Edward Soja
Edward W. Soja (US) is a postmodern geopolitical theorist.
Edward Soja [2001 © Jan Sprij]
Edward Soja teaches regional planning, urban political economy, and planning theory at UCLA. After specializing in Africa early in his academic career, over the past 20 years Edward Soja has focused his research and writing on urban restructuring in Los Angeles and, more broadly, on the critical study of cities and regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles bring together traditional political economy approaches and recent trends in critical cultural studies. Of particular interest to him is the way issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality intersect with the spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of difference and identity this generates.
Edward Soja also writes on how social scientists and philosophers think about space and geography, specially in relation to how they think about time and history. His latest book brings these various research strands together in a comprehensive look at the geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins to the more recent development of the "postmetropolis." His policy interests primarily concern questions of regional development, planning and governance, and the local effects of ethnic and cultural diversity in Los Angeles.
Among his publications are Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (with Allen J. Scott, 1996), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000). For V2_ publishing, he participated with Restructuring the industrial Capitalist City in TransUrbanism (2002).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Soja
