Neil Smith (geographer)
| Neil Robert Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born | 18 June 1954 Leith, Scotland |
| Died | 29 September 2012 (aged 58) New York City, United States |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of St. Andrews Johns Hopkins University |
| Occupation | Geographer, Anthropologist |
Neil Robert Smith (18 June 1954 – 29 September 2012) was a Scottish geographer and academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Smith was born in 1954 in Leith, Scotland. He was one of four children of a schoolteacher and his wife, and spent most of his childhood in Dalkeith, southeast of Edinburgh.[1] He attended King's Park Primary School and Dalkeith High School.
Smith earned his BSc from the University of St. Andrews and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where his advisor was noted Marxist geographer David Harvey. He was the Robert Lincoln McNeil Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Columbia and Rutgers universities. At Rutgers he was Chair of the Geography Department (1991–94) and a senior fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture. From 2008 to 2012 he held a 20 percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen.
Smith's research explored the broad intersections among space, nature, social theory, and history. His dissertation at Johns Hopkins University became the book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984). In this major work of social theory, Smith proposed that uneven spatial development is a function of the procedural logic of capital markets; thus society and economies "produce" space.[2][3] Smith is credited with convincing theories about the gentrification of the inner city as an economic process propelled by urban land prices and city land speculation, not a cultural preference for living in the city; his seminal article "Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People" (1979) has been cited over 300 times.
Smith's curiosity about why such critical study of space and place came so late to the discipline of geography lead to his study of early 20th-century geographer Isaiah Bowman and his book American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), which traced America's rise to global power through geographical ignorance. Smith's critique of American-led, capitalist neoliberalism was further developed in his final book, The Endgame of Globalization (2005). [4]
Smith died on 29 September 2012, from liver and kidney failure. He was survived by his three siblings; his partner, geographer Deborah Cowen; his former wife, geographer Cindi Katz; and his daughter, Isabella DeRiso.[5][6]
Publications[edit]
Books
- 2006 The Politics of Public Space (with Setha Low). Routledge.
- 2005 Endgame of Globalization. Routledge.
- 2002 American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. University of California Press (winner, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography).
- 2000 Globalización: Transformaciones urbanas, precarización social y discriminación de género (with Cindi Katz). Nueva Grafica, S.A.L. La Cuesta, La Laguna.
- 1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge.
- 1994 Geography and Empire: Critical Studies in the History of Geography (edited with Anne Godlewska). Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
- 1986 Gentrification of the City (edited with Peter Williams[disambiguation needed]). George, Allen and Unwin, London.
- 1984 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Basil Blackwell. 2nd ed. 1990.
Articles
- 2003 Foreword, pp. vii–xxiii in The Urban Revolution, by Henri Lefebvre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- 2003 "Geographies of Substance" in Envisioning Human Geography, Paul Cloke, Philip Crang, and Mark Goodwin, eds.
- 2003 "Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban 'Regeneration' as Global Urban Strategy" in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, M. Fisher and G. Downey, eds.
- 2003 "Generalizing Gentrification" in Retours en ville, Catherine Bidou, Daniel Hiernaux, and Helene Riviere D'Arc, eds. Paris: Descartes & Cie. January.
- 2002 "Scale Bending" in Rethinking Scale, E. Sheppard and R. McMaster, eds.
- 2002 "Remaking Scale: Competition and Cooperation in Prenational and Postnational Europe" in State/Spaces.
- 2002 "Scales of Terror: The Manufacturing of Nationalism and the War for U.S. Globalism", pp. 97–108 in After the World Trade Center, Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin, eds. New York: Routledge.
- 2002 "New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy", Antipode 34 (3): 434–57. Reprinted in "Neo-Liberal Urbanism", Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, eds., Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell.
- 2002 "Ashes and Aftermath", Studies in Political Economy 67. Spring, pp. 7–12.
- 2002 "Ashes and Aftermath", Philosophy & Geography 5 (1): 9–12.
- 2002 "Kontinuum New York", pp. 72–86 in Die Stadt Als Event, Regina Bittner, ed. Dessau, Bauhaus.
- 1979 "Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People". Journal of the American Planning Association 45 (4): 538–48. doi:10.1080/01944367908977002
References[edit]
- ^ Don Mitchell. 2012. Neil Smith obituary. The Guardian, 23 October.
- ^ Patrick Bond. 1999. What is Uneven Development?. In P.O'Hara (Ed), The Encyclopaedia of Political Economy, London, Routledge.
- ^ Neil Smith, The Production of Space.
- ^ Don Mitchell. 2012. Neil Smith obituary. The Guardian, 23 October.
- ^ "Neil R. Smith, 1954 – 2012 · The Center for Place, Culture and Politics". Pcp.gc.cuny.edu. 26 December 2008. Retrieved 29 September 2012.
- ^ Don Mitchell. 2012. Neil Smith obituary. The Guardian, 23 October.
