Eric Owen Moss introduces Soja’s lecture. Soja explains the title of the lecture as a reference to the fact that the majority of people on Earth now live in cities. Soja quotes Jane Jacobs, “Without cities we would all be poor.” The second is Henri Lefebvre’s idea that all social life is influenced by cities. Soja points out that urbanism has influenced other disciplines, and that we should all be urbanists now.

Soja describes his idea of publishing ten books before he dies. The first five books would be The Great Ontological Distortion on the relationship of geography, history and time, Parisian Reversals on urban spatial causality, The Spatial Turn on transdisciplinary diffusion, The City in Geohistory on the first urban settlements, and Re-Spatializing Aristotle on being political and being urban.

Soja describes the next five books he wants to write: The Urban Industrial Revolution on the role of cities in the industrial revolution, Urbanizing the Globe/Globalizing the Urban on understanding globalization, The New Regionalism on social capital as spatial capital, and Seeking Spatial Justice on environmental justice and spatial justice. Soja points out that the last book is his favorite and the most likely to be published soon.