Griffin’s Book Review of Seeking Spatial Justice

Seeking Spatial Justice by Edward W. Soja explores space, spatiality and

advises readers to reconceptualize space as a concept and what justice looks like from

a spatial perspective. This book prompts us to think about what spatial justice is and

could look like. However, the book is lacking clarity in answering the main important

question: what is spatial justice? The book does invite the reader to conceptualize

space differently, and dispels notions such as environmental determinism. Soja argues

that as opposed to location, spatial relations (which are social in nature), and the

outcomes of these relations, lead to oppression or flourishing and many perspectives

neglect to pay attention or acknowledge these processes. Soja also dispels the notion

that space is a void we fill, and argues that social and political relations produce space.

The theory of the book is well-written, and serves as an important introduction to

thinking and conceptualizing about space, about space as social and about spatial

justice, particularly from the context of Los Angeles in California.

In the book, Soja considers seeking spatial justice in LA and LA’s resilient activist

base within the continued history of community unionism post 9/11, which had three

major outcomes that affected LA and the search for spatial justice. Job loss in the labor

movement was notable, as many unionized workers in positions deemed to be

important to national security, such as contracted airport security workers, were

replaced with federal civil service employees. This meant that airport security was now

a government worker filled position and thousands of people found themselves jobless.

Regressive economic policies also were prominent during this period. Without the fear

propagated by 9/11, and encouraged by officials and corporations, many proposed-and

passed-policy measures would have been seen by the public as infringements on civil

liberties and as prone to promoting injustices. The newly formed Office of Homeland

Security for example proposed cuts to many welfare programs including jobs training,

health centers, childcare, and education. The third major outcome was anti-immigration

hysteria, this outcome has mostly inflated in the U.S. in the years post 9/11, wherein

federal officers and voluntary vigilantes perceive a higher level of threat and mobilize to

prevent any ‘alien incursion’ from breaching the U.S. borders at all costs-including

murder.

Given that LA was at this point highly populated by immigrants and known for

leadership in grassroots organizing, one might have expected LA’s search for spatial

justice and activism to come to an abrupt halt, however, precisely because of the

strength and continued history of these community-coalitions, many

community-coalitions came together with other community-coalitions to create even

bigger coalitions to confront difficulties presented by new policies that were aimed at

labor and immigrants. Soja claims that the weathering of 9/11 by these movements has

also preserved their focus on seeking spatial justice and points to more recent LA-based

projects as examples including the rise in use of Community Benefit

Agreements, successful struggles against Wal-Mart, and the forming of the National

Right to the City Alliance.

Soja points to these efforts as hope and continuation of the search for spatial

justice but also offers us a few calls and conclusions. Now that there is an established

spatial perspective to draw upon, Soja notes that it can be improved in that it must

recognize the spatiality of our lives, how the social and spatial intertwine and the

consequences of what they produce: “oppressive or enabling geographies” (191).

Soja then concludes with reflection on a quote from David Harvey in which

Harvey states “If the crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization, then the solution should

be urbanization of a different sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city

becomes crucial…” (198). Soja agrees but offers four qualifications for the readers’

consideration: first, struggles over the right to the city must not be reduced only to

struggles over capitalism because there are multiple forces shaping spatial justice and

injustice beyond economics. Second, coalitions and mobilization must remain open to

multiple constituencies and when necessary strange bedfellows. Third coalition building

must not be confined to city-dwellers. This is a call back to the introduction of the book

in which Soja points out that “everywhere is being urbanized” and therefore urbanization

is affecting everyone. Finally, Soja asserts that spatial justice must connect more

closely, and align itself with environmental justice efforts.

Soja structures this book by introducing the concept of space, geography and justice.

Then an explanation of what made the Planning program at UCLA unique in order to

give the reader insight as to why the university was uniquely involved in LA’s grassroots

and labor movements and to illustrate how a widespread integration of spatial theory may

have made its way into these efforts. Then a look at relatively recent efforts and possibilities

for the future of seeking spatial justice. Many of the aims of these chapters, Soja communicated

with stories of activism and labor movements in LA and their quests in seeking justice, which

was necessarily spatial to begin with, and became intentionally so as community

unionism and partnerships with UCLAUP deepened. Though many of Soja’s

explanations were surface level or lacked a desired depth, an understanding of spatial

justice, what it means, and what it has looked like for Los Angeles comes through.

Seeking Spatial Justice ultimately offers a lens through which the reader can

situate the spatial as social and the social as spatial within the context of urban

injustice. Particularly, Soja introduces the reader to spatial justice as a concept itself

and, key to it, the right to the city. The aim of the book is to outline a meaning of spatial

justice, and while Soja does do this, I think more depth is needed. Readers are left with

the definition introduced on page 7, in which seeking spatial justice is explained as the

process of following “a demand for greater control over how the spaces in which we live

are socially produced wherever we may be located…” This is considered “synonymous”

 with spatial justice in Soja’s words, but also appears to be synonymous with the Right to

the City in Lefebvre’s as “the need for those most negatively affected by the urban

condition to take greater control over the social production of urbanized space” (7).

However, the distinction that seems important to me here is that seeking spatial justice

can be considered when pursuing the right to the city. The book is informative and intriguing,

a great introduction for proposing we think about space as social in character and particularly

how it is produced in the context of the urban, and what that means. Although it has some

surface level explanations and leaves the reader with a feeling that the discussion is not quite

finished, the book is formative and worth reading and propels the reader to think about and

include seeking spatial justice in their academic endeavors.