It’s sad news to hear of the passing of Ed Soja after what appears to have been a long battle with illness. In just the last 15 hours or so, I have already read a number of personal reflections from academics who knew Ed as a teacher, collaborator and theoretical inspiration. Reading about these small details, things like his fondness for certain types of food, or his eagerness for a proper conceptual argument, have already substantially augmented my sense of someone who I knew in only the most modest of ways.

I first encountered Ed in 2002 as an MSc student in geography at the London School of Economics. ‘Soja’ – as us students seemed to collectively call him – was teaching a module titled (if my memory serves me correctly) ‘Critical Studies of Cities and Regions’. It was effectively an in-depth exploration of the themes Ed addressed in his book Postmetropolis (the subtitle of which mirrored the module title) and, I think especially in hindsight, its themes left a pretty deep impression on me. Above all, an interest in the riddle of what makes the urban space specifically ‘urban’ – and why we should care. But aside from the ideas, Ed’s teaching performativity is probably what I remember best. He was a very entertaining lecturer to say the least, who paid a lot of attention to how he conveyed concepts and examples. Quite deliberatively, he’d over-pronounce terms such as synekism (‘SEE-no-key-ZIM’) or Çatal Hüyük (‘KKA-tall hoo-YUK’); and he’d infuse his examples – particularly as they related to Los Angeles – with sheer enthusiasm. Okay, I’ll admit we sometimes exchanged knowing sideways glances when he mentioned LA, because he did rather a lot. Though now I think I get it. Not LA itself mind you – my urban habitus is too informed by an odd hybridity of Toronto and London – but Ed’s enthusiasm for the riddle of LA as a paradigmatically interesting urban region.

A few years later, 2009 to be exact, I saw Ed again in different circumstances. We were in Las Vegas, where he had agreed to present a paper within a set of AAG sessions I was co-organizing with Clive Barnett and Allan Cochrane on the theme ‘Where is urban politics’? Ed’s paper – which didn’t appear in the special issue that eventually followed in the wake of the AAG sessions – was on LA-based social justice coalitions, presenting some of the arguments which a year later would appear in his book Seeking Spatial Justice. I had the odd fortune of presenting my own paper – what would later slowly evolve into a paper in Society in Space on media practices and urban politics – immediately after Ed. We were in one of those massive conference hotel rooms, and as you’d expect a lot of people came to hear Ed’s paper. And as you’d also expect, many of those same people left once he was done and I was ambling up to present mine. Not that I minded; I mean, it’s Ed Soja! But what was really gratifying was that, during my presentation – a theoretical paper that was, at least at that point, centrally focused on spatial theory – I kept seeing Ed out of the corner of my eye, and he seemed to be paying really close attention. Whether it was in interest or disagreement I will never know, for I don’t think we talked afterwards (though I do recall having a good chat with one of his former PhD students, Miguel Kanai). And unfortunately Ed couldn’t come to the excellent Thai meal most of the sessions participants had that evening, in a nondescript plaza away from the main Las Vegas strip. It was very postmetropolis.

In recent years, I’ve only sporadically dipped in an out of the work of Ed Soja. Coincidentally, I cited his classic Postmodern Geographies late last night as I finally tied up a paper for a conference, just a couple of hours before learning of passing. Maybe it’s time to take another look.