Speaker:

Edward Soja, Distinguised Professor Ereritus of Urban Planning, UCLA

MELLICHAMP GLOBAL STUDIES LECTURE

Globalization As Urbanization
EDWARD SOJA
Distinguised Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA

Thursday, February 6, 2014
4:00 p.m.
SSMS 2135 (2nd floor conference room)

An attempt to redefine globalization beyond the global spread of capital, labor, and culture. Capital, labor, and culture are combined in the globalization of urban industrial capitalism, with the urban in the sense of the generative power of cities, emphasized. The majority of the world's population today not only lives in cities but is becoming increasingly concentrated in the 500 or so globalized city regions of more than a million. The largest 40 of these "megacity regions" contain 18% of the world's population but concentrate more than half of the world's wealth and more than 75% of all innovations--reflecting the enormous generative power of cities. I will trace the development over time of these megacity regions and argue that this is leading to an urbanization of the entire world, from the Amazon rainforest to the Siberia tundra, the Sahara desert to the Antarctic icecap. On a more local level, it is transforming the modern metropolis and causing a paradigmatic shift from a metropolitan model of the city to what can be described as regional urbanization. Among its major effects, regional urbanization is erasing the classic division and dualism between the urban and suburban in what are being called outer cities, edge cities, boomburbs, and in China chengzhongcun.

Author of Postmodern Geographies: The Ressertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000). Seeking Spatial Justice (2010) won Honorable Mention for both the C. Wright Mills Award (for best book in the social sciences) and the Paul Davidoff Award (best book in progressive planning). Out just now is My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization, UC Press. He is currently writing a quasi-novel on the urbanization and agricultural development of hunting and gathering bands in Anatolia 12,000 years ago.