The Premature Demise of Postmodern Urbanism

Abstract

The articulations of the global and local have long exercised geographers, anthropologists, and others concerned with the spatial structure of society. This globallocal dialectic has recently been rendered acutely problematic by the burgeoning postmodern hyperspace, the coordinates of which are, according to Jameson (1984), so far only dimly perceived. Thus it is of some consequence that two prominent Marxist geographers have recently published books on postmodern urbanism. The appearance of Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989) and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989) provide an opportune template for examining the prospect of a postmodern urban theory. Marxists have, by and large, been highly critical of the postmodern turn (see, for example, Callinicos 1990). In keeping with this heritage, Harvey mounts a sustained, hostile attack on postmodernism and postmodernists; by contrast, Soja celebrates the cross-fertilization between the two realms. Both authors ultimately devise a thoroughly modernist reconstruction of urban theory. What interests me in this article are the ramifications of their responses. How were these modernist reconstructions achieved? What emasculations of postmodern thought were necessary to enable the authors to rescue the modernist project? And what are the principal consequences of Soja's and Harvey's encounters with a postmodern urbanism? I shall attempt to answer these questions by examining the authors' respective readings of postmodernity; their representations of contemporary urban process; and, finally, their reconstructions of a modernist urbanism via Marxian social theory. In concluding, I shall argue that Soja and Harvey have obtained their coherent visions of urban theory by adopting Enlightenment strategies that effectively foreclose on the promise of postmodern urbanism.'