Edward W. Soja. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. xviii + 256 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-6667-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-6668-3.
Reviewed by Naomi Millner (University of Bristol)
Published on H-HistGeog (August, 2010)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew (University of Bristol)
Circuitously Seeking Spatial Justice
Across the last thirty years, the case for a spatial dimension of inequality has rallied social scientists across the disciplines; a dimension, it is held, long neglected by theorists of uneven social development. One yield of this "spatial turn" has been a remodeled Marxist analytic, with a constitutive role for spatial, as well as sociohistorical, processes. Spatial sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre is widely associated with popularizing a vocabulary for this "production of space," and for the contentious praxis that targets its progressive transformation, most notably in his seminal work Le Production de l'Espace (1974). This vocabulary steadily infiltrated critical lexicons throughout the 1970s and 1980s, adding nuance to emergent studies of urban agglomeration and their unequal effects. But it was, properly speaking, the last decade of the twentieth century in which a literature of critical urban studies truly burgeoned. The work of geographers and urban theorists, such as Neil Brenner, Mustafa DikeƧ, and Mark Purcell, marked the rise of a "heterodox" Marxism, with its hallmark attention to the new scales and multiple centers of contemporary capitalism. Situating himself firmly within this legacy, in Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward W. Soja sets out to conduct a "wide-ranging exploration of spatial justice as a theoretical concept," with which he hopes to sharpen the objects of progressive research agendas--and in consequence, to catalyze more participatory forms of social activism, and a spatially attuned democratic politics (p. 1).
Soja's recapitulation of the spatial agenda is singular on two principle levels: the first empirical and the second theoretical. In empirical terms, he offers a genealogy of resurgent civil rights movements in Los Angeles in relation to the urban restructuring processes that contextualize them. Here, recent campaigning successes are held as prototypes for what planning and action may achieve, when informed by a critical spatial imagination. The prologue and introduction, for example, are framed by the unprecedented victory of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union over the city's Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1996. This is an actualization of possibilities whose spatial and historical configuration is unpacked in later chapters, through anecdotal examples of previous social uprisings and accounts of recent collaborations on a transnational scale. Meanwhile, on a theoretical level, Seeking Spatial Justice establishes a manifesto for what Soja terms "spatial consciousness" in urban theory and planning--a dialectical relationship between the academic spatial perspective and place-based local activism, considered prerequisite for the constitution of spatially just social transformations. An empirical "regionalism," which acquired ground in the academic world until its "entrepreneurialization" in the 1970s, is Soja's flagship example of successful spatial conscientization, while the "new regionalism" fostered by the present urban planning department in Los Angeles is a source of his optimism for the future (pp. 65, 66). Significant influences on this interventionist approach to urban planning include not only Lefebvre, but also David Harvey--converted from his early liberal approach to distributional inequalities to the socialism of the built environment evident in such texts as Social Justice and the City (1973). The "spatial justice" that makes Soja's title summarizes the geography that results from the interaction between this empirical setting and theoretical enterprise--effectively this entails reframing the social movement's role in urban restructuring processes. This interaction shapes the structure of the book as it is made to dialogue with a second concept of progressive change, Lefebvre's "rights to the city" (p. 6).
The concept of rights to the city addresses the specificity of the production of space under a regime of capitalist accumulation, highlighting the urban as a crucial site of contestation. This is foregrounded in chapter 1, which focuses on the spatial aspect of spatial justice, presenting it as a form of "consequentialist geography," or concretized expression, of justice--as against "space as container" or text-centric approaches to equality (p. 4). Distinctive examples of the link between claiming rights to the city and achieving spatial justice are identified in the organizing strategies of Los Angeles social movements--such as the "Justice for Janitors" movement; living wage protests, and the "justice riots" of 1992 (p. 24). Chapter 2 then expands on the scope and scales intended for these coalitions of activists and academics, making the case for "multiscalar" forms of contestation in the context of new "regional" coalitions (such as regional trading blocs) and the remaking of local space through processes of globalization (hence the "urban") (p. 32). Coalitions Soja counts as successful, such as the environmental justice movement, are here related to three levels of the constitution of injustice: a first imposed through political boundaries from without ("exogenously"), as in apartheid and the privatizations of the 1970s; a second that arises internally ("endogenously") as a form of distributional inequality resulting from discriminatory decision-making processes, and--critically for Soja--a third that is incurred through new ("mesogeographical") transnational coalitions, such as the European Union. In the third chapter, this framing of injustice then shapes the basis for a new, spatialized theorization of the concept of justice. This is situated firstly in relation to an ontological reformulation of "theory," said to follow claims of spatial primacy; and secondly to Greek and liberal democratic conceptions of justice, which the critical urbanism of Harvey and Lefebvre are shown to extend.
The book's weakest point is then perhaps the overly complex structure that derives from these multiple dialogues and dialectics; long parts of the preface, introduction, and subsequent chapters are spent justifying neat conceptual organizations of the material, which in practice can actually complicate the reader's navigation of the content. For example, on the one hand, the "exogenous, endogenous, mesographical" division of scales in chapter 2 not only is etymologically spurious, but remains only vaguely linked to the notions of multiscalarity it sets out to elucidate. On the other hand, the way in which the "rights to the city" concept allows the Los Angeles case study to be excavated according to multiple vectors of theoretical history is also an important strength, and many readers will appreciate the new conceptual links afforded by its colorful detours. In particular, the latter three chapters read as lucid worked examples of the paradigm Soja spends the first half of the book piecing together. Chapter 4 traverses labor and community unionism from 1965 to 2001; a particularly sophisticated fifth chapter documents a rise in spatial consciousness at the Los Angeles urban planning department across the same time period; and the final substantive chapter explores national and global extensions of the Los Angeles coalitions into transnational alliances, in the context of 9/11 and the financial crisis.
Structural questions aside, there is a further issue to raise with this coherent illustrative approach, however, and that is the ease with which diverse theorists and activist practices are aligned into the spatial justice paradigm. Passing references to Michel Foucault, for example, may discomfort scholars familiar with his theory of power and political productivity, since overtly absent is an appreciation of the ethical constitution of activism and contestation. The alignment of all those seeking "justice" with an inherently progressive social praxis is distinctly at odds with Foucault's contention that historical conceptions of population and rights are by nature "productive," which is to say perpetually generative of new and unintentional forms of intelligibility and exclusion. Notwithstanding, Seeking Spatial Justice remains a coherent and detailed account of Marxist geographies after the spatial turn, which lends weighty empirical material to the demands of a specific research agenda. It would particularly benefit students or academics in the social sciences engaging with issues of social justice and the urban restructuring process, as well as the lay person interested in contesting social exclusion, or the implications of urban planning. A clear call for the analysis of spatial inequality in urban spaces is the strongest impression that remains with the reader after the book is set down, and chapter 5, in particular, resonates a demand for collaboration between academics and practitioners, which seems both timely and perilous to ignore.
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Citation:
Naomi Millner. Review of Soja, Edward W., Seeking Spatial Justice.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30986
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