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Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places
Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.
The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.
Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique 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 of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.
The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.
Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique 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 of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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January 3, 2024
I think we should start with the dialectic. That’s because this book is going to argue for a trialectic and we ought to start with the comparatively easy. Now, people often get confused with the dialectic. The problem is that it sounds a bit like ‘dialogue’ and Socrates liked the dialectic too, and his philosophy was one based on discussion… so… it all seems to make sense.
The problem is that the dialectic doesn’t really mean truth through discussion at all. In fact, it doesn’t really have anything to do with talking, as such. In the context of this book, perhaps the best definition would be that dialectics implies a fight, often to the death, of two opposing binary concepts. To simplify this to the point of absurdity, there is hot and there is cold and there is whatever the temperature is today. Today’s temperature falls on some sort of continuum between these two binary extremes. The key here is that the dialectic always involves two poles – it is a binary concept.
What isn’t said explicitly in this book, but is implied, is that the dialectic is also essentially temporal. The (also simplified) version of Hegel’s dialectic is that there is always a thesis that stands in conflict with an antithesis and this conflict between binaries brings about a synthesis. But this resolution occurs in time. Much of philosophy, in fact, has been concerned with change in time, historicist, to give it its proper name, and this has too often left the role of space hard to decide.
Notice also that the dialectic also has a kind of narrative structure. In fact, an excellent book on scriptwriting called Story discusses the dialectical negation of the negation at some length, using a scene from China Town to illustrate this idea. My point in raising all of this is that the author, and, according to the author also Lefebvre, see the dialectic as too limiting. They argue this for many reasons. One is that binaries oversimplify problems. We focus on the binary (male/female, capitalist/worker, coloniser/colonised) and believe that in resolving any one of these binaries, and the contradictions they entail, we will be closer to a better world.
This brings us to what the author refers to as the trialectic. The point here is to introduce a confounding term that does not allow a simple binary to dominate our thinking. In the case of space, his trialectic is between space as it is perceived (first space), space as it is conceived (second space), and space as it is lived (third space). The book gets its title from this last one, space as it is lived – but again, that needs some explanation.
First space is the material reality of the outside world. Everything I’m going to say is going to be a simplification, but stay with me. You can map the first space, it has a physical presence that maps are particularly good at displaying. The second space is how the space is conceived or understood or marketed or visualised beyond its physical and material reality. I think this space is the odd feeling we get when we finally get to visit a city (like London or Paris) that we have heard about all of our lives. It is not just that the city is unfamiliar in ways that we did not anticipate, but also that it is familiar in ways we didn’t anticipate either. We have a conception of the city in our minds eye – one that is more marketing than physical reality – and then we arrive and the city doesn’t quite fit our expectations. The expectations are what I think he means by second space.
Then there is the space that we live within. This obviously contains the first two spaces, but it also contains more than our own ways of perceiving and conceiving space – but also how space is enacted by all those who occupy it. By definition, the third space is contested, and necessarily so. People enter spaces with their own cultural baggage, histories, social backgrounds and sense of entitlement or exclusion. Spaces then become less about things that can be measured and mapped, less about the accepted tale of the nature of the space, and so therefore that needs to be understood within the endless possibilities of the uses and truths of those that live within it. Not as a kind of negative relativism – but rather within a kind of eclectic mashing of multiple truths.
This third space is also added to Foucault’s complicated binary between power and knowledge – which he generally writes as power/knowledge. Except, here it also becomes a triad – power/knowledge/space.
Now, this was where I was hoping for more from this book – and perhaps there is more and I just haven’t seen it – but I basically wanted this to be a bit more like The Eyes of the Skin or Life Between Buildings. I wanted a discussion of how space constructs power and knowledge, or how space is impacted by these. How a small change in space can make a large change in the power and knowledge of a location. And I wanted this book to play more with all three spaces, not focus so much on the third space, but to explain how these three spaces dance together.
He spends the last part of this book discussing real and imagined spaces. He does this mostly in reference to LA and Amsterdam. I’ve never been to either city and I’m not particularly good at constructing imagined cities in my mind. I generally tell people that I don’t think in images, and so the long descriptions provided by certain authors in books drift past me mostly unnoticed. When I spoke of Paris and London before, the second space concept I had of these places mostly involved their rivers and the ‘unreality’ of one and how ‘romantic’ the other was meant to be. I mostly expected ‘something else’ from both – but couldn’t quite tell you what.
I’m going to tell you something about the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets in Melbourne as a way of explaining what I was expecting this book to do, particularly in the last half, which I don’t feel it really did.
The City of Melbourne was laid out about 50 years after Sydney was settled. Science had moved on and Melbourne was to be laid out on scientific principles. Sydney is a confusing city, as my father-in-law once said, it was constructed along sheep paths. Melbourne had a grid placed on top of it and all of the streets form literal rectangular blocks. These paid no attention at all to the geography of the place – other than to have Elizabeth Street more or less at the middle, since it is a valley from the roads running east-west. It was also a stream. All other streets work at either right-angles or parallel to that.
The streets of Melbourne are very wide. This was due to a mistaken understanding of the nature of disease. At the time, science believed disease was spread by smells – by bad air (the literal translation of malaria). Having wide streets was understood to be a means of making a healthy city – as there would be a good distance between this side and that side and so plenty of room for air to blow away disease.
Swanston Street forms the spine of the city since it is where the river Yarra is crossed. It has the Town Hall, the Anglican cathedral, the State Library.
All of this is first space. But second space is leaking in at the end now too – since Swanston Street has certain policy decisions being made that locate important public buildings there. This sets the tone for at least one side of the street – where these buildings are located. The fact the streets are so wide, however, impacts the lived experience of the streets. The other side of the street is so far away that one side of the street can feel quite different from the other side. So, Swanston Street on the east side up to Little Collins at least, tends to feel more sedate than the west side does. For instance, there is a pub on the west side, and certainly none on the east side.
The same is true of Collins Street. I think that because Bourke Street (one major street up from Collins) had two markets on it from the beginning, it became known as the ‘people’s street’. This meant Collins has always been more about business – particularly from Swanston up the hill towards where the State parliament house now stands. This form of zoning isn’t merely about first space, but second space too, as use enters a kind of feedback loop differentiating Collins Street from Bourke and from Swanston.
When Melbourne was set up it was set up by people living in Sydney. The people living in Sydney weren’t particularly happy that Melbourne had been set up. And they thought the people who set up Melbourne were likely to be annoying. So, they decided that there should be no public square where people could meet and cause trouble. This was a long-standing thorn in the side of the city. Then, in the late 1960s, a building that occupied from Collins Street to Flinders Lane was knocked down and the city council decided to purchase the site for a city square. The city square went through multiple iterations over the years, none of which were particularly successful, only to now be in the process of becoming a train station. The city council procrastinated in working out what to do with the site, and so it stood for a long time as a kind of construction site. Prior to the building that had been on this site being pulled down, people would walk up from the train station and then turn right into Collins Street to visit the up-market shops along the street there. But the construction site was so unattractive, it literally changed the pattern of pedestrian traffic on this corner.
Here we have a clash between first and second space on this corner. A change in the physical reality of the space causes a change in how it is conceived. But also in the lived experience of the space too – we enter the third space. How that space had been made unattractive by the endless dithering over what to do with the space impacted how people lived that space.
The city square, when it was finally built, never quite knew what it wanted to be. It had ‘clever’ ideas like a graffiti wall – if there is one thing you can know about graffiti, it is that it doesn’t want to be confined to a wall. It’s like that joke about spontaneity, there is a time and a place for it. The city square, to me anyway, never felt particularly safe. It had odd water features and nocks and crannies. And people doing drug deals and other intimidating people. It wasn’t a third space I particularly wanted to spend too much time in.
I’m going to say something that I think is true, but that might annoy the author of this one. I think I got more of a sense of what this book was trying to do from a book about time – called ‘In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics’. In that book, the author shows how various places are experienced differently by different people living and working within them. This book sought to do this, but it did so by photographs, and photographs are particularly hopeless at displaying space, I think. And I wasn’t left with a feeling for the spaces described in ways that I was hoping. And I worry that focusing too much on the personal response to space – as in third space – might make a critical understanding of space something that also ends up being personal.
I was saying today to someone that I worry I’m far too narrative based in how I understand the world and I have been hoping for years that perhaps space – which is less impacted by narrative – might be a way for me to see how power works outside of the stories we tell – outside of time. But I’m not even sure if that makes sense. I can’t help feeling, though, that how we go about constructing space (particularly ‘cyber-space’ – for want of a better word) does more to construct ourselves than we are capable of realising. That’s the book I want to read, by the way. The two books I mentioned earlier (Eyes of the Skin and Life Between Buildings) came closest to what I’m looking for.
The problem is that the dialectic doesn’t really mean truth through discussion at all. In fact, it doesn’t really have anything to do with talking, as such. In the context of this book, perhaps the best definition would be that dialectics implies a fight, often to the death, of two opposing binary concepts. To simplify this to the point of absurdity, there is hot and there is cold and there is whatever the temperature is today. Today’s temperature falls on some sort of continuum between these two binary extremes. The key here is that the dialectic always involves two poles – it is a binary concept.
What isn’t said explicitly in this book, but is implied, is that the dialectic is also essentially temporal. The (also simplified) version of Hegel’s dialectic is that there is always a thesis that stands in conflict with an antithesis and this conflict between binaries brings about a synthesis. But this resolution occurs in time. Much of philosophy, in fact, has been concerned with change in time, historicist, to give it its proper name, and this has too often left the role of space hard to decide.
Notice also that the dialectic also has a kind of narrative structure. In fact, an excellent book on scriptwriting called Story discusses the dialectical negation of the negation at some length, using a scene from China Town to illustrate this idea. My point in raising all of this is that the author, and, according to the author also Lefebvre, see the dialectic as too limiting. They argue this for many reasons. One is that binaries oversimplify problems. We focus on the binary (male/female, capitalist/worker, coloniser/colonised) and believe that in resolving any one of these binaries, and the contradictions they entail, we will be closer to a better world.
This brings us to what the author refers to as the trialectic. The point here is to introduce a confounding term that does not allow a simple binary to dominate our thinking. In the case of space, his trialectic is between space as it is perceived (first space), space as it is conceived (second space), and space as it is lived (third space). The book gets its title from this last one, space as it is lived – but again, that needs some explanation.
First space is the material reality of the outside world. Everything I’m going to say is going to be a simplification, but stay with me. You can map the first space, it has a physical presence that maps are particularly good at displaying. The second space is how the space is conceived or understood or marketed or visualised beyond its physical and material reality. I think this space is the odd feeling we get when we finally get to visit a city (like London or Paris) that we have heard about all of our lives. It is not just that the city is unfamiliar in ways that we did not anticipate, but also that it is familiar in ways we didn’t anticipate either. We have a conception of the city in our minds eye – one that is more marketing than physical reality – and then we arrive and the city doesn’t quite fit our expectations. The expectations are what I think he means by second space.
Then there is the space that we live within. This obviously contains the first two spaces, but it also contains more than our own ways of perceiving and conceiving space – but also how space is enacted by all those who occupy it. By definition, the third space is contested, and necessarily so. People enter spaces with their own cultural baggage, histories, social backgrounds and sense of entitlement or exclusion. Spaces then become less about things that can be measured and mapped, less about the accepted tale of the nature of the space, and so therefore that needs to be understood within the endless possibilities of the uses and truths of those that live within it. Not as a kind of negative relativism – but rather within a kind of eclectic mashing of multiple truths.
This third space is also added to Foucault’s complicated binary between power and knowledge – which he generally writes as power/knowledge. Except, here it also becomes a triad – power/knowledge/space.
Now, this was where I was hoping for more from this book – and perhaps there is more and I just haven’t seen it – but I basically wanted this to be a bit more like The Eyes of the Skin or Life Between Buildings. I wanted a discussion of how space constructs power and knowledge, or how space is impacted by these. How a small change in space can make a large change in the power and knowledge of a location. And I wanted this book to play more with all three spaces, not focus so much on the third space, but to explain how these three spaces dance together.
He spends the last part of this book discussing real and imagined spaces. He does this mostly in reference to LA and Amsterdam. I’ve never been to either city and I’m not particularly good at constructing imagined cities in my mind. I generally tell people that I don’t think in images, and so the long descriptions provided by certain authors in books drift past me mostly unnoticed. When I spoke of Paris and London before, the second space concept I had of these places mostly involved their rivers and the ‘unreality’ of one and how ‘romantic’ the other was meant to be. I mostly expected ‘something else’ from both – but couldn’t quite tell you what.
I’m going to tell you something about the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets in Melbourne as a way of explaining what I was expecting this book to do, particularly in the last half, which I don’t feel it really did.
The City of Melbourne was laid out about 50 years after Sydney was settled. Science had moved on and Melbourne was to be laid out on scientific principles. Sydney is a confusing city, as my father-in-law once said, it was constructed along sheep paths. Melbourne had a grid placed on top of it and all of the streets form literal rectangular blocks. These paid no attention at all to the geography of the place – other than to have Elizabeth Street more or less at the middle, since it is a valley from the roads running east-west. It was also a stream. All other streets work at either right-angles or parallel to that.
The streets of Melbourne are very wide. This was due to a mistaken understanding of the nature of disease. At the time, science believed disease was spread by smells – by bad air (the literal translation of malaria). Having wide streets was understood to be a means of making a healthy city – as there would be a good distance between this side and that side and so plenty of room for air to blow away disease.
Swanston Street forms the spine of the city since it is where the river Yarra is crossed. It has the Town Hall, the Anglican cathedral, the State Library.
All of this is first space. But second space is leaking in at the end now too – since Swanston Street has certain policy decisions being made that locate important public buildings there. This sets the tone for at least one side of the street – where these buildings are located. The fact the streets are so wide, however, impacts the lived experience of the streets. The other side of the street is so far away that one side of the street can feel quite different from the other side. So, Swanston Street on the east side up to Little Collins at least, tends to feel more sedate than the west side does. For instance, there is a pub on the west side, and certainly none on the east side.
The same is true of Collins Street. I think that because Bourke Street (one major street up from Collins) had two markets on it from the beginning, it became known as the ‘people’s street’. This meant Collins has always been more about business – particularly from Swanston up the hill towards where the State parliament house now stands. This form of zoning isn’t merely about first space, but second space too, as use enters a kind of feedback loop differentiating Collins Street from Bourke and from Swanston.
When Melbourne was set up it was set up by people living in Sydney. The people living in Sydney weren’t particularly happy that Melbourne had been set up. And they thought the people who set up Melbourne were likely to be annoying. So, they decided that there should be no public square where people could meet and cause trouble. This was a long-standing thorn in the side of the city. Then, in the late 1960s, a building that occupied from Collins Street to Flinders Lane was knocked down and the city council decided to purchase the site for a city square. The city square went through multiple iterations over the years, none of which were particularly successful, only to now be in the process of becoming a train station. The city council procrastinated in working out what to do with the site, and so it stood for a long time as a kind of construction site. Prior to the building that had been on this site being pulled down, people would walk up from the train station and then turn right into Collins Street to visit the up-market shops along the street there. But the construction site was so unattractive, it literally changed the pattern of pedestrian traffic on this corner.
Here we have a clash between first and second space on this corner. A change in the physical reality of the space causes a change in how it is conceived. But also in the lived experience of the space too – we enter the third space. How that space had been made unattractive by the endless dithering over what to do with the space impacted how people lived that space.
The city square, when it was finally built, never quite knew what it wanted to be. It had ‘clever’ ideas like a graffiti wall – if there is one thing you can know about graffiti, it is that it doesn’t want to be confined to a wall. It’s like that joke about spontaneity, there is a time and a place for it. The city square, to me anyway, never felt particularly safe. It had odd water features and nocks and crannies. And people doing drug deals and other intimidating people. It wasn’t a third space I particularly wanted to spend too much time in.
I’m going to say something that I think is true, but that might annoy the author of this one. I think I got more of a sense of what this book was trying to do from a book about time – called ‘In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics’. In that book, the author shows how various places are experienced differently by different people living and working within them. This book sought to do this, but it did so by photographs, and photographs are particularly hopeless at displaying space, I think. And I wasn’t left with a feeling for the spaces described in ways that I was hoping. And I worry that focusing too much on the personal response to space – as in third space – might make a critical understanding of space something that also ends up being personal.
I was saying today to someone that I worry I’m far too narrative based in how I understand the world and I have been hoping for years that perhaps space – which is less impacted by narrative – might be a way for me to see how power works outside of the stories we tell – outside of time. But I’m not even sure if that makes sense. I can’t help feeling, though, that how we go about constructing space (particularly ‘cyber-space’ – for want of a better word) does more to construct ourselves than we are capable of realising. That’s the book I want to read, by the way. The two books I mentioned earlier (Eyes of the Skin and Life Between Buildings) came closest to what I’m looking for.
May 22, 2012
A solid secondary source and introduction to postmodern theories of spatiality: if you struggled with Lefebvre, Baudrillard, et al., or want a quick sketch of space in critical race and feminist theory circa 1990, this is well worth picking up. It's also a great place to find other useful primary materials: I discovered several new-to-me authors and a key Foucault piece I'd never come across elsewhere.
That said, it's 1990s academia, full of silly neologisms and paren(theses), and much nose-thumbing at other academics. The back half, a survey of Los Angeles and Orange County developed out of an exhibition at UCLA for the bicentennial of the French Revolution (?) struck me as fairly thin, but I was reading it for other purposes.
That said, it's 1990s academia, full of silly neologisms and paren(theses), and much nose-thumbing at other academics. The back half, a survey of Los Angeles and Orange County developed out of an exhibition at UCLA for the bicentennial of the French Revolution (?) struck me as fairly thin, but I was reading it for other purposes.
December 16, 2023
Another must read in specialty research. Best stuff is from other authors and I don't care much for Los Angeles.
Second reading
So, first part is about the concept of thirdspace that is made by relying on Lefebvre and Foucault. Second part is about Los Angeles and cultural studies with the themes of sex, race and economics.
I don't really see how those two are connected to tell the truth.
Second reading
So, first part is about the concept of thirdspace that is made by relying on Lefebvre and Foucault. Second part is about Los Angeles and cultural studies with the themes of sex, race and economics.
I don't really see how those two are connected to tell the truth.
August 18, 2021
Ed Soja is proabably the principal post-modern developer of Henri Lefebvre's geographical trialectic. His mode of extension is to draw on work of postcolonial theorists (Spivak, Bhabha and Anzaldua mainly) to create a parallel between notions of Third Space in postcolonial theory and Lefebvre's ideas of spaces of representation. It is an interesting argument ans clearly proposes a critical spatial philosophy and politics that assert Third Space (it is NOT the same as Lefebvre's 'third space') as a site of radical open-ness, and as a challenge to the binary politics of othering. However, the case studies of LA & Amsterdam are more convincing than the theoretical discussions, in part because he ties himself in knots trying to argue that this radical an-Otherness can be the basis of effective political struggles and fails to deal with the problem of whether these are 'wars of position' (that is oppositional moments of defiance) or 'wars of movement' (that is, moments of systemic change. My fear is that the instability of an-Otherness, a product of Thirdspace's radical open-ness is that at best they can be wars of position, and hence a strategy for bad times. In short, Soja over-eggs his case for Third Space as a site for liberation, and there he is with so many of the cultural post-colonialists he draws on.
October 9, 2007
Henri Lefebvre wasn't translated into English until the 1990s so his ideas about space as a lived, perceived, conceived triad were left mostly unexplored by North Americans. This book by Soja is one of the first that did. Important project because Lefebvre/Soja et. al have developed some good reasons why we should learn to think about social space as space-of-flows rather than in Cartesian mathematical sense.
April 21, 2008
With this, I have now read every book of Soja's. It stands on par with Postmetropolis, I feel. Whereas Postmetropolis was predominantly a study of cities, and Postmodern Geographies was a study of how geography has been treated, Thirdspace lies in betweeen, synthesizing a new approach to geography that is neither physical nor symbolic but lived. Very good for anyone interested in geography, and for anyone interested in abolishing the silly Lacanianisms that have accumulated over the past few decades. And you know, fuck, the review for this is too low, so I'm going to give it five stars.
January 10, 2020
After I have read the book, I stumbled upon a review of it by Andy Merrifield. Sadly, the brief review was more structured than the actual book. I have to agree with Merrifield on this book: brilliant idea, poor elaboration.
September 5, 2020
Introduced me to bell hooks. So on that alone I am thankful.
November 23, 2022
Fascinating, powerful crazy text written by a guy who is clearly far too high. I loved the 5% of this book that I actually understood - maybe worth a revisit in a few years time.
September 18, 2024
Extrastar for the tangent about his brunch with bell hooks where they talk about Lefebvre
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews