Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

Rating:
Summary: Exciting view of the City
Review: The city as a phenomenon has gone through major changes. Mr Soja displays some extraordinary visions and views of this phenomenon and invites us to an exciting journey of the urban and regional concept.Quite recommendable if you are interested in the subject and already know a bit about it.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful for Grad Students
Review: The core of the book is a section of 6 chapters, each focusing on a key issue of post modern debate about megacities. I found this extremely helpful because each one starts with a list of 20 of the most important books about the issue, and contains Soja's summary of the main arguments of 4 or 5 important writers with occasionally enlightening commentary. It is Soja's own analysis that tends to fall flat, however. He criticizes the traditional left as not understanding the complexeties of modern cities, but the only examples he gives of modern progressive sucess stories are based on the kind of community organization coalitions pioneered by orthodox leftists like Saul Alinsky. Perhaps to counter it being written off so much as an anomoly, Soja overstates the case for Los Angeles as the model postmodern megacity. In order to do that he has to avoid talking about the main difference between it and larger cities like London, New York, Tokyo or São Paulo - its near total lack of what Oldenburg calls 3rd places: public, non-consumerist spaces where people socialize away from work and home. Soja mistakenly labels advocates of pedestrian friendly cities like Jane Jacobs as "nostalgic", ignoring the positive social factors that vibrant street live gives to every other city with over 10 million inhabitants in the World. He is also occasionally misleading in his statistics, repeatedly siting one neighborhood in LA as being more densily populated than the borough of Manhatten (which has a large non-residential business district and two huge parks), downplaying LAs sprawl problem. On the whole, however, it is a very helpful book to read if you are an urban studies student needing to familiarize yourself with current debates in postmodern urban theory.