Description
Book SynopsisThis completes Ed Soja's trilogy on urban studies, which began with Postmodern Geographies and continued with Thirdspace. It is the first comprehensive text in the growing field of critical urban studies to deal with the dramatically restructured megacities that have emerged world-wide over the last half of the twentieth-century.
Trade Review"Traditional sociological and urban design critiques of the American city have left vacant a wide middle ground of critical enquiry. Between statistical analysis and physical critique, Edward Soja attempts to bridge the divide by proposing a 'third way' for urban studies. The result is a broad overview, ranging between sociological and cultural points of view, with the provocative possibility of pairing the two in a new urban paradigm."
Tom Leslie, World Architecture "Coming to the field as a relative novice, I found this book more straightforward and thought provoking than I expected...it is sure to be of interest and value to students and researchers alike." Regional Studies.
"Postmetropolis effectively illuminates the rich complexity and multidisciplinary of urban and regional restructuring in the current era... will serve as a useful resource." Journal of Economic and Social Geography.
"Postmetropolis is magisterial in its historic sweep" Thomas L. Bell, University of Tennessee.
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations x
Preface xii
Acknowledgments xix
Part I Remapping the Geohistory of Cityspace 1
Introduction 3
Outlining the Geohistory of Cityspace 4
Defining the Conceptual Framework 6
The spatial specificity of urbanism 7
The trialectics of cityspace 10
Synekism: the stimulus of urban agglomeration 12
The regionality of cityspace 16
1 Putting Cities First 19
Re-excavating the Origins of Urbanism 19
The conventional sequence: hunting and gathering – agriculture – villages – cities – states 20
A provocative inversion: putting cities first 24
Learning from Jericho 27
Learning from Çatal Hüyük 36
James Mellaart and the urban Neolithic 36
Learning from New Obsidian 42
Learning more from Çatal Hüyük 46
2 The Second Urban Revolution 50
The New Urbanization 51
Space, Knowledge, and Power in Sumeria 55
Ur and the New Urbanism 60
Fast Forward >> to the Third Urban Revolution 67
3 The Third Urban Revolution: Modernity and Urban-industrial Capitalism 71
Cityspace and the Succession of Modernities 72
The Rise of the Modern Industrial Metropolis 76
Made in Manchester 78
Remade in Chicago 84
4 Metropolis in Crisis 95
Rehearsing the Break: the Urban Crisis of the 1960s 95
Manuel Castells and the Urban Question 100
David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City 105
Summarizing the Geohistory of Capitalist Cityspace 109
5 An Introduction to the Conurbation of Greater Los Angeles 117
Los Angeles – from Space: A View from My Window 120
A Perpetual Alternation Between Vision and its Forgetting 121
1870–1900: the WASPing of Los Angeles 123
1900–1920: the Regressive–Progressive Era 127
1920–1940: roaring from war to war 129
1940–1970: the Big Orange explodes 131
Looking back to the future: Los Angeles in 1965 135
1970 and beyond: the New Urbanization 140
Part II Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis 145
Introduction 147
Border Dialogues: Previewing the Postmetropolitan Discourses 147
Conceptualizing the New Urbanization Processes 148
Grounding the Discourses 154
6 The Postfordist Industrial Metropolis: Restructuring the Geopolitical Economy of Urbanism 156
Representative Texts 156
Pathways into Urban Worlds of Production 157
The geographical anatomy of industrial urbanism 157
Production-work-territory: reworking the divisions of labor 160
Manufacturing matters: against postindustrial sociology 164
Crossing industrial divides 166
Post-ford-ism 169
The empowerment of flexibility 171
Getting lean and mean: the surge in inequality 173
Into the regional world: the rediscovery of synekism 175
Localizing Industrial Urbanism 180
Postfordist industrial cartographies 181
Developmental dynamics of the industrial complex 185
Concluding in the realm of public policy 187
7 Cosmopolis: The Globalization of Cityspace 189
Representative Texts 189
Recomposing the Discourse on Globalization 191
The globality of production and the production of globality 192
Regional worlds of globalization 197
New geographies of power 202
Adding culture to the global geopolitical economy 208
The reconstruction of social meaning in the space of flows 212
Globalized neoliberalism: a brief note 216
Metropolis Unbound: Conceptualizing Globalized Cityspace 218
The world city hypothesis 219
Commanding our attention: the rise of global cities 222
Urban dualism, the Informational City and the urban-regional process 227
The turn to cosmopolis 229
8 Exopolis: The Restructuring of Urban Form 233
Representative Texts 233
Metropolis Transformed 234
Megacities and metropolitan galaxies 235
Outer Cities, postsuburbia, and the end of the Metropolis Era 238
Edge Cities and the optimistic envisioning of postmetropolitan geographies 243
City Lite and postmetropolitan nostalgia 246
Simulating the New Urbanism 248
Exopolis as synthesis 250
Representing the Exopolis in Los Angeles 251
Starting in the New Downtown 251
Inner City blues 254
The middle landscape 258
Off-the-edge cities 259
9 Fractal City: Metropolarities and the Restructured Social Mosaic 264
Representative Texts 264
Manufacturing Inequality in the Postmetropolis 266
Normalizing inequality: the extremes at both ends 267
Variations on the theme of intrinsic causality 268
Describing metropolarities: empirical sociologies and labor market dynamics 272
Moving beyond equality politics 279
Remapping the Fractal City of Los Angeles 282
An overview of the ethnic mosaic 283
Mono-ethnic geographies: segregating cityspace 291
Multicultural geographies: mapping diversity 294
10 The Carceral Archipelago: Governing Space in the Postmetropolis 298
Representative Texts 298
Conceptualizing the Carceral Archipelago 299
Fortress L.A. and the rhetoric of social warfare 300
The destruction of public space and the architectonics of security-obsessed urbanism 303
Policing space: doing time in Los Angeles 307
Entering the Forbidden City: the imprisonment of Downtown 309
Homegrown Revolution: HOAs, CIDs, gated communities, and insular lifestyles 312
Beyond the Blade Runner scenario: the spatial restructuring of urban governmentality 319
11 Simcities: Restructuring the Urban Imaginary 323
Representative Texts 323
Re-imagining Cityspace: Travels in Hyperreality 324
Jean Baudrillard and the precession of simulacra 326
Celeste Olalquiaga and postmodern psychasthenia 330
Cyberspace and the electronic generation of hyperreality 333
M. Christine Boyer and the imaginary real world of Cybercities 337
Simcities, Simcitizens, and hyperreality-generated crisis 339
SimAmerica: a concluding critique 345
Part III Lived Space: Rethinking 1992 in Los Angeles 349
Introduction 351
12 LA 1992: Overture to a Conclusion 355
Revisionings 355
Bodies, Cities, Texts: The Case of Citizen Rodney King (by Barbara Hooper) 359
Inscriptions 359
Somatography: the order in place 361
The Trial: Us v. Them 368
13 LA 1992: The Spaces of Representation 372
Event-Geography-Remembering 372
Visible antipodes: Inner versus Outer City 373
Normalized enclosures: the development of common interests 376
The Invisible Riots Remembered 379
Downtowns: this is not the 1960s 379
Pico-Union and the desaparacidos 386
Sa-i-ku and other commemorations 389
A repetitive ending 392
14 Postscript: Critical Reflections on the Postmetropolis 396
New Beginnings I: Postmetropolis in Crisis 396
The downturn of postfordism 397
Too fulsome globalization? 399
Suddenly everywhere is Pomona 401
Repadded white bunkers 402
Deconstructed modes of regulation 403
Simgovernment in crisis 405
New Beginnings II: Struggles for Spatial Justice and Regional Democracy 407
Bibliography 416
Name Index 431
Subject Index 436
