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City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action
City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action
To cite this article: Martin Woessner (2010) A new ontology for the era of the New Economy: On
Edward W. Sojas Seeking Spatial Justice , City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy,
action, 14:6, 601-603
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2010.525080
Martin Woessner
dward W. Soja has been at the forefront of urban studies for a long time
now. So influential has his work been
that when the members of an undergraduate
seminar on The American City in Literature
and Film, which I participated in over a
decade ago at the University of San Francisco,
traveled to Los Angeles on a research trip, we
all but stalked him. Its a testament to his
generosityboth intellectual and spatial
that he welcomed us into his home for a
discussion of his work and its ties to the Los
Angeles area. That generosity is on full
display in Sojas latest book, Seeking Spatial
Justice, which chronicles four decades worth
of scholarship, pedagogy and activism. Like
other recent books about Los Angeles, it
suggests that amidst the Mike Davis dystopia,
there might be a glimmer or two of hope still
to be found out on the West Coast.1
Sojas works, including Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Theory (1989), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los
Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined
Places (1996) and Postmetropolis: Critical
Studies of Cities and Regions (2000), have
transformed the way we think about urban
and regional spaces. Seeking Spatial Justice
simultaneously extends and breaks from the
trajectory of these earlier writings. It carries
forward many of their concerns, but it is
aimed at a wider audience. Its composition
and style reflect its primary thesis, that
theory and praxis must necessarily reinforce
each other if we are to confront the concrete
realities of what he calls spatial (in)justice.
City:
10.1080/13604813.2010.525080
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WOESSNER: A NEW ONTOLOGY FOR THE ERA OF THE NEW ECONOMY 603
philosopher Michael J. Sandel suggests,
justice is really about the right way to value
things, then our theorizing has been itself
unjust for far too long.3
To talk about spatial (in)justice is to
acknowledge, first and foremost, that
(in)justice is the product of spatial forces as
much as social or historical ones. Why?
Because existence itself, in addition to being
both social and historical, is spatial through
and through. This insight Soja continues to
borrow from Lefebvre, who has recently
reemerged as the forefather, as it were, of the
burgeoning Right to the City movement,
although Soja, among others, has been championing his work for quite some time. For
Soja, Lefebvres work provides not just a
powerful political motto, one that gathers
together so many different local organizations
and causes, but more importantly, it provides
us with a new way to think about life itself.
It is this new ontology, emerging from the
shadows of the now tottering New Economy, which stands behind Sojas survey of
the past and present achievements of Los
Angeles area social movements. But we can
make out only its barest outlines here. Given
Sojas claims that a fundamental bias in
knowledge formation (p. 70) has omitted
and in some instances even overlooked the
spatiality of human existence, we can guess
that a corrective to the temporally focused
ontologies of the last century, such as
Heideggers, is on its way. But will it be
enough to replace Being and Time with
something like a book entitled Being and
Space?
If the spatial turn in theory has been late
in arriving, at least its arrival bodes well for a
new, radical politics, one that beginsquite
literallyon the ground. As Sojas critique of
the philosophy of Rawls illustrates, justice
cannot be thought of in abstract terms. The
idea of spatial (in)justice reminds us that
place and justice go together, and that both
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Martin Woessner, Center for Worker Education, The City College of New York (CUNY),
USA. Email: mwoessner@ccny.cuny.edu