Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places

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Wiley, 6 нояб. 1996 г. - Всего страниц: 348
Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced asignificant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one ofthe most important intellectual and political developments in thelate twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space andthe embracing spatiality of human life with the same criticalinsight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time andhistory on the one hand, and social relations and society on theother. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins andimpact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope andpractical relevance of how we think about space and such relatedconcepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment,home, city, region, territory, and geography.

The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or whathas been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tendedto be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality iseither seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, andexplained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representationsof space and its social significance. Edward Soja criticallyre-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, onethat comprehends both the material and mental dimensions ofspatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modesof spatial thinking.

Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual andempirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of HenriLefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space assimultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws onLefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threadsthough all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms inbell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space ofradical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretationsof the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonialcritique 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 ofdowntown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and theCentrum of Amsterdam.

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Об авторе (1996)

Born in the Bronx and nurtured in its dense diversities, Edward Soja was a street geographer by the time he was ten and a doctoral student in Geography at Syracuse University just after turning twenty-one. For the next two decades, he specialized in the political geography of moderization and nation-building in Africa, holding visiting appointments at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. After seven years of teaching at Northwestern University, he joined the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA, in 1972. He has twice been department chair in Urban Planning and, for nine years, was the Associate Dean. For the past fifteen years, he has been writing about the postmodernization of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife Maureen and children, Christopher and Erika.

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