Smith, Neil (1954–)

Neil Smith is among the most influential and famous of living geographers. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York (CUNY) and was the founding director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics in the Graduate Center at CUNY.

Smith was born in Scotland in 1954 and studied for a BSc degree in geography at the University of St. andrews. In 1977, he left Scotland for Baltimore, where he began his PhD research on gentrification under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1982. Though younger than Harvey, Smith underwent a similar academic and political transformation to that of his supervisor. This trajectory entailed a rejection of the kind of geography taught to him as an undergraduate—the so-called new geography or spatial science that Harvey's late-1960s writings embodied—and an embrace of the Marxist approach that Harvey pioneered in his 1973 book, Social Justice and the City. It is above all as a Marxist geographer that Smith has made his name.

Like Harvey, Smith has built carefully and creatively on the late political-economic writings of Karl Marx. He has made germinal contributions in four areas—three of them beginning with his book Uneven Development, published 2 yrs. (years) after he graduated from Hopkins. First, he is responsible for the “rent-gap” thesis on studies of gentrification and urban redevelopment. In opposition to theories that posit urban professionals as welcome “pioneers” returning to blighted inner-city neighborhoods, Smith's thesis focused on the political economy of gentrification, suggesting that only when the gap between the actual and potential ground rent is sufficiently high do waves of gentrification occur. This thesis pointed to the class dynamics of land use and the power of rentiers and investors to govern the uses of urban space. Highly political questions thereby arise about who has a “right to the city.”

Second, Smith popularized the counterintuitive idea of the “production of nature.” His claim in Uneven Development is that in a capitalist world, nature is no longer natural but, instead, is actively [Page 2552]produced at a discursive and material level in the service of capital accumulation. This “denaturalizing” move usefully focused some geographers’ analytical attention on the processes that remake nature (e.g., in commercial agriculture), and it also posed a challenge to those whose politics is founded on ideas of a nonsocial nature with supposedly intrinsic capacities and values.

Third, also in Uneven Development, Smith presented a powerful Marxian account of uneven geographical development (UGD). Unlike some other theories of UGD, Smith did not look to the “natural differences” in geography to explain the phenomenon. Instead, he argued that capitalism both produces and needs UGD: It is part of the system's operating hardware, as it were. This means that UGD is a socially constructed phenomenon and thus, in theory, entirely preventable. Finally, Uneven Development also advanced the challenging idea that geographical scale is socially produced and a tool of power—thus being more than simply a mental category that we use to divide the world up. Smith argued that capitalism (including the capitalist state) actively organizes commodity production, distribution, exchange, and consumption at certain scales at certain historical moments. These constructed geographical scales become containers, constrainers, and enablers of different sorts of activities undertaken by different groups—producers, rentiers, politicians, financiers, trade unionists, and so on. Geographical scale, for Smith, thus enters into the very fabric of capitalist life and struggles to alter and transcend it.

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