[spectre] Lectures of Edward Soja

[Geert Lovink]

Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Monday 25th of September at 6 PM 
 
In the framework of the research project of the Centre for Visual 
Culture MOCAB titled Differentiated Neighbourhoods guest lecuturer 
professor Edward W. Soja will give a talk on the topic of:
 
SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE POSTMETROPOLIS
 
About the lecture:
The modern metropolis has been experiencing far-reaching changes over 
the past thirty years.  One of the major features of this 
postmetropolitan transformation, as I will describe it, has been 
intensifying economic inequalities and social polarization, or, in 
other words, increasing social and economic injustices.  I will discuss 
the growing importance of understanding justice from a critical spatial 
perspective both in theory and in political practice.  Social movements 
seeking spatial justice have begun to emerge at many different scales, 
from the global justice movement to the emergence of community-based 
struggles over the “rights to the city,” reviving Henri Lefebvre's old 
idea of “le droit a la ville.”
 
 
Second lecture of professor Soja with the title:
 
THE SPATIAL TURN IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
(National Library of Serbia, Tuesday 26th of September at 7 PM)
 
About the lecture:
A look at the remarkable diffusion of spatial thinking across nearly 
all the social sciences and humanities, after at least a century and a 
half during which time and history were ontologically and 
epistemologically privileged over space and geography.  Particular 
attention will be given to the creative reconfigurations of spatial 
thinking developed in the works of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, 
and to more recent approaches to understanding the generative effect of 
cities and other examples of spatial causality.
 
 
The lecturer:
Professor Soja teaches in the Regional and International Development 
(RID) area of Urban Planning at UCLA. He also teaches courses in urban 
political economy and planning theory. Over the last twenty years 
Edward Soja has focused his research and writing on urban restructuring 
in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and 
regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles bring together 
traditional political economy approaches and recent trends in critical 
cultural studies. Of particular interest to him is the way issues of 
class, race, gender, and sexuality intersect with what he calls the 
spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of 
difference and identity that this generates. 
In addition to his work on urban restructuring in Los Angeles, 
professor Soja continues to write on how social scientists and 
philosophers think about space and geography, especially in relation to 
how they think about time and history. His latest book brings these 
various research strands together in a comprehensive look at the 
geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins to the more recent 
development of what he calls the "postmetropolis." His policy interests 
are primarily involved with questions of regional development, planning 
and governance, and with the local effects of ethnic and cultural 
diversity in Los Angeles. 
  
Selected Publications:  
Soja, E.W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical 
Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989.
Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory 
at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California 
Press. 1996. 
Soja, E.W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other 
Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996. 
Soja, E.W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and 
Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
 
 
On the project:
The project Differentiated Neighbourhoods consists of socio-spatial 
research and artistic intervention in local urban structures.
The project will explore different connotations of the term 
neighborhood, in the vocabulary of its urban, architectural and social 
context. It will comprise of two parallel sets of events:
-          Series of presentations and lectures at the MOCAB by guest 
experts in 2006/2007
-           Workshops, research and art projects of the members of 
initial research group coming from different fields such as sociology, 
urbanism, architecture, art history, visual arts, philosophy that will 
try to address the issue from the perspective of their profession. The 
team has chosen for the case study several neighborhoods in New 
Belgrade.
 
 
Initial research group:
Vera Backović, MA  student of sociology, Belgrade, Serbia; Bik Van der 
Pol, artists Rotterdam, Netherlands; Sabine Bitter  and Helmut Weber, 
artists, Vienna, Austria; Ljiljana Blagojević, professor, Faculty of 
Architecture, Belgrade, Serbia; Adam Budak, curator, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria; Aleksandar Dimitrijević, artist, Belgrade, Serbia; Davor Ereš, 
architect, Belgrade, Serbia; Zoran Erić, curator MOCA, Belgrade, 
Serbia; Sanja Jovović, architect, Belgrade, Serbia Jakob Kolding, 
artist, Copenhagen, Demnark / Berlin, Germany; Milica Lopičić, 
architect, Belgrade, Serbia; Tamara Maričić, urban planner, Belgrade, 
Serbia; Ivana Milenković, architect of the New Belgrade municipality, 
Belgrade, Serbia; Jelena Mitrović, apsolvent student of architecture,  
Belgrade, Serbia; Vesna Pavlović, artist, Belgrade, Serbia / New York, 
USA; Mina Petrović, Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Department 
of Sociology, University of Belgrade, Serbia; Ivan Petrović, film and 
TV director, multimedia proletaire, Belgrade, Serbia; Dunja Predić, 
apsolvent student of architecture, Belgrade, Serbia; Stefan Römer, 
artist and theorist, Munich, Germany; Dubravka Sekulić, apsolvent of 
architecture studies, Belgrade, Serbia; Dušan Šaponja, journalist, RTV 
B92, Belgrade, Serbia