LEY, DAVID (1947–)

David Ley is a well-known humanistic geographer whose research has dealt with several topics, including symbolic landscapes, critiques of structural Marxism, gentrification, immigration, and urban neighborhoods.

After completing a bachelor's degree at Oxford University, Ley crossed the Atlantic Ocean by ship to begin graduate study in geography at the University of Pennsylvania with Peter Gould. Whereas Gould favored quantitative approaches to geographic analysis, Ley found himself leading others on a divergent path of qualitative research. On the forefront of humanist geography, geography that centers on human experience and interpretation, Ley's doctoral dissertation, The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behaviour of a Philadelphia Neighbourhood, was published in 1974 by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and became a “classic” in geography, celebrated in recollections published 25 years later. The book explores the racialized microgeographies of daily life in an African American neighborhood in Philadelphia.

By the time he completed his doctoral studies, Ley was offered a job as an assistant professor in Vancouver, Canada, in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, where he still works today. In the years that followed, Ley worked collaboratively with other social geographers to build humanistic geography. With Jim Duncan, he explored the relationship between landscape, aestheticization, and interpretive frameworks and authored key texts in social geography. Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare State (published in 1994 with Shlomo Hasson) examined the struggles among inner-city neighborhood groups.

Ley quickly became an active citizen, student, professor, and researcher in Vancouver and began a program of research on the urban and cultural geographies of the city that evolved throughout his career. The focus of Ley's research changed as he studied the shifting cultural and economic forces in the city and suburbs, from the changes bound up in processes of gentrification to the significant demographic shifts driven by international migration to Vancouver in the late 20th century. His 1996 book on gentrification, The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, straddles the subdisciplines of urban and social geography, tracks the changing demographics in six Canadian cities as greater numbers of women enter the work force, and “follows the hippies” who search for particular urban lifestyles and landscapes. Ley's most recent book, Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, examines transnational linkages among wealthy migrants in Vancouver, Toronto, and East Asia.

Ley published many key papers in the fields of urban and social geography and later in the field of migration as he charted population change through immigration and mapped poverty in Canadian cities. An oft-cited paper, “Between Europe and Asia: The Case of the Missing Sequoias,” combines his interest in social and urban geography and migration with a close reading of a community struggle over zoning that brings to the forefront the classed, racialized, and cultural dimensions of neighborhood conflict.

Ley was the first codirector of the Vancouver Centre of the Canadian Metropolis Project, one [Page 1778]node in a larger global network designed to fuel research on immigration through collaboration between scholars, policymakers, and immigration service providers. Ley is a fellow of the Royal Society and holds a Canada Research Chair in geography. He became a Pierre Trudeau Fellow in 2003 and was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the AAG in 2009, to name but a few of the many honors he achieved during the course of his career. Ley trained many geographers who themselves now teach at universities in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Britain.

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