Andy Merrifield

Andy Merrifield (born 1960) is a Marxist urban theorist.

He was born in Liverpool, UK and attended Quarry Bank School until 1976. He left school at 16 and did office jobs and travelled. He graduated in geography, philosophy and sociology from Liverpool Polytechnic in the mid-1980s. Merrifield received his PhD in geography from Oxford University in 1993, supervised by David Harvey.

Merrifield spent most of his early career teaching geography at the University of Southampton and King's College London, before moving to Clark University, USA, where he taught from 2000 to 2003. He subsequently lived in France with his partner, initially in Haute-Loire and then in Lavoûte-Chilhac, south of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, as an independent scholar.

He returned to the academic system in 2011. In 2011–12 he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Manchester. As of 2015, he was Supernumerary Fellow in Human Geography at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

Merrifield is a prolific writer, and was a leading proponent of the idea of 'The Right to the City', a phrase associated with Henri Lefebvre. In later work he supports the 'politics of the encounter' in a globalised world, rather than the more restrictive 'right' to urban space. He draws heavily on the work of Lefebvre and his theories.

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