Thirdspace

Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced asignificant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one ofthe most important intellectual and political developments in thelate twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space andthe embracing spatiality of human life with the same criticalinsight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time andhistory on the one hand, and social relations and society on theother. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins andimpact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope andpractical relevance of how we think about space and such relatedconcepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.

The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or whathas been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tendedto be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality iseither seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, andexplained
or as mental constructs, ideas about and representationsof space and its social significance. Edward Soja criticallyre-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, onethat comprehends both the material and mental dimensions ofspatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modesof spatial thinking.

Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual andempirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of HenriLefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space assimultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws onLefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threadsthough all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms inbell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space ofradical openness
in post-modern spatial feminist interpretationsof the interplay of race, class, and gender
in the postcolonialcritique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity
in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power
and in interpretative tours of the Citadel ofdowntown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and theCentrum of Amsterdam.