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A new ontology for the era of the New

Economy: On Edward W. Sojas Seeking
Spatial Justice
Martin Woessner
Published online: 16 Dec 2010.

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
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CITY, VOL. 14, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2010

A new ontology for the era of

the New Economy
On Edward W. Sojas Seeking Spatial
Justice

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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
CCIT_A_525080.sgm
1360-4813
Original
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of Urban
MartinWoessner
Trends
(online)

Sojas latest effort is a memoir of sortsa

kind of summing-up of previous endeavors.
But there is no room for nostalgia in its
pages. To the contrary, Sojas latest book is
as forward-looking as any of its predecessorsperhaps even more forward-looking.
Indeed, Seeking Spatial Justice doesnt just
take stock of urban studies a decade into the
new century; it also maps out a course of
action for the decades to come.
Not only does Soja maintain that spatial
justice is possible amidst the global economic
meltdown, he also suggests that we already
have access to the tools and methods necessary
to achieve it: theoretical innovation, grassroots
mobilization and coalition-building. If there is
a lament bubbling beneath the surface of Seeking Spatial Justice, it is a lament for the very
thing that his narrative celebrates: a rich and
fertile connection between academic research
and innovation, on the one hand, and grassroots social justice movements on the other.
Like the figure of the public intellectual (whose
supposed disappearance has been narrated by
everybody from Russell Jacoby to, more
recently and problematically, Paul Berman),
the scholar-as-activist is a vanishing breed (and
the cuts to UCLAs Urban Planning programs
inaugurated by Governor Schwarzenegger are
pushing it to outright extinction). More and
more, academics are tending their own
gardens, refusing to answerlet alone even
askquestions concerning how their theoretical work should translate into social praxis.
In some respects, the gap that has opened
up between the scholarly world and the social

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/10/060601-03 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.525080

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 12:29 12 February 2015

602

CITY VOL. 14, NO. 6

world that it is supposed to serve is a reflection

of wider trends in the era of the New Economy. Just as the transition from Fordist
models of industrial development to looser
and more flexible means of capital accumulation and distribution (often through speculative finance, insurance and real estate markets)
has resulted in a more globalized, seemingly
less place-specific economic system, so too
has the new, globalized world of intellectual
exchange replaced the rooted and site-specific
contexts of the academy with an amorphous
zone of rarefied intellectual debate, one that
seems to float free of any responsibilities or
duties to the taxpayers and citizens who make
it possible in the first place. If confronting the
ravages of the New Economy means replacing
abstract placelessness with a rich sense of
place, then we might conclude that the academys growing removal from questions of
social justice can only be rectified by a heavy
dose of spatial thinking. Luckily, as Soja
points out, the spatial turn is already making
its way through the academy. The transdisciplinary diffusion of spatial thinking has been
felt far and wide, from history and philosophy
all the way to science studies (p. 3).2
But why is the spatial turn so particularly
relevant today? Here is where Sojas new
book is particularly illuminating. It suggests
that the spatial turn is both a response to, as
well as a product of, the spatial injustices
inherent in globalization. The spatial turn is
necessarily connected to spatial (in)justice.
The New Economy, as Soja is right to point
out, is built upon a place-bound paradox. On
the one hand, the New Economy tries to
sever capital from all spatial ties, thus making
it more mobile, more flexible and, most
importantly, more profitable. As a result,
factories are uprooted, labor is outsourced
and regulatory agencies are undermined if
not entirely avoided. Nevertheless, space
cannot be entirely surpassed. Here Soja
adopts David Harveys notion of the spatial
fix, which suggests that capitalism requires
periodic jolts of spatial speculation to keep it
going (p. 90). New places have to be
(re)made, if for no other reason than to create

new markets. Try as they might, the forces of

neoliberal globalization cannot remove
themselves from geography. These forces end
up reaffirming the very thing they are trying
to overcome.
Far from denying spatial realities, the New
Economy only reminds us of how spatial our
existence really is. This is but one of the
reasons that Soja thinks an explicitly spatial
theoretical orientation is needed today. As
much as Seeking Spatial Justice focuses on the
often successful strategies of grassroots activism against New Economy policies, strategies
that have emerged from, and worked in
concert with, the Urban Planning programs
at UCLA, I take the centerpiece of the book
to be the chapter that engages in what Soja
describes as an ontological rethinking (p. 9)
of urban theory itself. Chapter 3, Building a
Spatial Theory of Justice, attempts to restore
the spatial/geographical (p. 7) aspect of
existence by injecting the abstract Rawlsian
notion of justice, which Soja describes as
only weakly spatial (p. 77), with a bit of true
spatiality. Although others before him in the
history of Western thought have called attention to the spatiality of existence (Foucault
and Lefebvre most recently), Soja here
reminds us that historically and socially
oriented theories continue to dominate our
thinking. Soja maintains that even the most
influential urban thinkers of our era, such as
Harvey (whom Soja chides on more than one
occasion), have for too long privileged
economic, historical, political or social forces
at the expense of a more specifically spatial
analysis. Until we can rebalance this ontological triad of the social, the historical and
the spatial, we will be unable to account for
the emergence, let alone the success, of the
new social movements. But there is more:
Soja wants us to think spatially not just
because it is a convenient rallying point for
coalition-building (many different coalitions,
representing many different local and global
interests, necessarily overlap in specific
locales); but also because he sees the denial of
our inherent spatiality as the root cause of
spatial injustice itself. If, as the political

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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

are rooted in existence, in ontology. But

where are the new ontologists? What are they
telling us about our spatial responsibilities
and duties? Soja is convincing when he
suggests that we need a new ontology, but
Im not sure that we have one as of yet,
despite his valiant efforts in the past. It seems
to me that, in the case of the spatial justice
movement, the theory might be lagging
behind the activism in this regard, which isnt
necessarily a bad thing. In their campaigns,
coalitions like the Bus Riders Union have
demonstrated that they can get along just fine
without what we might call, after Heidegger,
a spatial analytic on which to build a new
ontology. As Seeking Spatial Justice demonstrates, the struggle for space, the defense of
place and the fight for justice are well underway, even if, like some of the characters in
Thomas Pynchons recent Inherent Vice, we
arent always certain of just what it is we are
fighting for.4

Notes
1
1

2
2

3
3

4
4

See, for instance, Daniel Hurewitz (2007)

Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern
Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press;
and Scott Kurashige (2008) The Shifting Grounds
of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the
Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
See, for example, Charles W.J. Withers (2009)
Place and the Spatial Turn in Geography and in
History, Journal of the History of Ideas 70(4)
(October), pp. 637658.
Michael J. Sandel (2009) Justice: What is the Right
Thing to Do?, p. 261. New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux.
Thomas Pynchon (2009) Inherent Vice. New York:
Penguin.

Martin Woessner, Center for Worker Education, The City College of New York (CUNY),
USA. Email: mwoessner@ccny.cuny.edu