City analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action ISSN: 1360-4813 (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20 Spatializing the urban, Part I Edward Soja To cite this article: Edward Soja (2010) Spatializing the urban, Part I, City, 14:6, 629-635 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2010.539371 Published online: 16 Dec 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1537 View related articles Citing articles: 11 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccit20 CITY, VOL. 14, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2010 Spatializing the urban, Part I Edward Soja MyTaylorCCIT_A_539371.sgm10.1080/13604813.2010.539371City:[email protected] Analysis and& Article Francis (print)/1470-3629Francis of Urban comments Trends (online) here are instigated in part by more effective critical (urban) theory and the response I received last year from my practice. presumptuous search engine after entering To achieve this rebalanced ontology will ‘spatial justice’. Do you mean social justice?’ require a period in which, almost as a form of I was asked. No, I wanted to scream back, affirmative action, the spatial will be strategi- but I knew no one would be listening. While cally and assertively foregrounded, put first keeping to the spirit established in this jour- to make up for its marginalization as mere nal of stimulating continuing debate on background container or stage under the ‘urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action’, impress of a hegemonic social historicism. I will begin by explaining why I am so insis- This will mean going beyond the timid tent on the specific term spatial justice. Fram- lament that space matters to recognize more ing my response to the eight excellent cogently the far-reaching causal and explana- commentaries on Seeking Spatial Justice tory power of the human geographies we contained in this issue is the assertion and produce and within which we live. Caution is assumption that putting ‘spatial’ first, before necessary in promoting this assertive critical justice as well as many other terms and spatial perspective to avoid simply replacing concepts, is not only useful and revealing but social and historical determinisms with will increasingly shape critical debates on purely spatial ones. Such caution, however, both urban theory and urban politics and should not prevent a determined and trans- practice. disciplinary effort to reconstitute a three- I begin with a reference to what the critical sided rather than binary ontology of being, realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar once called moving beyond Heidegger’s Zeit und Sein to ‘ontological struggle’. Reconstructing an include a resounding Raum as well. appropriate ontology for urban studies is a In many ways, thinking about the social necessary step toward better urban theory, world needs to become more like what empirical analysis, policy making and politi- thinking about the physical or natural world cal practice. More specifically, this ontologi- has always been: rooted in a three-sided cal restructuring primarily involves achieving ontology in which the material world a new balance between historical, spatial and (matter, energy) is seen as inherently spatial social perspectives after a century and a half and temporal. Privileging time over space (or of hegemonic social historicism, during the reverse) becomes patently absurd. These which the historical development of social- ontological remarks underpin my insistence ity, of individual biography and collective on maintaining if not asserting the impor- social life, took priority and epistemological tance of the spatial in understanding justice privilege over the spatiality of life. Restoring and many other fundamental social and the balance of the ontological triad or trialec- historical concepts and developments. tic, as I once called it, wherein our social Seeking Spatial Justice is not just a descriptive existence is seen as simultaneously spatial exploration of the geography of social justice and temporal, geographical and historical, but a much more comprehensive attempt to without either being intrinsically privileged spatialize the concept at all levels of over the other, is fundamental to building knowledge formation: from ontology to ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/10/060629-07 © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.539371 630 CITY VOL. 14, NO. 6 epistemology, theory-building, empirical through a critical spatialization of justice as a study and social praxis. My discussion of the concept, a rethinking in which the spatiality commentaries contained in this issue of City of justice is not only a descriptive material reflects the idea that just being spatial, using dimension but also a generative, explanatory, spatial metaphors and terminology, is not and causal force in and of itself. enough. Spatializing social justice requires an The only exception to my insistence on the interpretive commitment to what might be specific term spatial justice is the synony- called the precession of the spatial in theory mous use of Henri Lefebvre’s (1968) original and practice. and assertively spatial concept of right to the city (RTTC). So convergent are the two concepts, that I considered changing the title Putting space first … and demanding more to reflect the virtual equivalence of seeking spatial justice and struggling over the right to Seeking Spatial Justice, as nearly all commen- the city. As several commentators note and I tators notice, is driven by a determined agree, activists are likely to find RTTC more advocacy of a critical spatial perspective, tangible and familiar a mobilizing metaphor something I have been doing in all my than SSJ, just as a few decades ago more academic writings. What is different about SSJ politically appealing notions of environmen- is its more specific concern for how a critical tal justice attracted activist geographers and spatial perspective has begun to spread other spatial thinkers. What I do not find beyond the academic realm and into social and acceptable, however, is an occlusive substitu- political practice, significantly influencing the tion in which the assertive spatiality and mobilization, identity, cohesion and strategic attention to urban spatial causality that is actions of urban social movements. For some inherent in Lefebvre’s conceptualization is very special reasons that are discussed in detail lost or blocked from view, as I think has been in SSJ, this process started most successfully occurring in recent discussions of the RTTC in Los Angeles but has been emerging in new that reductively refocus the debate around, and interesting ways in other major urban for example, the search for a just city or regions and activist organizations. worse, bland (neo)liberal calls for egalitarian The expanded practical and political role democracy and/or universal human rights. of spatial theory has made me more confi- Continuing to be inspired by the unfettered dent than ever before of the inherent power spatial insights of Henri Lefebvre (1996), I of spatial thinking and the attendant practical build into nearly every chapter of SSJ a vigor- and theoretical payoffs that come from ous argument that not only does space matter, putting space as an interpretive perspective but that a critical spatial perspective has the first rather than subordinating it to more power to advance our knowledge in new and social and historical modes of analysis. This innovative ways whatever subject one has reinforced my insistence on interpreting chooses to explore. Putting space first as an justice as specifically and inherently spatial explanatory perspective and/or political strat- rather than seeing it as merely the geographi- egy, I argue from the start, has the potential to cal dimension of social justice, or attaching to open up enriching and often unexpected justice such other labels as environmental or possibilities for both theoretical and practical territorial. Spatial justice, in my view, should political innovation. These payoffs arising not be reduced to just another variant of from foregrounding a critical spatial perspec- social justice or one of many attributes and tive are illustrated more vividly by what may aspects that can be ranked and compared on eventually be considered one of the most some scale of inherent importance. My intent important geographical discoveries of the past in SSJ is not to compete with these alternative century: that specifically urban spatial causal- terms but to supplement their usefulness ity or what I called synekism, the stimulus of SOJA: SPATIALIZING THE URBAN, PART I 631 urban agglomeration, may be the primary idea that recognition and further exploration cause of economic growth, technological of urban spatial causality, the enormous innovation and cultural creativity. Urbaniza- generative and explanatory power of the way tion (delivered and lived of course by human we organize urban geographies, will signifi- agency) is not the only cause of societal devel- cantly shape the development of urban opment and change, but it is being posited studies in the 21st century. today—most often I might add by non-geog- For this to happen, however, the genera- raphers—as the most important generative tive force of cities (and perhaps also the form force. and focus of debates that occur in City) must Urban spatial causality and