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Seeking Spatial Justice.
EDWARD SOJA. Minneapolis, 2010: University of
Minnesota Press. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-6668-3,
$24.95
In times of urban crisis, increasing informal
settlements, homelessness, tent cities and
shanty towns, academic critique is pushed
forward to oppose neoliberal urban policies
and to support the ‘cry and demand’ for a just
city and the right to use it. Since Lefebvre’s
work was translated into English in the early
1990s (1991, 1996) contemporary criticism
has (re-)focused on the city’s productive forces
(inhabitants). From a critical perspective, local
inhabitants are not seen as mere consumers or
cost factors but as the ones who make the city
and develop its space. In line with the Marxist
notion of workers, who generate wealth, the
core focus now is on inhabitants who are
expected to centrally create and produce their
urban environment and who should, therefore,
participate and benefit from the production of
space and/or valorisation of their habitat.
Popular grassroots urban movements have
emerged from struggles for basic human
resources (land, water, health, education), and
decent housing. They have most visibly and
coherently developed in Southern and North-
ern America (e.g. the US right to the city alli-
ance), and are predominantly informed by
critical urban scholars seeking alliances with
local forces, seeking social and spatial justice.
Public attention is directed towards the negative
social, political, cultural and environmental
effects that economic globalisation has on cities.
Amid the ‘right to the city’ discourse (Lefebvre
1991,1996),andafterPurcell(2008)Recapturing
Democracy, a number of books have come out in
2010 that contribute to the theoretical founda-
tion of the idea of the just city, for example The
Just City (Fainstein 2010), and to frame the con-
sequenceof social justice in space: spatial justice.
Edward Soja’s new book describes the social
production of space and consequential geog-
raphies. His argument in Seeking Spatial Justice
is at least threefold: (1) to inform readers
about uneven global development schemes
of neoliberal urbanisation and local conse-
quences for social justice in the city; (2) to
introduce and to promote the term ‘spatial
justice’; and (3) to emphasise the inter-
relationship between academics and activists
in local urban struggles – with empirical refer-
ence to UCLA and Los Angeles (e.g. the
Justice Riots 1992).
Soja is clear that his objective is to stimulate
new ways of thinking and acting to change the
unjust geographies in which we live. His book
seeks to promote more progressive and partici-
patory forms of democratic politics and social
activism. His approach is intended to be more
than the claim ‘space matters’ and aims to
strengthen the spatial turn in human geogra-
phy and related interdisciplinary sciences. ‘To
emphasise the consequential spatiality of social
justice and its connections to related notions of
democracy and human rights, I pay particular
attention to the explicit use of the term spatial
justice...Highlighting the socio-spatial dialec-
tic, I also adopt from the start the view that the
spatiality of (in)justice...affects society and
social life just as much as social processes shape
the spatiality or specific geography of (in)jus-
tice’ (p. 5).
In Chapter 1 he sets the stage for his cen-
tral arguments and vocabulary. Here, Soja is
critical of the neoliberal notion of seeking
freedom or liberty, which predominantly
represents a neoconservative logic of a free
market economy or democratic capitalism,
neither of which structurally changes geogra-
phy. Seeking justice, on the other hand, seems
appropriate to Soja, because it seems ‘to be
imbued with a symbolic force that works more
effectively across cleavages of class, race and
gender to foster collective political conscious-
ness’ (p. 21).
To further his argument on the produc-
tion/reproduction of unjust geographies, in
Chapter 2, Soja differentiates three overlap-
ping areas of social action on multiple scales:
(1) exogenous geographies; (2) endogenous
geographies; and (3) mesogeographies of
uneven development.
Exogenous geographies (of power) desc-
ribe a top-down perspective of the macrospatial
imperatives of political power and private prop-
erty rights. Soja is explicitly critical on power
relations and the inalienable right to own prop-
erty, that allow human rights to become subor-
dinated to the primacy of property rights. Like
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© 2011 The Authors
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie © 2011 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
Fainstein (2010), however, he advocates an
incrementalist path to reforming the capitalist
production of space and does not want to ‘to
attack property rights and private property own-
ershipinthemselves,orto call for a revolutionary
transformation’ (p. 46). Endogenous geogra-
phies describe the bottom-up perspective, the
reproduction of discriminatory geographies,
which are not naturally given but socially
(re)constructed. Mesogeographies of uneven
development describe the many regional scales
in-between the global and the local scale: metro-
politan,subnational, national, supranational. In
a context of primarily economic interests, which
increasingly skip the national scale, regional
tradingblocs(EU,NAFTA,MERCOSUR, APEC,
OPEC, OECD and BRIC), are dominant and
governance becomes a major goal in local
struggles. Soja is comfortable at the regional
scale, which he views as the most relevant scale
for contemporary spatial developments. Here,
he calls for a regionalisation of the right to the
city: as democratic regionalism or regional
democracy (p. 66).
In Chapter 3, Soja aims to build a spatial
theory of justice. Introducing the ‘triple dialec-
tic’ or ‘ontological triad’, this conceptualisa-
tion primarily relies on the work of Lefebvre
(1991, 1996), Harvey (1973) and Young (1990)
‘linking dynamically and dialectically the social
and the historical dimensions of individual
and societal development, with the spatiality of
our sociohistorical being’ (p. 70). His mission
becomes quite clear when he states: ‘we are
spatial beings’ (p. 71).
Recalling theories of social justice, Soja sets
out to the Greek polis, and then to the American
and French revolutions, to promote liberty
and freedom. In contrast to Fainstein (2010),
however, Soja criticises John Rawl’s ‘fundamen-
tally aspatial and ahistorical notion of justice’
(p.76),whichonlyseekstonegotiatestaticforms
of social inequality and their unfair outcomes,
rather than the deep structural processes that
produce them. With reference to Lefebvre, Soja
insists on the global phenomenon of uneven
neoliberal urbanisation and the competitive
role cities play to accommodate the accumula-
tion of capital. ‘Things do not just happen in
cities, they happen to a significant extent
becauseof cities’ (p. 97). Lefebvre’s idea that the
survival of capitalism depends fundamentally on
the production of (predominantly urban) space
is one of the strongest assertions of social spati-
ality, Soja states. ‘Moving closer toward a strate-
gic spatial consciousness and thus a spatial
theory of justice, it becomes evident and chal-
lenging that these socially produced geogra-
phies...can be changed or transformed
through human agency...Human geogra-
phies are not merely external containers, given
and immutable. Their changeability is crucial’
(p. 104).
In Chapter 4, Soja provides rich empirical
data on Los Angeles and a good overview of
post-Fordist urban restructuring in one of
the former epicentres of US industrial mass
production. He places special emphasis on
community organisation, social movement
mobilisation and the urban riots, the Watts
Riots in 1965, the Justice Riots in 1992 and the
disruptive events after 9/11 in 2001 in Los
Angeles. Describing LA’s urban transforma-
tion, Soja is eager to stress the argument that
‘the restructuring process has built into it a
powerful tendency toward increasing economic
inequality and social polarisation’ (p. 118).
Reporting on the erosion of the middle class
and the widening income divide between the
rich and poor, he states: ‘Today, the poverty
rate and income gap in the United states are
the highest among the advanced industrial
countries and are accompanied by persistently
high rates of infant mortality and adult illit-
eracy, and lower life expectancy than in many
less developed countries’ (p. 119).
Soja is careful to detect the social and spatial
transformation not as ‘inevitable by-product’ of
global economic development – what some
scholars have called casino capitalism – but
focuses on the local production process and the
many workers’ lives that are attached to it. He
reports on the decline of the White working
class and emergence of a Latino majority and
Spanish as the dominant everyday language of
Los Angeles (as it was 150 years ago).
In Chapter 5, he documents the engagement
of critical academics at UCLA, who have shown
strong ‘commitment to participatory democ-
racy’ (p. 160), by supporting local struggles
for adequate social benefits and space. This
engagement ‘revolved not around paid consul-
tancy with governments and large funding
agencies but on voluntary assistance to and edu-
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© 2011 The Authors
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie © 2011 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
cational emphasis on constituencies usually
given little attention by university researchers
and professors’ (p. 157). Academic resources
and research facilitated rent control activism,
stimulated discourses around spatial feminism
and environmental justice and played a crucial
role in setting up the first national meeting of
the US right to the city alliance in Los Angeles.
Soja is successful in making a strong argument
for local inhabitants producing space and fight-
ing for the right to use it and this book reads
much like a handbook to the social production
of space, which he calls ‘spatial justice’. It is a
good introduction to the work of Lefebvre and
Harvey and ideal for undergraduate planning
students. Informed readers, however, may
notice a certain redundancy as many of these
arguments have appeared in Soja’s previous
work. His attempt to promote the term ‘spatial
justice’, however, was not convincing to me.
Spatial justice, understood as ‘consequence’
of social (inter)action and (in)justice in space
may be an accurate academic expression but
has its weaknesses. First, if we follow Soja’s argu-
ment and his reading of Lefebvre asserting that
the greatest struggle is among urban develop-
ments, and that the urban affects rural develop-
ments significantly, one conclusion would be to
pacify the urban and introduce urban justice
first. Urban justice would consequently allevi-
ate (market) pressure from the rural and serve
local needs. Second, academic accuracy does
not necessarily support social movement activ-
ists. Overemphasising the abstract spatialisa-
tion of justice can lead to the old container trap
and the question: filled with what? Though the
social is implied in the notion of ‘spatial’
justice, it contributes confusion; for whom is
justice served? At this point radical environ-
mentalist and/or vegan activists may cheer for
life on this planet in favour of flora and fauna –
being freed from humanity.
After all, Soja has introduced an academic
term to describe the urbanisation of (in)justice
and socio-spatial environment we live in –
whether urban or not. Soja has made an impor-
tant contribution in summarising spatial
discourses (and prominent scholars) around
justice – territorial justice, geography of social
justice, urbanisation of injustice, right to the
city – but I am not sure, if he succeeds in his
argument for a new term here.
References
Fainstein, S. (2010), The Just City. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991), Production of Space. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (1996), Writings on Cities. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Purcell, M. (2008), Recapturing Democracy. New
York: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Young, I.M. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference.
Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.
University of Groningen Tino Buchholz
Traditional Food Production and Rural Sustainable
Development: a European Challenge.
TERESA DE NORONHA VAZ, PETER NIJKAMP
& JEAN-LOUIS RASTOIN, eds., Farnham, 2009:
Ashgate. 300 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-7462-7, £65
Traditional Food Production and Rural Sustainable
Development: a European Challenge is a volume
that is interesting both for specialists and non-
specialists in the agro-food sector in Europe.
The quality of the book is guaranteed by the
editors and by the series in which it is published
(Ashgate Economic Geography Series). With
this volume, the reader is introduced to the
world of agri-food and rural development.
The introductory chapter by Vaz and
Nijkamp sets the scope: ‘the volume addresses
the importance of traditional food production
against the background of dramatic changes in
the European scene’. Here the question is
posed if a positive development of traditional
food production could solve both environmen-
tal, rural development and policy problems.
After this short chapter, the book is divided
into three parts. One on sustainability and
rurality, the second on markets and globalisa-
tion, and the third on market segmentation in
relation to traditional food.
The first chapter of the first part (Chapter 2),
by the third editor Rastoin, tells us that the
current development of the global agro-food
system is not sustainable, both because of
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Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie © 2011 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
