Neil Smith

(PhD Johns Hopkins 1982; Dist Prof) Political economy, urban social theory, space, nature-culture, history and theory of geography ()

Neil Smith was trained as a geographer and his research explores the broad intersection between space, nature, social theory and history. He teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology and environmental anthropology, and directs the Center for Place Culture and Politics. His environmental work is largely theoretical, focusing on questions of the production of nature. His urban interests include long term research on gentrification, including empirical work in North America and Europe and a series of theoretical papers emphasizing the importance of patterns of investment and disinvestment in the the real estate market. He also writes more broadly on New York City, focusing especially on the "revanchist city" which has filled the vacuum left in the wake of liberal urban theory.

His interests in social theory include political economy and marxism and lie behind his theoretical work on uneven development. From the global to the local scales, he argues, our spatial worlds are constructed and reconstructed as expressions of social relations and especially as expressions of capitalist social relations. Uneven development is in many way the hallmark of capitalism. More recently he has been studying the "geography of the American Century," trying to understand the ways in which global economic development in the twentieth century -- up to and including so-called globalization -- represent specific expressions of US power and responses to it. This has also led to considerable research on the construction of geographical scale. He co-edits Society and Space and sits on numerous editorial boards including Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.

Recent Visiting Appointments

• Visiting Distinguished Johnson-Connaught Professor in American Studies, University of Toronto, 2002.
• Visiting Professor, University of Oslo, July-August 2002.

Recent and Upcoming Keynote Addresses

• December 2-5, 2003: School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii.
• September 26-27, 2002: "Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban Regeneration as Global Urban Strategy." Conference on Upward Neighborhood Trajectories: Gentrification in a New Century, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
• January 31 - February 1, 2002: "Geographies of Urban Terror: Manufacturing Nationalism and the Politics of Reconstruction in New York City." Conference on Sustainable Development in Urban Communities, University of Arizona.

Recent Representative Publications

Books

• 2002 American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. University of California Press.
• 1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge.
• 1991 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Basil Blackwell.

Articles

• 2003 Foreword, pp vii-xxiii in Urban Revolution by Henri Lefebure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• 2003 "Geographies of Substance" in Envisioning Human Geography, Paul Cloke, Philip Crang, and Mark Goodwin, eds.
• forthcoming: "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): 434-457. 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 issue, 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.

PhD Program in Anthropology - The CUNY Graduate Center
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This departmental publication supplements the official Bulletin of The Graduate School as well as the current Graduate Center Student Handbook and "Announcement of Courses."