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BOOK REVIEW

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies ofCities and Regions

reviewed byCarl Grodach

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Edward Soja.Blackwell Publishers. Oxford. 2000. 440 pp. ISBN 157718003 (cloth),ISBN 1577180011 (paper).

InPostmetropolis, Edward Soja foresees the day when tourists entering Los Angeles will be provided with avisitors passbook to hundreds of cultural worlds, with rights to one meal in an appropriately ethnic restau-rant, an authentic cultural encounter, a musical event, and a brief language lesson (342). Actually, the day mayalready be here. The Los Angeles Visitors Bureau has produced a film geared toward the regional tourismindustry to call attention to the touristic potential of Los Angeles ethnic neighborhoods and businesses.This simcity is one of six manifestations of what Soja characterizes as the postmetropolis. Six discourses

thepostfordist industrial metropolis, cosmopolis, exopolis, thefractal city, thecarceral archipelagoand thesimcityrep-resent the postmetropolis, and in particular, Los Angeles, as a multinodal urban agglomeration in which newurbanization processes are emerging.

FollowingPostmodern GeographiesandThirdspace, which both influenced the recent spatial turn among a diversearray of academic disciplines,Postmetropolisis the denouement of Sojas trilogy of critical urban and regionalstudies. In addition to continuing his pioneering work on the spatiality of social life,Postmetropoliscan also beread as a conceptual framework for the new regionalism. In each of the three parts that comprise the book

(primarily in the first two) Soja constructs an explicitly spatial and historical narrative to justify and demon-strate the theoretical power of a regional approach. Part 1 situates the urbanization of human thought andbehavior into 11,000 years of regional geohistory. Part 2 outlines the six representations of thepostmetropolis listed above to demonstrate the distinctive features of todays urban regionalism. Part 3 con-sists primarily of quotations drawn from commentary that revolved around the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings

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following the trial of Rodney King. As such, whilethe purpose ofPostmetropolisis not to empiricallyapply a total regional approach, it lays the theoreticalgroundwork for new directions in regional planning.

In Part 1:RemappingtheGeohistory of Cityspace, Sojaestablishes the new regional consciousness by con-structing an alternative narrative of urbanization thatsituates the region as an historical fact of social lifeand human history. He embeds the terminology ofthe new regionalism into the history of urbanizationto legitimate its vocabulary and to assert these con-cepts as intrinsic to human development. As such,regional thinking is essentially the culmination of

11,000 years of urban agglomerations. Soja arrangeshis history of city development as a set of spatialmyths, that is, the reinterpretation of three urbanrevolutions: pre-agricultural settlements of hunters,gatherers and traders; the formation of the city-state;and the industrial capitalist city.

In reinventing the origins and development of ur-

banization, Soja seeks to reveal alternative perspec-tives on urban history. With each period, asynekismproduces an increasing need and desire for more in-tense interdependencies and politicaland culturalconventions necessary to the urban agglomerationsthat have propelled social development since thedawn of humankind.Synekisma term Soja disin-

ters to describe the stimulus of urban agglomera-tionis an ancient Greek concept that refers to anetwork of urban settlements within regionalboundaries, where innovation, growth and develop-ment occur. It is through such competitivelearningthat cities have evolved. I must stress, however, that

Sojas reconstitution of the historical roots of re-gional planning is not simply to sanction these rootsas historical fact. More importantly, it is an attemptto abolish the notion of cities and nations asbounded and atomized entities where the flow ofpeople, goods and ideas remain contained within

isolated spaces.

Moreover, Soja continually makes the point that,today, the postmetropolis attracts and participates inthe economies and cultures of the entire globe. Intodays urbanized areas, boundaries are porous andill-definedhence the growing attention to regionalthinking.This sentiment is made most cogently in

the core of the book, Part 2:Six Discourses on thePostmetropolis, in which Soja examines how scholarshave attempted to make sense of contemporary pro-cesses of urbanization.

What Soja characterizes as thepostfordist industrialmetropolisis most closely associated with, and mostactively conceptualized by, the new regionalism.

Those who study the postmetropolis under this lensexamine the role of industrial production within theprocesses of postfordist economic restructuring,flexible accumulation and geographically uneven de-velopment. In particular, this scholarship examinesthe geographic intricacies of the deindustrializationand de-territorialization of fordist economies, and

their reconstitution into more flexible, and oftenregional, forms of production and location deci-sions. Furthermore, the significance of the regiontakes on increasing analytic power as the migrationof culture, labor and capital intensify at a global scale.

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No longer is the nation-state the unchallenged centerof economic, political and social life. As Soja pointsout, new forms of economic organization, culturalidentity and citizenship have emerged at regional andtransnational levels amidst global restructuring.

Contemporary theories of globalization, which Sojasummarizes under the headingCosmopolis, engage ina rethinking of this ubiquitous term. The most re-cent theories attempt to break down the global/ localdichotomy that characterized past scholarship onuneven development to examine the vast flows ofinternational capital and culture entangled in the pro-cesses of restructuring. Consequently, these writings

also point out that the nation-state, while still ex-tremely powerful economically, politically and ideo-logically, is no longer the only territorial delineationof cultural identity and economic organization. Like-wise, with the rise of flexible production, new formsof government are necessary to support new formsof capital accumulation and divisions of labor.

Cognitively, if not physically, territories are beingremapped and reconstituted. New coalitions andprofessional and group affiliations are characterizinglocal, regional and national spaces, and new forms ofregional power have emerged (for example, andmost prominently, the European Union).

Soja uses the termsexopolisand thefractal cityto

identify some of the major social and geographicoutcomes of restructuring. Exopolis captures thephysical mass of postsuburban development. Theeconomic changes wrought under the postfordisteconomy have generated vast new built environ-

ments and have intensified social stratification. Outof exopolis come the fictional histories (249) ofthe new urbanismits residents clinging to an imag-ined pastas well as an inner city which increasinglyfunctions as a dormitory of transplanted, flexible,third world labor. Simultaneously, young urban pro-

fessionals colonize downtown territory to set up amythical urban life, while ethnic minorities claim thesuburbs. Exopolis is indeed the city both turnedinside-out and outside-in, twisted and densely lay-ered, for as demographics belie a simple urban-sub-urban dichotomy, somehow the city still retains in-tensified social and spatial polarization.

Likewise, the fractal city is meant to characterize in-creasing social and spatial inequality and polarizationemerging within the geography of postfordism. Therestructured social mosaic (265) that distinguishesmany city-regions, however, is also marked by therise of new space-based social movements and a po-litical consciousnesswhich Soja touches on in Part

3 as wellthat is slowly being defined at a regionallevel by groups in LA such as the Los Angeles BusRiders Union (BRU) and the Los Angeles Alliancefor a New Economy (LAANE).1

Thecarceral archipelagoand thesimcityreflect differentways that social control is instituted in cities and re-gions. Out of the restructuring of public and private

space, the carceral archipelago fashions increasinglybalkanized private spaces and fosters the idea of adiminishing classical public realm that separates socialgroups both physically and psychologically. Thesimcity describes a softer manipulation of social per-

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ception and the power of the urban imaginary toinfluence not only popular taste but also civic con-sciousness. Ultimately, both obscure the possibilitiesfor spatial coalitions and the perception of commonsituations between socially disparate groups.

In Part 3,Lived Space: Rethinking1992 in Los Angeles,the book concludes with a fascinating array of quota-tions that reconstruct the multiple perspectives sur-rounding the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings followingthe Rodney King trial. While perhaps lengthier thannecessary, Sojas cut-and-paste approach succeeds intransporting the reader to multiple spaces and experi-ences around the city that a more analytic or objective

account could not possibly provide. From here, as inPart 2, Soja touches on the current struggles towardspatial justice and regional democracy within LA.

Postmetropolisreaches across disciplinary boundaries inits conceptualization of the city-region and the mul-tiple, colliding processes of urbanization. Sojas sixrepresentation types demonstrate that urban and

regional change cannot be mapped or conceptualizedsimply in economic terms, by studying demographicmovement or by mapping changes in urban mor-phology. The major strength ofPostmetropolislies inits ability to synthesize many of the major issues inurban and regional studies that are often negotiatedseparately. This comprehensiveness makes the book

an ideal text for an introductory course in urban andregional studies. However, some might find thisstrength the books primary flaw. Beyond the histori-

cal interpretations of Part 1,Postmetropolisdoes notassert any radically new theoretical insights in and ofthemselves. And, despite the books comprehensive-ness, some large omissions occur. Some readers mayfind the lack of non-western cases problematic, espe-cially in the context of globalization. Others may

find discussion of environmental regionalism con-spicuously absent.

Soja does, however, open many new and excitingperspectives to the reader. He masterfully synthesizesthe scattered interpretative strategies typically em-ployed to make sense of contemporary urbanizationand commands huge amounts of theoretical and

empirical material in the process.Postmetropolisis aninvitation to new explorations that will definitelyinform urban and regional planning studies in thefuture. As Iain Chambers explains, the metropolisis, above all, a myth, a tale, a telling that helps someof us to locate our home in modernity, there to findthe new gods, the new myths.(71). Quite simply,

Sojas reinvention of the region is to postmodernityas the metropolis was to modernity. InPostmetropolis,the region is a new tool for grasping recent transfor-mations in political, ideological and economicspheres, and a framework for thought and action.

Endnotes1BRU works toward improving the availability and

affordability of mass transit for the working poor inthe Los Angeles region. LAANE seeks to mobilizedisenfranchised groups in Los Angeles through ac-tions such as the Living Wage Campaign.

CARL GRODACH (cwg@ucla.edu) is a doctoral s tudent in the Depar tment of Urban Planning at UCLA.