ancient cities

754 Soja, Edward W.
the attacks on New York City and Washington,
D.C., on September 11, 2001. A contrasting
attempt to reclaim the use of spectacular means for
progressive ends is explored by Stephen Duncombe,
who calls on the political Left to learn from Las
Vegas and commercial cultures so as to build a
politics that embraces people’s dreams and fantasies.
He coins the term ethical spectacle to refer to
a model that encourages intervention and transformative
action rather than passive contemplation
and that is open, democratized, and participatory.
Among his examples are collective actions in city
streets and public spaces that seek to demonstrate
that another world is possible.
David Pinder
See also Cinematic Urbanism; Le Corbusier; Lefebvre,
Henri; Marxism and the City; Situationist City; Urban
Theory
Further Readings
Debord, Guy. [1988] 1990. Comments on the Society of
the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London:
Verso.
———. [1967] 1994. The Society of the Spectacle.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York:
Zone Books.
———. [1973] 2005. “La société du spectacle.” [Black
and white film.] In Œuvres cinématographiques
completes (3 DVDs), by G. Debord. Text translated by
K. Knabb as “The Society of the Spectacle,” in G.
Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills,
Documents. 2003. Edinburgh, UK: AK Press.
Duncombe, Stephen. 2007. Dream: Re-imagining
Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York:
The New Press.
Jappe, Anselm. [1993] 1999. Guy Debord. Translated by
Donald Nicholson-Smith. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Knabb, Ken, ed. 2006. Situationist International Anthology.
Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.
Pinder, David. 2000. “‘Old Paris Is No More’:
Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-spectacle.”
Antipode 32(4):357–86.
Retort. 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in
an Age of War. London: Verso.
Situationist International Online (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/
sionline). (Collection of writings by Debord and the
situationists in English translation.)
So J a , ed w a r d w.
The American geographer Edward W. Soja has
become known internationally in critical urban
theory for his work on spatial analysis and the
spatiality of social life. In his writings, he takes a
spatial, regional, and political perspective, viewing
space as an explanatory principle for social
theory in which uneven spatial practices and the
struggle over space are implicated in contemporary
capitalism. As one of the key proponents of
the spatial turn in social science, as well as an
advocate for a critical postmodern approach, Soja
developed a number of conceptual terms such as
exopolis, thirdspace, and synekism. Moreover, he
was one of the first, and most persistent, North
American scholars to introduce Henri Lefebvre’s
work on space to an English-speaking audience.
Born in New York City in 1941, Soja grew up
in the Bronx. He was trained as a geographer at
the University of Wisconsin (MA in 1961) and
Syracuse University (PhD in 1966). In 1965 he
received his first academic appointment, which
was in the Department of Geography at
Northwestern University (Illinois), which, at that
time and in his own words, “was considered the
most advanced center in the country for teaching
and research in the new quantitative and theoretical
geography.” In 1972 he joined the faculty of
the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban
Planning at the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA). There, Soja replaced the positivist
spatial science approach of the 1960s with a
more critical approach and shifted his study areas
from African and third world development to Los
Angeles. Since 1999 he has also been associated
with the London School of Economics and Political
Science and currently holds the title of Centennial
Professor of Sociology in the Cities Programme. In
addition, he has been a visiting professor at the
universities of Amsterdam, Cambridge, Concordia,
Vienna, Nairobi, and Ibadan.
Soja started his academic career with an interest
in the geography of modernization in Kenya,
where he investigated the relationship between the
development of transportation and communication
networks and changing social relations.
Further he linked this transformation to the major
flows and nodes of the colonial system. This work