Edward Soja and Spatial Justice: The City After Chicago

Spatial justice is the idea that geography produces injustice by itself: where one lives, what is nearby and what is far away decide opportunities, and so changing space is a way of doing justice. Edward W. Soja (1940–2015), a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, did more than anyone to give it a name and a theory. In Postmetropolis (2000) he analyses urban restructuring in the age of globalisation and challenges the view of space as a passive stage on which things simply happen.

Postmetropolis: the city after Chicago

Soja belonged to the so-called Los Angeles School, a group of geographers and planners who took that city as a laboratory for understanding the contemporary metropolis. Against the Chicago of the early twentieth century, with its centre and rings, Los Angeles offers a dispersed, polycentric and fragmented city where social problems no longer stay in the centre: inequality, poverty and segregation spread toward the suburbs and disprove the idea that those areas are homogeneous and prosperous. The postmetropolis is that new kind of city, and Soja describes it with precision.

Synekism: the force of dwelling together

One of the concepts Soja recovers is synekism, from the Greek synoikismos, the act of dwelling together. With it he names the agglomerating force of cities: the capacity of dense urban life to stimulate innovation, culture and the transformation of social relations. It is the reason cities exist and grow, and also the reason they concentrate conflict: putting many diverse people together in little space produces wealth and, at the same time, inequality if nobody corrects it.

What spatial justice is

Hence spatial justice. Soja argues that the unequal distribution of resources and services, transport, schools, parks, jobs, reinforces social injustice, and that examining it on the map is as necessary as examining it in the statistics. His book Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) starts from a concrete case: the struggle of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, which won a settlement so that public transport money stopped going to trains for wealthy areas and returned to the buses used by poor neighbourhoods. The injustice was spatial and so was the remedy.

Soja's legacy lies in that double lesson. First, that space is not a backdrop but a product of decisions that can be discussed and changed, an idea he takes from Henri Lefebvre and brings into geography. Second, that the contemporary city can no longer be understood with the models of the twentieth century: one has to look at the periphery, the new centralities and the invisible borders between neighbourhoods. His work still guides urban analysis and social planning in the twenty-first century, above all in Latin American cities where segregation is measured in distance.