>The UCB Geography department is evidently loaded with Marxists.
Urban geography and planning departments are the real stronghold of academic historical materialism in the U.S. and have been for a long time. That's another reason all the fretting about pomo in the humanities deflating left criticism here is so bogus. People who believe that just aren't paying attention. (And Woj is so full of shit his eyes are brown).
Check out these bios of faculty at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. This is just two guys. There are plenty more where they came from. A lot of them got the PhD. at Berkeley:
http://publicaffairs.ucla.edu/faculty-index/urban-planning/1
Edward Soja Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning Urban Planning
Ph.D. in Geography, Syracuse University Email: esoja at ucla.edu Phone: 310-825-4335 Ext#54335 Bio:
AREAS OF INTEREST: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions International Development Los Angeles/Southern California
Professor Soja teaches in the Regional and International Development (RID) area of Urban Planning and also teaches courses in urban political economy and planning theory. After starting his academic career as a specialist on Africa, Dr. Soja has focused his research and writing over the past 20 years 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, 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. 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.
Michael Storper Professor of Urban Planning Urban Planning
Ph.D. in Geography, University of California, Berkeley
Bio:
AREAS OF INTEREST: European Union International Development Latin America Politics Regional Political Economy
Professor Storper's research and teaching interests fall into five, closely linked, areas:
Economic geography, meaning the forces that affect the ways the economy organizes itself in geographical space. These forces are many and sundry, ranging from technology, industry structure and market structure, to institutions, effects of history, and policies. A core problem for me is the long-standing tension between the geographical concentration of activity and specialization of regional and national economies and the spreading out of activity into wider geographical spaces, both of which are occurring in the current wave of globalization.
Globalization, meaning the ever-increasing geographical scale of economic processes, and some of the associated processes of change in the scale at which management of firms, markets, and institutions operate. I am interested especially in the locational processes described above, and how they change the geographical distribution of economic activities and hence the composition of economies at different territorial scales and their development processes. Questions of interplace inequalities, polarization, convergence and divergence, can be seen strongly from an economic geographical perspective.
Technology as a force in structuring economic geography and globalization. Technological change is a key motor of geography, because it changes the structure of transport and trade costs. It does this in complex ways, and many of them are indirect. My research also concerns technological competencies at different territorial levels, the geography of technological innovation, and how this affects development processes in regions and nations.
Regions, especially city regions. The geographical concentration of activity is a key motor of the composition and functioning of urban and regional economies, their specializations, their labor markets, and their associated processes of physical and social development.
Economic development: economic geography is a strong way into examining the process of economic development. Though geography is structured by development, development is also structured by the unfolding of broad economic-geographical forces. Comparative economic development can be seen through the lens of economic geography, which can also help understand the geographical differentiation of institutions, which in turn have strong effects on development.
Beyond his core disciplinary skills in economic geography, his work on occasion draws on, and has links to, economics, sociology. and urban studies.
Storper holds concurrent appointments in Europe, where he is Professor of Economic Sociology at the Institute of Political Studies ("Sciences Po") in Paris, and a member of its research Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CS0), and at the London School of Economics, where he is Professor of Economic Geography.