenia 330

Cyberspace and the electronic generation of hyperreality 333

M. Christine Boyer and the imaginary real world of Cybercities 337

Simcities, Simcitizens, and hyperreality-generated crisis 339

SimAmerica: a concluding critique 345

Part III Lived Space: Rethinking 1992 in Los Angeles 349

Introduction 351

12 LA 1992: Overture to a Conclusion 355

Revisionings 355

Bodies, Cities, Texts: The Case of Citizen Rodney King (by Barbara Hooper) 359

Inscriptions 359

Somatography: the order in place 361

The Trial: Us v. Them 368

13 LA 1992: The Spaces of Representation 372

Event-Geography-Remembering 372

Visible antipodes: Inner versus Outer City 373

Normalized enclosures: the development of common interests 376

The Invisible Riots Remembered 379

Downtowns: this is not the 1960s 379

Pico-Union and the desaparacidos 386

Sa-i-ku and other commemorations 389

A repetitive ending 392

14 Postscript: Critical Reflections on the Postmetropolis 396

New Beginnings I: Postmetropolis in Crisis 396

The downturn of postfordism 397

Too fulsome globalization? 399

Suddenly everywhere is Pomona 401

Repadded white bunkers 402

Deconstructed modes of regulation 403

Simgovernment in crisis 405

New Beginnings II: Struggles for Spatial Justice and Regional Democracy 407

Bibliography 416

Name Index 431

Subject Index 436

"Traditional sociological and urban design critiques of the American city have left vacant a wide middle ground of critical enquiry. Between statistical analysis and physical critique, Edward Soja attempts to bridge the divide by proposing a 'third way' for urban studies. The result is a broad overview, ranging between sociological and cultural points of view, with the provocative possibility of pairing the two in a new urban paradigm." Tom Leslie, World Architecture

"Coming to the field as a relative novice, I found this book more straightforward and thought provoking than I expected...it is sure to be of interest and value to students and researchers alike." Regional Studies.

"Postmetropolis effectively illuminates the rich complexity and multidisciplinary of urban and regional restructuring in the current era... will serve as a useful resource." Journal of Economic and Social Geography.

"Postmetropolis is magisterial in its historic sweep" Thomas L. Bell, University of Tennessee.

Edward W Soja is Professor of Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written extensively on urban social life, planning and theory. His previous books include Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Verso, 1989)and Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996). Postmetropolis completes Edward Soja's trilogy aimed at expanding the scope and critical insight of our spatial imaginations. Applying the theoretical frameworks developed in Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Thirdspace (1996), it is the first comprehensive text in the growing field of critical urban and regional studies to deal with the dramatically restructured megacities that emerged worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. At its core is a lively discussion of six discourses that have coalesced around explaining what Soja calls the postmetropolitan transition, a major sea change in how we live in cities and experience urbanism as a way of life. To provide depth to these discussions, the book begins with a rethinking of the debates on the origins of cities, the geohistorical evolution of urban form, and the dynamic relations between society and space in the specific context of urban agglomerations.

In addition to being an innovative text in urban and regional studies and an insightful application of new approaches to interpreting the spatiality of human life, Postmetropolis is also a book about contemporary Los Angeles, a vivid and far-reaching interpretation of its turbulent recent history and geography. The book concludes with a look back to the civil unrest of 1992 to portray the postmetropolis in explosive crisis as well as to draw some hope for the future based on new coalition-based struggles for spatial justice and regional democracy.