Born in the Bronx and nurtured in its dense diversities, Edward Soja was a street geographer by the time he was ten and a doctoral student in Geography at Syracuse University just after turning twenty-one. For the next two decades, he specialized in the political geography of moderization and nation-building in Africa, holding visiting appointments at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. After seven years of teaching at Northwestern University, he joined the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA, in 1972. He has twice been department chair in Urban Planning and, for nine years, was the Associate Dean. For the past fifteen years, he has been writing about the postmodernization of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife Maureen and children, Christopher and Erika.