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Response to Kurt Iveson: Social orSpatial Justice? Marcuse and
Soja onthe Right to the CityEdward W. SojaPublished online: 01 Jun
2011.
To cite this article: Edward W. Soja (2011) Response to Kurt
Iveson: Social or Spatial Justice?Marcuse and Soja on the Right to
the City, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory,
policy,action, 15:2, 260-262, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.568719
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CITY, VOL. 15, NO. 2, APRIL 2011
ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/11/020260-03 2011
Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.568719
Response to Kurt Iveson: Social or Spatial Justice? Marcuse and
Soja on the Right to the City
Edward W. SojaTaylor and
FrancisCCIT_A_568719.sgm10.1080/13604813.2011.568719City: Analysis
of Urban Trends1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629
(online)Article2011Taylor & Francis152000000April
[email protected] thanks to Kurt Iveson for dealing
sosensitively and insightfully with the overlap-ping but different
approaches to justice andthe right to the city that Peter Marcuse
and Ihave been developing in recent years. Whileour mutual
interrogation about the social andpolitical meaning of space may
have peakedpublicly in the Henri Lefebvre amphitheaterat the
University of Nanterre in 2008almost at the exact site where the
explosionof unrest in Paris was initiated 40 yearsearlierwe have
been debating about spaceand justice well before the conference
onJustice et Injustices Spatiales.1 Some addi-tional background
might help readers under-stand better our mutually
supportiveagreements and friendly differences.
Our discussions of space and justice begansoon after I joined
the Urban Planningprogram at UCLA in 1972. At that timePeter, an
accomplished lawyer, was a profes-sor of Urban Planning at UCLA and
hadrecently been appointed to the RegionalPlanning Commission of
the County of LosAngeles. He had already begun a lifetime
ofthinking and writing about planning theoryand the ethics of the
planning profession. Asa young, boisterous, almost obsessive
geogra-pher, I tried to convince Peter to add a signif-icant
spatial dimension to his critical andnormative approaches to
planning theory andpractice. Always willing to listen, Peterwould
smile while making it clear that myarguments needed more careful
honing to beaccepted by his agile but always skeptical
legal mind. I was literally forced to rest mycase but invited to
try again. Peter was unlikeany of my more academic colleagues,
withouta competitive ego (at least on the surface),politically and
philosophically committed yetremarkably open to alternative
viewpoints, acritical legal scholar of the highest caliber.
Peter would leave UCLA several years aftermy arrival but we
remained intermittently incontact and over the past 20 years our
globalcircuits began to intersect in such places asBerlin,
Berkeley, Heidelberg and Paris. Everychance I had, I tried
different ways to convincePeter that space mattered much more than
hewould admit. Whether it was my argumenta-tion, or the
transdisciplinary resurgence ofinterest in space that has been
occurring thepast 15 years, or his renewed attachment toLefebvres
ideas about the right to the city(after all, le droit translates as
both right andlaw in French), Peter clearly began to
thinkdifferently about the meaning of space. Seek-ing the best way
to put space into its properintellectual and political place, Peter
reached anew stage in his contribution to the 2008conference and
2010 book on Justice et Injus-tices Spatiales, the focus of Ivesons
thoughtfulpaper. While recognizing some degree ofspatial causality
in aggravating injustices andaccepting the need to address
seriously thespatial aspects of how justice is formed
andexperienced, however, he continued to see thespatiality of
justice as derivative of socialjustice and ultimately a product of
(non-spatial?) social, economic and political forces.
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SOJA: RESPONSE TO KURT IVESON 261
I could end my response to Ivesons paperhere, with appreciation
for how far Peter hascome in his thinking about space. Social
injus-tices always have a spatial aspect, he affirms,and
insightfully identifies involuntaryconfinement (e.g. forced
segregation) and theunequal allocation/distribution of resourcesas
primary forms of spatial injustice. Withregard to seeking a more
just city, mobilizingand organizing the deprived and
alienatedaround the right to the city idea, and fosteringthe
further development of critical urbanstudies, we overlap so much
that our differ-ences become far less important than
ourconcurrences.
But, as Iverson writes, some significantdifferences remain. From
my view, for exam-ple, Peter is still captured by the long
tradi-tion of social historicism that has beenparticularly
difficult to shake among the bestradical thinkers and activists.
Giving equalforce and mutual causality to social andspatial
processes, what I have called thesocio-spatial dialectic, continues
to triggerpolitical and intellectual anxieties, a feelingthat such
spatializing goes too far and mayopen the door to reactionary
forces, whatI guess might be seen as false and politicallydivisive
spatial consciousness. Peter Marcuseis such an outstanding social
historicistscholar and lawyer, however, and so demand-ing of
unquestionable evidence before chang-ing his opinion on major
philosophical issues,that I no longer feel capable of convincinghim
to go any further in his thinking aboutthe spatiality of
justice.
Nevertheless, I do want to make one finalattempt to convince
Peter to expand hisspatial imagination still further. My
argumenthere revolves around the recent revival of theright to the
city idea, especially in its originaland more radical Lefebvrean
form. Asmentioned earlier, thinking about the right tothe city as a
means of achieving urban justicemay partially explain why Peter has
becomemore accepting, or perhaps it is less skeptical,about spatial
causality and the spatiality of(in)justice. I wonder, however,
whether it ispossible to embrace and promote the right to
the city idea as Lefebvre originally presentedit without also
accepting Lefebvres unmiti-gated and uncompromising arguments
abouturban spatial causality and how society andspace are mutually
formative, with neither thesocial nor the spatial privileged over
the other.
It is worthwhile remembering that Lefeb-vres assertive spatial
perspective and implicitcritique of social historicism in the late
1960sand early 1970s triggered reactions from suchradical thinkers
as David Harvey and ManuelCastells that were remarkably similar
toPeters current positioning: that the spatial isalways derivative
of the social, always partialin its causal effects, even slightly
dangerous toover-emphasize, edging toward a kind offetishism. For
the then Althusserian Castells inThe Urban Question (1972),
Lefebvre repre-sented the left-wing version of the ChicagoSchools
spatially determinative ideology,wherein the city takes the place
of explana-tion. In the end, after praising Lefebvresurban and
spatial insights, Harvey agreed withCastells in Social Justice and
the City (1973)that Lefebvre may have gone too far in
hisspatializing.
Interestingly enough, David Harveysrecent embrace and promotion
of the right tothe city idea, as I discuss in detail in
SeekingSpatial Justice, has built upon several brave ifstill
cautious admissions that he may have beenwrong in his earlier
critiques of Lefebvresassertive spatial perspective. What I am
imply-ing here is that Peter Marcuses normativesearch for the just
city, his version of criticalurban studies and planning theory, and
hiscontinued privileging of social historicismmake his work
incompatible with Lefebvresassertively spatial version of the
struggle overthe right to the city. Peter is always able to usehis
legal skills to argue creatively around theedges of major
philosophical and politicalideas, but for him to advance the
multiscalarstruggles over the right to the city will requireseveral
steps further in the development of hiscritical spatial
perspective.
To say much more takes us back into myearlier discussions of
ontology and the socio-spatial dialectic. But enough is enough
on
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262 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 2
this. To conclude, however, it is necessary torestate the core
political argument of SeekingSpatial Justice. However one sees the
relationbetween spatial and social justice, seekingspecifically
spatial justice can add new andinteresting strengths and strategies
to justicestruggles of all kinds, and especially to thebuilding of
cohesive, lasting and innovativecoalitions across divisive lines of
class, raceand gender. Thinking spatially will not solveall
problems nor will it guarantee politicalsuccess. The opposition can
and does thinkspatially too, for there is nothing
inherentlyprogressive or radical about it. Seekingspatial justice
takes nothing away from thesearch for social justice. It adds to
it.
Note
1 1 Whether our co-presence in Paris added an east coast vs.
west coast flavor to the proceedings is probably exaggerated, as
was, by the way, the imposition of an eastwest/gritfluff division
regarding Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, the murdered gangsta
rappers mentioned by Iveson. In addition, Peter and I are much too
friendly, respectful and bicoastal to fit such an analogy.
Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor ofUrban Planning at
the UCLA School ofPublic Affairs, and for many years wasCentennial
Visiting Professor in the CitiesProgramme, London School of
Economics.Email: [email protected]
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