Commentary. Edward Soja before Los Angeles: First Reflections on the Political Organization of Human Space and Territoriality

Abstract

Edward Soja is a leading figure in the field of political geography due to the impact and importance that his works have had on the evolution of the discipline, its approaches and its objects of study. Beyond his ability to explore the changes produced in recent decades in urban processes and the outstanding importance he attaches to social spatiality as an epistemological starting point to analyze them, he also presents himself as a pioneer in signalling certain themes and seminal reflection on certain concepts. In this sense, this commentary seeks to analyze his work in the text The political organization of space (1971) where he approached human territoriality in a new way. As it intended to highlight, here the main aim of Soja is divided into two approaches: on the one hand, to show the continuous relationship between the political organization of human beings and spatiality; and on the other, to understand the historical and contingent character of a concrete form of political organization of space traversed by territoriality that would have achieved to present itself as natural but that was far from being the only one possible from a geographical and temporal point of view.