Neil Smith

Neil Robert Smith (18 July 1954 – 29 September 2012) was a Scottish geographer and Marxist academic.

He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and winner of numerous awards, including the Globe Book Award of the Association of American Geographers.

Smith was born in 1954 in Leith, Scotland.

He was one of four children of a schoolteacher, and spent most of his childhood in Dalkeith, southeast of Edinburgh.

He attended King's Park Primary School and Dalkeith High School.

Smith earned his 1st class BSc from the University of St. Andrews in 1977 (with a year at the University of Pennsylvania, 1974–1975), and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1982, where his advisor was noted Marxist geographer David Harvey.

Smith is credited with theories about the gentrification of the inner city as an economic process propelled by urban land prices and city land speculation, rather than by cultural preferences for living in the city in his seminal article Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People (1979).

He took up a tenure-track position at Columbia University in New York (1982–1986), but Columbia closed its Geography Department and he moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey (1986–2000).

His dissertation at Johns Hopkins University was supposed to have been on urban processes, but was in fact a major theoretical treatise that became the book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984).

In this major work of social theory, Smith borrowed Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space and proposed that uneven spatial development is intrinsic to capital markets: capitalism needs to "produce" unevenness to keep accumulating and sustain itself.

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.

Smith lived in New York, latterly splitting his time between New York and Toronto, Canada, where he owned a house with his partner, Deb Cowen.

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 the book American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), which traced America's rise to global power through geographical ignorance.

The book won several awards, including the Henry Adams Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government.

Smith's critique of American-led, capitalist neoliberalism was further developed in The Endgame of Globalization (2005).

From 2008 to 2012 he held a 20 percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen in his native Scotland.

He was known for cultivating a new generation of critical geographers.

He behaved inappropriately around women colleagues and students.

Female students characterized his behavior towards them as sexual harassment, as "more than one woman student left departments Neil taught in because of his unwelcome and persistent advances."

Smith's research explored the broad intersections between space, nature, social theory, and history.

He had been diagnosed with liver disease some years prior to his death, but he returned to drinking alcohol in 2011.

He was survived by his three siblings; his partner, geographer Deborah Cowen, his former wife, geographer Cindi Katz, and his daughter Isabella DeRiso.

The Edinburgh-based band New Urban Frontier took their name from the title of Smith's book The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.

Smith died on 29 September 2012, from liver and kidney failure.

Their 2015 album Game of Capital also commemorates him.

Books

Articles