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Beginning…

Refresh your memory by taking a few minutes to read/mark-up the “notes” on the reading.

Jot some questions you have, or would like to discuss.

Try to generate some examples in your head that help you make sense of the processes described?

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Edward Soja

(1940-2015)

Urban and political geographer

One of the world’s leading spatial theorist

Wrote on spatial formation and social justice

Much of his work focused on Los Angeles

His work was influential in bringing spatial perspectives into our understanding of social and historical processes, including justice

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The Spatial Turn

After a quantitative turn in the 1960s and a cultural turn in the 1980s, 1990s began a turn in social and historical disciplines to spatial thinking

People in humanities and other social sciences turning to GIS and spatial theory

Soja: “perhaps never before in the past 150 years has a critical spatial perspective been so widespread and influential”

Spatial thinking now applied to many concepts and processes, including justice

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Spatial Justice:

Soja’s goal was to link together social justice and spatial thinking

Organization of space is a crucial dimension of human societies and reflects social facts and relationships (Lefebvre)

Believed a spatial perspective could help us “make better theoretical and practical sense of how social justice is created, maintained, and brought into question.” (p. 2)

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What shapes the world?

Before spatial turn, most attention was on social and historical analysis

After spatial turn: new attention to space, but there was more attention to how social processes (e.g. race) impact space, than “how geographies actively affect these social processes and forms.” (p. 4)

Some hesitancy to say space had causal power because of the history of environmental determinism

Soja argues space isn’t a passive receptacle

“space is actively involved in generating and sustaining inequality, injustice, economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and discrimination.” (p. 4)

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“space is actively involved in generating and sustaining inequality, injustice, economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and discrimination.” (p. 4)

Examples?

What shapes the world?

Space shapes the social world.

The social world shapes space.

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Socio-spatial dialectic

Prefix “di” means two; so you can think about dialectic in terms of an debate, conversation, or entanglement between two things

“the spatiality of whatever subject you are looking at is viewed as shaping social relations and societal development just as much as social processes configure and give meaning to the human geographies or spatialities in which we live” (p. 4)

“not only does the social comprise the spatial, it is also comprised by it” (p. 5)

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Gerrymandering

Shows “how the political organization of space produces and reproduces spatial (in)justice” based on the drawing of boundaries in an electoral democracy

Apartheid (South Africa)

A “sophisticated strategy specifically designed to produce beneficial geographies for the hegemonic few while creating spatial structures of disadvantage for the rest” (40)

Lasting effects in ”polarized cityscape of fortressed urban extremes”
Underdevelopment produced through discriminatory spatial strategies (akin to core-periphery colonial dynamic)

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So, spatial justice is a way to examine the spatiality of justice and injustice—how space shapes (in)justice and how (in)justice shapes space

Spatial thinking can help us understand processes of injustice, as well as create terrains for resistance!

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How could you apply the socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice to your idea(s) for your final project?

How is social justice shaped by/shaping the spatial in your idea?

Your discussion questions?

Application to final project ideas?

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Soja was particularly interested in the urban condition and the spatial patterns justice in cities.

“The urbanization process and along with it what can be called the urbanization of (in)justice”

The “urban condition has extended its influence to all areas” (e.g. rural, suburban, forest, etc) (p. 6)

“Questions of justice cannot be seen independently from the urban condition, not only because most of the world’s population lives in cities, but above all because the city condenses the manifold tensions and contradictions that infuse modern life.”

--Eric Swyngedouw

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An “intricate web of spatial injustice deeply rooted in the naturalized sanctification of property rights and privileges.”

(p. 44)

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Johannesburg, South Africa

“The rich have always lived behind protective walls of various kinds, physical as well as institutional and psychological.” (42)

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Singapore

Rio de Janerio

Houston

The “deepening chasm between the rich and poor populations of the world is perhaps the most emphatic life-threatening expression of spatial injustice at a global scale.” (44)

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Case Study!

Rio de Janerio, Brazil

How can you apply Soja’s ideas of spatial justice?

How is injustice expressed through public and private space, security-obsessed urbanisms, urbanization, and other issues related covered today?

How can you understand the case study in relation to the right to the city?

How do social processes of (in)justice shape space? How does the spatiality of (in)justice shape social processes? (socio-spatial dialectic)

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A slum in Brazil’s urban areas
6% of Brazil’s population lives in a favela
Late 19^th century, built by soldiers with nowhere to live; later became where many formerly enslaved Africans moved
Today, they are a product of urbanization, as rural people move to city and couldn’t find places to live
Unofficial, unplanned, often without services

Favela

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