Synopses & Reviews
City and regional planners talk constantly about the things of the world—from highway interchanges and retention ponds to zoning documents and conference rooms—yet most seem to have a poor understanding of the materiality of the world in which they’re immersed. Too often planners treat built forms, weather patterns, plants, animals, or regulatory technologies as passively awaiting commands rather than actively involved in the workings of cities and regions.
In the ambitious and provocative Planning Matter, Robert A. Beauregard sets out to offer a new materialist perspective on planning practice that reveals the many ways in which the nonhuman things of the world mediate what planners say and do. Drawing on actor-network theory and science and technology studies, Beauregard lays out a framework that acknowledges the inevitable insufficiency of our representations of reality while also engaging more holistically with the world in all of its diversity—including human and nonhuman actors alike.
Review
"A significant theoretical contribution both to the social science in general and to human geography in particular ... This literary achievement establishes Soja as one of the foremost thinkers in this difficult interdisciplinary field." Choice
Review
"One of the most challenging and stimulating books ever written on the thorny issue of how and why societies use space for social purposes in the ways they do." David Harvey
Review
“This is a brilliant book. Planning Matter is carefully crafted, rigorously argued, and truly original, poised to become a seminal component of planning literature for decades to come. Beauregard has rethought the debates that have been central to planning theory for decades, and his book will open up new pathways for scholarly investigation—and perhaps even creative action by practitioners.”
Review
“In this extraordinary work Beauregard makes a strikingly original contribution to planning thought. Embracing a new materialism, he examines the interplay between the physical and human world, avoiding both Marxian determinism and a vision of the world as existing wholly through perception. Filled with brilliant insights, this book can be read as planning theory, philosophy, and sociology.”
Synopsis
Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographiescontests 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 powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja 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 respatialization 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.
Synopsis
“One of the most challenging and stimulating books ever written.”—David Harvey
Synopsis
'“One of the most challenging and stimulating books ever written.”—David Harvey\n
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Synopsis
Postmodern Geographies stands as the cardinal broadcast and defence of theory's "spatial turn." From the suppression of space in modern social science and the disciplinary aloofness of geography to the spatial returns of Foucault and Lefebvre and the construction of Marxist geographies alert to urbanization and global development, renowned geographer Edward W. Soja details the trajectory of this turn and lays out its key debates. An expanded critique of historicism and a refined grasp of materialist dialectics bolster Soja's attempt to introduce geography to postmodernity, animating a series of engagements with Heidegger, Giddens, Castells, and others. Two exploratory essays on the postfordist landscapes of Los Angeles complete the book, offering a glimpse of Soja's new geography carried into its highest register.
About the Author
Robert A. Beauregard is professor of urban planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. He is the author of When America Became Suburban and Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities.