Soja, Edward (1940—2015)
American Marxism geographer. Soja obtained a PhD from Syracuse University for a thesis on urban planning in Kenya. His early work focused on Africa. However, it is for his later work on Los Angeles that he is most widely known, starting with Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), which along with the work of Harvey, David introduced postmodernism as a new kind of problematic that geographers should take note of. Utilizing the work of Lefebvre, Henri, Soja expanded on Postmodern Geographies with two further works also devoted to Los Angeles, Thirdspace: Journeys to Real-and-Imagined-Places (1996) and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000). Soja’s work was distinctive for the way he factored the imagination into his geography: he argued persuasively that a city like Los Angeles, which is so consciously invested in image-production of all types, cannot be adequately engaged with if the imagination is not taken into account.