Interview: Edward Soja

Edward Soja teaches in the Regional and International Development (RID) area of Urban Planning and also teaches courses in urban political economy and planning theory at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. After starting his academic career as a specialist on Africa, Dr. Soja has focused his research and writing over the past 20 years on urban restructuring in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and regions.

How do you characterise the present debate or dialogue concerning religion and the public sphere?

My interest always revolves around one thing and it's been that way all my life, and that's around space and a spatial perspective. My attention to religion has derived from the fact that religious studies and critics of religious studies have begun seriously to entertain and spatial perspective. So that's how I became involved with a number of religious debates. One in Manchester, one in Chicago School of Divinity, and then involved in some of their publications. The one in Chicago was called 'Without Nature', and they drew upon a variety of disciplines and I was included for that. They were curious about disciplines that had defined religious beliefs or non-religious beliefs that changed the very nature of the concept of human nature and physical nature. And what that would mean for religious debates. Again, biologists beginning to see chemical and other causes for human nature and behaviour and my work basically saying that the social production of space has transformed nature, physical nature or first nature, and created a second-nature. And that I'm still following in my own work at the moment which is very weirdly going back eleven or twelve thousand years to the Neolithic origins of urbanisation.

Do you sense that the relationship between urbanisation and globalisation and I suppose capitalism - does the twenty-first century feel different to the nineteenth and twentieth when it comes to how religion is involved in those kind of broader dynamics?

From my perspective back into the spatial, yes there has been a significant spatial turn in a wide variety of disciplines in recent years. It seems to be particularly active in religious studies broadly defined. Certainly the twenty-first century is the century in which space is taken more seriously than it has been before. So religious debate is now opening up. The other part of what I argue in my maximum interpretation of the spatial turn, is that all the stuff that we've been writing for the last two hundred years has some flaws in it. Many of the ideas don't take space seriously or exaggerate the importance of time and history. So that now, once we start flexing our spatial muscles in the same way as we flex our historic muscles, new insights are going to open up. Major revisions of old ideas are going to take place. So that's the exciting part of the spatial turn. It's opening up radically new ways of thinking about everything. Religion is one of those areas. I don't follow the debates on religion, but appreciate the new spatial emphasis. There was a big conference I went to, 'God, space and the city' I think in Manchester. And at the conference I was told that my work was particularly hot in the field of eschatology. And I said, what's going on, what are you doing with me and my work? They answered that my concept of Thirdspace gave them three rather than two ways to look at heaven, hell, and other eschatological issues, so they're attracted to the Thirdspace argument. It doesn't go very much further than that. I guess partly what I'm saying that relates to your question is that there is a sort of desacralisation taking place of religion, and sort of opening it up to a more widely adoptable perspective on religious issues, such as secularisation of religion. I can see some of the spatial stuff contributing to it. I can see this connection being made but again, my position revolves entirely around some form of spatial thinking.

I remember towards the end of the Thirdspace book, you were talking about progressive confederacies of groups in civil society who were working together for progressive urban change around issues like transport. And I think I recall you mentioned faith-groups as being part of that progressive confederacy. Has the role of religion in politics changed since you wrote that book do you think?

Well I also wrote Seeking Spatial Justice published in 2010. I guess yes, there has been much greater involvement of religious groups in political issues of various types including urban kinds of social movements. That's likely to continue and that's certainly an important issue. Again I mentioned the groups in LA, and Reverend Richard Gillett who has been involved in almost every progressive movement in LA in the past several decades. And the group he helped to found, Clergy and Laity United for Economic justice or CLUE, they've been deeply involved. I discovered that i critical religious studies involve some very sophisticated people. Their whole essence is to develop and react to different ways of critically thinking about the world in terms of its implications for religious issues. And so there aren't very many critical theorists of any type who are more actively engaging with most current beliefs and ideas in critical studies. Hence the spatial turn in religious studies, because these folk in critical studies are looking out all over the place for new ideas and they discovered the spatial turn and are taking it seriously. I was quite impressed. They know all this stuff and it's at the heart of what they do.

I think the spatial turn is something that's certainly been around for the last ten years or so. And I suppose the other thing that you're referring to is in a sense what this project is trying to tease out, especially the growing interdisciplinarity around these issues. The analysis and interpretation of urban space and urban futures is not just located within the domain critical human geography but other disciplines are certainly getting involved. I think a lot of people recognise that we are becoming more urbanised and therefore the urban and the spatial are these defining areas of experience. They are struggles to catch up with what's actually happening within spatial arenas.

The other side of that is that critical spatial studies is inherently eclectic and multidisciplinary. And it's been that way for the last many years. Postmodern geography was a kind of release, suggesting that you could do a wide variety of things quite different from what tradition dictated. It opened up new areas in psychoanalysis, in religion, in law, and gender issues and so on. So yes, interdisciplinarity is there. The importance of the urban has never been greater. I'm absolutely intrigued by the discovery of some of the geographical economists that agglomeration generates economic development, technological change and cultural creativity more than anything else. And I'm stunned why everybody isn't doing this, joining to find out how it works. And that's partly what I'm doing eleven thousand years ago, trying to see what was being generated from the world’s first permanent urban settlements, including the agricultural revolution.

Where do you see this debate going in the next five to ten years, this debate around religion and the public space or the urban space? Do you have any sense of any particular changes in that debate or discussion from your perspective?

I think when you mention things like interdisciplinarity, this also relates to this kind of work. You're likely to see progressive religious groups more and more involved. And that's likely to continue. But it reminds me of some of the debates in more egotistical fields such as architecture, where they think well they're going to take the lead in everything urban. But soon most realize that they are not going to lead but be part of a team. And I think that's what's going to be happening with religious groups. They're not going to be able to struggle over independent issues of religion but they're going to have to participate in a larger political frame in terms of a collective coalition building with religious organisations playing and increasing role. I think that's likely to continue and it's an exciting area for religious studies. Again the larger issues are how these broader social movements arise, how they act, and what they struggle for.

So you're perhaps being optimistic in saying you can see these kind of progressive alliances continuing to build momentum and continuing to have an impact on the public space. Is that related to the spatial in your terms, is there something about the spatial allowing boundaries to break down I suppose?

Very much so as I said before. I developed this in enormous detail in Seeking Spatial Justice, looking at many of the struggles involved. It's not just a descriptive thing. It's opening up radical new ideas about actual practice. And I suspect if anything positive does happen, it's going to revolve around the spatial perspective. And indeed it's my interest in space that makes me optimistic.