Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Monday 25th of September at 6 PM
In the framework of the research project of the Centre for Visual
Culture MOCAB titled Differentiated Neighbourhoods guest lecuturer
professor Edward W. Soja will give a talk on the topic of:
SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE POSTMETROPOLIS
About the lecture:
The modern metropolis has been experiencing far-reaching changes over
the past thirty years. One of the major features of this
postmetropolitan transformation, as I will describe it, has been
intensifying economic inequalities and social polarization, or, in
other words, increasing social and economic injustices. I will discuss
the growing importance of understanding justice from a critical spatial
perspective both in theory and in political practice. Social movements
seeking spatial justice have begun to emerge at many different scales,
from the global justice movement to the emergence of community-based
struggles over the “rights to the city,” reviving Henri Lefebvre's old
idea of “le droit a la ville.”
Second lecture of professor Soja with the title:
THE SPATIAL TURN IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
(National Library of Serbia, Tuesday 26th of September at 7 PM)
About the lecture:
A look at the remarkable diffusion of spatial thinking across nearly
all the social sciences and humanities, after at least a century and a
half during which time and history were ontologically and
epistemologically privileged over space and geography. Particular
attention will be given to the creative reconfigurations of spatial
thinking developed in the works of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault,
and to more recent approaches to understanding the generative effect of
cities and other examples of spatial causality.
The lecturer:
Professor Soja teaches in the Regional and International Development
(RID) area of Urban Planning at UCLA. He also teaches courses in urban
political economy and planning theory. Over the last twenty years
Edward Soja has focused his research and writing on urban restructuring
in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and
regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles bring together
traditional political economy approaches and recent trends in critical
cultural studies. Of particular interest to him is the way issues of
class, race, gender, and sexuality intersect with what he calls the
spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of
difference and identity that this generates.
In addition to his work on urban restructuring in Los Angeles,
professor Soja continues to write on how social scientists and
philosophers think about space and geography, especially in relation to
how they think about time and history. His latest book brings these
various research strands together in a comprehensive look at the
geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins to the more recent
development of what he calls the "postmetropolis." His policy interests
are primarily involved with questions of regional development, planning
and governance, and with the local effects of ethnic and cultural
diversity in Los Angeles.
Selected Publications:
Soja, E.W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989.
Scott, A.J and E.W. Soja, eds. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory
at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California
Press. 1996.
Soja, E.W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996.
Soja, E.W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and
Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000.
On the project:
The project Differentiated Neighbourhoods consists of socio-spatial
research and artistic intervention in local urban structures.
The project will explore different connotations of the term
neighborhood, in the vocabulary of its urban, architectural and social
context. It will comprise of two parallel sets of events:
- Series of presentations and lectures at the MOCAB by guest
experts in 2006/2007
- Workshops, research and art projects of the members of
initial research group coming from different fields such as sociology,
urbanism, architecture, art history, visual arts, philosophy that will
try to address the issue from the perspective of their profession. The
team has chosen for the case study several neighborhoods in New
Belgrade.
Initial research group:
Vera Backović, MA student of sociology, Belgrade, Serbia; Bik Van der
Pol, artists Rotterdam, Netherlands; Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber,
artists, Vienna, Austria; Ljiljana Blagojević, professor, Faculty of
Architecture, Belgrade, Serbia; Adam Budak, curator, Kunsthaus Graz,
Austria; Aleksandar Dimitrijević, artist, Belgrade, Serbia; Davor Ereš,
architect, Belgrade, Serbia; Zoran Erić, curator MOCA, Belgrade,
Serbia; Sanja Jovović, architect, Belgrade, Serbia Jakob Kolding,
artist, Copenhagen, Demnark / Berlin, Germany; Milica Lopičić,
architect, Belgrade, Serbia; Tamara Maričić, urban planner, Belgrade,
Serbia; Ivana Milenković, architect of the New Belgrade municipality,
Belgrade, Serbia; Jelena Mitrović, apsolvent student of architecture,
Belgrade, Serbia; Vesna Pavlović, artist, Belgrade, Serbia / New York,
USA; Mina Petrović, Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Department
of Sociology, University of Belgrade, Serbia; Ivan Petrović, film and
TV director, multimedia proletaire, Belgrade, Serbia; Dunja Predić,
apsolvent student of architecture, Belgrade, Serbia; Stefan Römer,
artist and theorist, Munich, Germany; Dubravka Sekulić, apsolvent of
architecture studies, Belgrade, Serbia; Dušan Šaponja, journalist, RTV
B92, Belgrade, Serbia
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