Transcript Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis by Edward W. Soja

Six Discourses on the
Postmetropolis
by Edward W. Soja
Helen Ho
Nov. 2013
Urban Region of Los Angeles
http://www.americanhomeshow.net/losangeles/images/losangeles.pic.9.jpg
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
http://www.iappcontest.com/.a/6a01310f
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
http://binary-options-strategy.info/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Wall-Street-Exposed.jpg
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
http://www.kotoc114.com/data/cheditor4/1308/nlk
PbRkXZOATmQHA8UB1GSHGq.jpg
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ70hiltO
dw
Disparity Gap of the United States
http://mrhyper.blogspot.tw/2013/03/blogpost.html
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
http://pic1a.nipic.com/2008-1215/20081215135658545_2.jpg
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
http://www.google.com.tw/imgres?um=1&b
iw=1366&bih=620&hl=zh-
Orange County
http://img.realtor.com/california/orange.gif
http://www.carolmendelmaps.com/mapla/soc.gif
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!