Political geographer, urban planner Soja to lecture at School of Architecture

Political geographer, urban planner Soja to lecture at School of ArchitectureMarch 05, 2008Mary Kate O’Brienmcobrien@syr.edu

Edward Soja ’67, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, will speak at the Syracuse University School of Architecture on Wednesday, March 19, at 4:30 p.m. in the main auditorium at The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St. The lecture, “Putting Cityspace First,” is free and open to the public.

Soja, who received his Ph. D. in geography from SU, teaches in the regional and international development area of urban planning at UCLA and offers courses in urban political economy and planning theory. He also teaches in the Cities Program at the London School of Economics. After starting his academic career as a specialist on Africa, Soja has focused his research and writing over the past 20 years on urban restructuring in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles bring together traditional political economy approaches and recent trends in critical cultural studies, particularly the way issues of class, race, gender and sexuality intersect with what he calls the spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of difference and identity that this generates.

Soja continues to write on how social scientists and philosophers think about space and geography, especially in relation to how they think about time and history. His latest book brings these various research strands together in a comprehensive look at the geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins to the more recent development of what he calls the “postmetropolis.”

His publications include “Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions” (Blackwell Publishers, 2000), “The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century” (University of California Press, 1997), “Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places” (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996) and “Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory” (Verso Books, 1989).