Six Discourses on the
Postmetropolis
by Edward W. Soja
Helen Ho
Nov. 2013
Urban Region of Los Angeles
[Link]
Urban Region of Los Angeles
Orange County
Postmodern fiscal crisis of Orange County in
1994
Postmetropolis
Understanding the postmetropolis requires a
variety of creative recombination of micro
and macro perspectives, views from above
and from below, a new critical synthesis that
rejects the rigidities of either/ or choices for
the both/ and also.
Six Discourses on the
Postmetropolis
FLEXCITY
COSMOPOLIS
EXOPOLIS
METROPOLARITIES
CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS
SIMCITIES
FLEXCITY
On the restructuring of the political economy
of urbanization and the formation of the more
flexibly specialized post- Fordist industrial
metropolis.
FLEXCITY
Continued intimate relation between
industrialisation and urbanisation process.
De-industrialisation has been occurring
alongside a potent re-industrialization process.
built on:
high-technology electronics production
cheap labour-intensive forms of craft production
the expansion of producer-oriented services and
technology
Silicon Valley
[Link]
4ee8be970c0133f2601b0b970b-pi
COSMOPOLIS
On the globalization of urban capital, labour
and culture and the formation of a new
hierarchy of global cities.
COSMOPOLIS
The vanity of the bonFIRES and it referred to
what an over-concentration on the command
and control functions of the FIRE sector
(finance, insurance, real estate) in the global
cities literature and a closely related
overemphasis on two tiny sites where these
commanding bonFIRES appear to be burning
most brightly.
Wall Street in Manhattan
The City in London
The Wall Street
[Link]
EXOPOLIS
On the restructuring of urban form and the
growth of edge cities, outer cities and
postsuburbia: the metropolis turned inside-out
and inside-in.
EXOPOLIS
The growth of Outer Cities and Edge Cities
and other manifestation of the rather
oxymoronic urbanization of suburbia
A dramatic reconstitution of the Inner City:
outmigration of domestic populations
immigration of 'Third World' workers and
cultures
Beijing
[Link]
[Link]
METROPOLARITIES
On the restructured social mosaic and the
emergence of new polarizations and
inequalities.
Attracts largest number of urban sociologists.
METROPOLARITIES
Increasing social inequalities, widening
income gaps, new kinds of social polarization
and stratification that fit uncomfortably within
traditional dualisms based on class (capitallabour) or race (white-black) as well as
conventional upper-middle-lower class models
of urban society.
e.g. dinks, upper professionals, the new
technocracy, the working poor, the new
orphans...
Disparity Gap of the United States
[Link]
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Disparity Gap of the United States
[Link]
CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS
On the rise of fortress cities, surveillant
technologies and the substitution of police for
polis.
CARCERAL ARCHIPELAGOS
City of Quartz, Mike Davis
Los Angeles: fortified city
e.g.
bulging prisons
sadistic street environments
gated and armed-guarded places
high-tech space police
'carceral' technologies of violence and social
control
Gated
[Link]
SIMCITIES
On the restructured urban imaginary and the
increasing hyper reality of everyday life.
SIMCITIES
On the postmetropolis as Simcity, a place
where simulations of a presumably real world
increasingly capture and activate our urban
imaginary and infiltrate everyday urban life.
Hyper-reality
e.g. passing through gates and paying for
admission
Both micro-scale and macro-scale
Disney Land
[Link]
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Orange County
[Link]
[Link]
Orange County
One of the richest, best-educated, and most
staunchly right wing and Republican counties
in the US.
Post-Fordist industrial restructing, Exopolis,
hyper-reality
1994, bankruptcy
Conclusion
We are all living in an increasingly postmordern
world that is creating new contexts and new
challenges that cannot be effectively responded to by
clinging to older ways of thinking and acting
politically.
Urgent for progressive thinkers and actors to resolve
their internal divisions and act together to create an
effective and emancipatory postmodern politics and a
conceptual framework for an also explicitly
postmodern critical urban studies that is appropriately
and effectively attuned to the realities and hyperrealities of the contemporary moment.
The End
Thanks a lot!
