>1.) Just went the links to look. Sure enough, City Planning and Urban
> Studies. I will look up Soja in awhile...
>
>Sidenote. Some of the early 70s events and organizations in the
>disability rights movement here were informed (I wouldn't exactly call
>it influenced, assisted maybe) by two professors in the City Planning
>dept at UCB.
I'm thinking of going to this:
http://www.spa.ucla.edu/dept.cfm?d=up&s=newsevents&f=news.cfm&news_id=19697
Urban Planning to Celebrate Edward Soja Posted on February 15, 2008
On Friday, May 9, 2008 the Department of Urban Planning will host a celebration of the work of Professor Edward W. Soja in honor of his elevation to Emeritus status at the end of this academic year. A daytime conference will address the lifetime achievements of this critical thinker whose work continues to open insightful new research directions for the theoretical and practical understanding of contemporary cities and regions. Panels and participants slated thus far include:
* The Spatial Turn: Soja's Impact on Los Angeles Planning and Activism (Moderator: Jacqueline Leavitt. Panelists Ava Bromberg, Martha Matsuoka, Gilda Haas, Allan Heskin, Goetz Wolff)
* The L.A. School: Impact on Southern California and the World (Moderator: Allen Scott. Panelists: Michael Dear, Sue Ruddick, Marco Cenzatti, Clyde Woods)
* Putting Space First - or Third: Soja's Impact on the Social Sciences, (Moderator: Michael Storper. Panelists: John Friedmann, Neil Brenner, Barbara Hooper, Olivier Kramsch) The conference will be followed by a dinner and other festivities including the presentation of the Edward W. Soja Prize for Critical Thinking in Urban and Regional Research for the best article published in Critical Planning, the UCLA Journal of Urban Planning volume 15, summer 2008. The awarded article will exemplify the seminal contribution that such visions make to scholarly research.
Professor Soja, a Distinguished Professor at UCLA, 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 intere st 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, Dr. 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. He is author of Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (editor with Allen Scott). Berkeley: University of California Press. 1996 and Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Press, 1989.
All events will take place at the UCLA Faculty Center.