Arjen Mulder: The city is becoming an unstable system through the process of globalization (or whatever you like to call it). What used to be an infrastructure plus buildings in a network of roads in a landscape is becoming an urban cloud - not just because of the sprawls around cities, but also in the sense that wherever you use your cell phone, you are in a city. And then there are the economic changes, where parts of cities suddenly become obsolete and other derelict parts suddenly turn into hotspots. Two questions interest me here. How do cities become unstable or "transurban"? And how does one ground oneself in this cloud of urbanity?
Edward Soja: There are two elements in what you are saying that I have difficulty with or disagree with. One has to do with the notion of the city somehow becoming unstable in this period. I would argue that capitalist urbanism has always been fundamentally unstable, but has gone through cycles of crisis and restructuring and then consolidation and then crisis again. Periodically, over time, the cities around the developed world seem almost simultaneously to become unstable, basically creating a situation that no longer fits a period of expansion. This leads to a period of experimentation and new trends of development, which begin to transform the city into something significantly different.
We went through periods like this in the 1830s to the 1850s, in the 1870s to 1900, during the Great Depression to the end of the Second World War. And now we are going through what may be the most dramatic of these four: a new round of disintegration or, to use more contemporary terms, a deconstruction and reconstitution of what we still think of as the modern metropolis. For the last 30 years the modern metropolis has been breaking down and new forms have been emerging. That is what I call the postmetropolitan transition. The emerging postmetropolis has many features, all of which are associated with the fact that the old form is not disappearing entirely but breaking down from its consolidated and fairly stable state and changing into something significantly unlike what it was. This is a different way of thinking about what you describe as "transurbanism" and "creative instability"; I prefer this broader geographical and historical interpretation.
The other disagreement arises from the different scales and concepts of urbanism that exist within architecture versus those in geography and planning, a real clash in the vision of what a city is. You describe in many ways the core architectural view when you said that a city consists of streets, roads and a built environment located within a vaguely defined "urban cloud." In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built environments compacted together to form an urban mass. This view is radically different from the larger-scale spatial or regional vision of the city as an expansive urban system of movements and flows, of goods being produced and people living not just in built environments but in constructed geographies characterized by different patterns of income, unemployment, education levels, ethnic and racial cultures, housing and job densities, etc. All these things are often pushed aside in the obsession - sorry, the passionate concern - architects have for design. These constructed geographies get lost when the city is reduced entirely to a collection of built forms. As a result, architects either tend to see planning the city as their exclusive domain, as specialists in built form, or else they dissociate themselves entirely from the planning process, seeing it only as imposing constraints on their creativity. The city that the geographer looks at is much more than the built environment. What is being planned from the geographer"s point of view is a very different kind of city. The emphasis is not on the built environment per se (although sometimes it is), but on a more variegated and larger-scale social environment. Architects are not usually educated to think of the city in this way.