Edward Soy

Edward Soy 2012

Edward William Soja (born May 4 or May 14, 1940 in New York City , † November 2, 2015 in Los Angeles ) was an American geographer and urban researcher.

Life

1940 Polish as the son of immigrants in New York's Bronx born and raised there, soy geography studied at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the University of Wisconsin-Madison before at Syracuse University graduated promotion. He then initially worked at Northwestern University . In 1972 Soy came to the University of California, Los Angeles , where he continued his academic career. Most recently he was Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning there before he retired .

From 1999 Soja also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science . In 2015 he was awarded the Prix ​​Vautrin Lud , but could no longer accept the award in person. He died shortly afterwards at the age of 75.

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Soja started his career with post-colonial nation building in Africa, especially Kenya . Although his modernization- theoretical approach at the time had little in common with the critical neo-Marxist later works, Soja's research interest was already in examining spatially different developments and embedding them in a general social-scientific understanding of development processes.

In the 1970s he did little empirical research, and he published little. Instead, Soja devoted himself to the search for a deeper socio-theoretical understanding of spatial development processes in the emerging postmodernity , which he began to investigate in the greater Los Angeles area together with other researchers such as Allen J. Scott . This group of researchers later became known as the Los Angeles School of Urbanism , of which soy was one of the most important representatives.

Between 1989 and 2000 Soja published the three books Postmodern Geographies , Thirdspace and Postmetropolis , in which he set out his central theses on postmodernism: that a reorganization of the capitalist order was in progress, which attached greater importance to spatial than to temporal; that space is a fundamental component of social life; and that consequently social theory has to deal more with geographic space . Similar to David Harvey , he referred not least to Henri Lefebvre . In the course of this, soy was probably the first to use the term “ spatial turn ”.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

• The Geography of Modernization in Kenya: A Spatial Analysis of Social, Economic, and Political Change . Syracuse 1968.
• Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory . Verso, London a. a. 1989, ISBN 978-0-86091-936-0 (partial translations: spatializations: Marxist geography and critical social theory. In: Bernd Belina , Boris Michel (ed.): Raumproduktionen: Contributions of Radical Geography: an interim balance. Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2007, Pp. 77–110; History: Geography: Modernity. In: Martin Wentz (Ed.), Stadt-Raum. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / M. / New York 1991, pp. 73–90.).
• Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places . Blackwell, Malden, et al. a. 1996, ISBN 978-1-55786-675-2 (partial translation: Die Trialektik der Späumlichkeit. In: Robert Stockhammer (Ed.): Topographien der Moderne. Media for the representation and construction of spaces. Paderborn 2005, pp. 93–123. ).
• Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions . Blackwell, Oxford et al. a. 2000, ISBN 978-1-57718-000-5 .
• Seeking Spatial Justice . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2010, ISBN 978-0-8166-6667-6 .
• My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization . University of California Press, Berkeley 2014, ISBN 978-0-520-95763-3 .

Anthologies

• John N. Paden and Edward W. Soja (Eds.): The African Experience . Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1970 (4 volumes).
• Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Eds.): The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century . University of California Press, Berkeley 1996, ISBN 0-520-20424-7 .

Essays

Published in German

• Economic restructuring and internationalization of the Los Angeles area . In: Renate Borst u. a. (Ed.): The new face of cities (=  Stadtforschung aktuell . No. 29 ). Birkhäuser, Basel 1990, ISBN 3-7643-2540-2 , p. 170-187 .
• Los Angeles, a city turned outwards: The development of the postmodern metropolis in the USA . In: Volker Kreibich u. a. (Ed.): Rome - Madrid - Athens. The new role of the urban periphery (=  Dortmunder contributions to spatial planning . No. 62 ). 1992, ISBN 978-3-88211-077-7 , pp. 213-228 .
• "Everything comes together in Los Angeles": The deconstruction and reconstruction of the modern . In: Bernd-Peter Lange and Hans Peter Rodenberg (eds.): The new metropolis: Los Angeles - London (=  Gulliver . No. 35 ). Argument, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-88619-713-1 , p. 7-32 .
• To encourage a little confusion: A contemporary comparison of Amsterdam and Los Angeles . In: Hansruedi Hitz u. a. (Ed.): Capitales Fatales: Urbanization and politics in the financial metropolises Frankfurt and Zurich . Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-85869-093-7 , p. 160-175 .
• Postmodern Urbanization: The Six Los Angeles Restructures . In: Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann and Walter Prigge (eds.): Mythos Metropole . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1995, ISBN 3-518-11912-5 , pp. 143-164 .
• Thirdspace - The expansion of the geographical perspective . In: Hans Gebhardt, Paul Reuber and Günter Wolkersdorfer (eds.): Cultural geography: Current approaches and developments . Spectrum, Heidelberg / Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8274-1393-1 , p. 269-288 .
• Edward Soja and Allen J. Scott: Los Angeles 1870-1990: Historical Geography of an American Megacity . In: Wolfgang Schwentker (ed.): Megacities in the 20th century . Wolfgang Schwentker, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-36296-9 , p. 283-304 .
• From “Zeitgeist” to “Raumgeist”: New Twists on the Spatial Turn . In: Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann (eds.): Spatial Turn: The space paradigm in the cultural and social sciences . Transcript, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-683-0 , p. 241-262 .

Further

• The Socio-spatial Dialectic . In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers . tape 70 , no. 2 , 1980, p. 207–225 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1467-8306.1980.tb01308.x .
• The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a Transformative Retheorisation . In: Derek Gregory and John Urry (Eds.): Social Relations and Spatial Structures . Macmillan, Houndsmills, et al. a. 1985, ISBN 0-333-35404-4 , pp. 90-127 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Edward Soy in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Costis Hadjimichalis: Remembering Ed Soja… before he became famous: a very personal note ( en ) In: Human Geography: A New Radical Journal (blog) . Retrieved November 29, 2016.
2. ^ UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Maggie Sharpe: In memoriam: Edward Soja, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning ( en ) University of California, Los Angeles. November 16, 2015. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
3. ↑ Gareth Evans and Tara McPherson, Watch This Space: An Interview with Edward Soja . In: Discourse . tape 14 , no. 1 , 1992, p. 41-42 , JSTOR : 41389200 .
4. ↑ Mike Sonksen: Edward Soja, 1940-2015 ( en ) In: The Architect's Newspaper . January 28, 2016. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
5. ↑ Alan Latham: Edward W. Soy . In: Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin (Eds.): Key Thinkers on Space and Place . 2nd Edition. Sage, Los Angeles et al. a. 2011, ISBN 978-1-84920-102-5 , pp. 381 .
6. ↑ Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielmann: Introduction: What do we read in space? The spatial turn and the secret knowledge of the geographers . In this. (Ed.): Spatial Turn: The space paradigm in the cultural and social sciences . Transcript, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-683-0 , p. 7-45 .

literature

• Emma Blake: Spatiality past and present: An interview with Edward Soja, Los Angeles, April 12, 2001 . In: Journal of Social Archeology . tape 2 , no. 2 , 2002, p. 139-158 , doi : 10.1177 / 1469605302002002964 .
• Gareth Evans and Tara McPherson: Watch This Space: An Interview with Edward Soja . In: Discourse . tape 14 , no. 1 , 1992, p. 41-57 , JSTOR : 41389200 .
• Alan Latham: Edward W. Soy . In: Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin (Eds.): Key Thinkers on Space and Place . 2nd Edition. Sage, Los Angeles et al. a. 2011, ISBN 978-1-84920-102-5 , pp. 380-386 .
• Ute teacher: Soja, Edward W. In: Ray Hutchison (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Urban Studies . Sage, Los Angeles et al. a. 2010, ISBN 978-1-4129-1432-1 , pp. 754-755 , doi : 10.4135 / 9781412971973.n267 .