"There is much that is innovative and thought provoking in the book ..." Rob
Atkinson, Capital and Class
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Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In
what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political
developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the
embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has
traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and
society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the
spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think
about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture,
environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.
The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the
geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two
approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed,
and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its
social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an
alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of
spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.
Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning
with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social
space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to
describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys,
reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a
space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the
interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural
politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics
of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los
Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations.
Acknowledgements.
Introduction/Itinerary/Overture.
Part I: Discovering Thirdspace:
Part II: Inside and Outside Los Angeles:
Select Bibliography.
Index.
Detailed contents
352 pages, Paperback
About the Author
Edward W. Soja is Professor of Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He
has written extensively on urban social life, planning and theory. His previous books
include Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989).
