Walker, Richard (1947–)

A longtime professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Richard Walker has played a significant role in Marxist theorizations of economic geography, agriculture, water and the social construction of the environment, and urban change. A student of David Harvey, Walker completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1977. With more than 80 refereed articles and four books, his work has been influential in several domains of human geography. He has long insisted eloquently on the centrality of the production process, the division of labor, and the politics of the state as driving forces behind numerous social and spatial phenomena under capitalism. He has also written on geographic pedagogy, particularly the challenges of teaching political economy. He has been actively involved with the journal Antipode, serving as its editor from 1991 to 1999. In addition to his research, Walker has mentored a number of successful PhD students, including Michael Storper.

Walker's early works centered on the dynamics of American suburbanization, which he recast in light of the changing urban division of labor in the late 19th century rather than as an accumulation of individual residential location decisions. A series of papers and book chapters embellished this theme so often framed in empiricist and idealist terms. Thus, he maintained that suburbanization was not a “crabgrass frontier” but, rather, the reflection of long-standing industrial decentralization, real estate speculation, and the active promotion of business and government elites.

His other works in economic geography include powerful critiques of technological determinism; analyses of the relations between class, space, value, price, and profit; theorizations of uneven spatial development; assaults on behavioral perspectives of the firm; and an analysis of services as part of the broader logic of commodity production rather than a postindustrial utopia with their own, independent dynamics. The Capitalist Imperative, coauthored with Michael Storper in 1989, is widely heralded as one of the discipline's most concise explications of the national division of labor and its consequences. Similarly, Walker and Sayer's The New Social Economy in 1992 [Page 3044]aptly summarized structuralist accounts of changing job patterns, technological change, and state policy.

He has also spent decades studying the historical development of California. Specific lines of thought within this topic include the geopolitics of water in the state, particularly the powerful role played by agribusiness. Walker also wrote extensively about the development of the greater San Francisco Bay area, its historical transformations, its changing social and spatial features, its struggles over green spaces, and its ongoing globalization.