Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
by Edward W. Soja

This book contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror or, as Marx called it, an 'unnecessary complication'. Beginning with a critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, the author builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson, and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being.
Soja charts the respatialisation of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of 'flexible accumulation'.
The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.