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Edward Soja
Thinkers

Edward Soja

1940–2015

American geographer who claimed for space the same weight that time has in the social sciences.

Soja argued that twentieth-century social thought privileged history and treated space as an inert backdrop. His «spatial turn» holds the opposite: where something happens is part of why it happens, and a city's geography produces inequality as much as its economy does.

His most applicable formulation is spatial justice. Distributing income better is not enough: access has to be distributed too — to transport, jobs, clean air, the park — because living ninety minutes from everything is a form of poverty no payslip reflects.

An American geographer, born in the Bronx in 1940 and professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, until his death in 2015, Soja was the great populariser of the spatial turn in the social sciences. Postmodern Geographies (1989) reclaimed space as a dimension as decisive as time for understanding society, drawing on Lefebvre and Foucault, and Thirdspace (1996) proposed a third space, neither only physical nor only imagined, where the city is lived and contested.

With Postmetropolis (2000) he named the city that came after the Chicago model, dispersed, fragmented and globalised, with Los Angeles as laboratory, and he formed part of the core of the Los Angeles School alongside Michael Dear and Allen Scott. Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) turned his theory into a political programme from the case of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, which won in 1996 a court settlement to invest in the buses the poor use. Spatial justice is a common term today thanks to him.

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