Neil Smith (geographer)
| Neil Robert Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born |
18 June 1954 Leith, Scotland |
| Died | 29 September 2012 (aged 58) New York City, United States |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater |
University of St. Andrews Johns Hopkins University |
| Occupation | Geographer, Anthropologist |
Neil Robert Smith (18 June 1954 – 29 September 2012) was a Scottish geographer and academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Smith was born in 1954 in Leith, Scotland. He was one of four children of a schoolteacher, and spent most of his childhood in Dalkeith, southeast of Edinburgh. He attended King's Park Primary School and Dalkeith High School.
Smith earned his 1st class BSc from the University of St. Andrews in 1977 (with a year at the University of Pennsylvania, 1974–1975), and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1982, where his advisor was noted Marxist geographer David Harvey. He took up a tenure-track position at Columbia University in New York (1982–1986), but Columbia closed its Geography Department and he moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey (1986–2000). At Rutgers he was Chair of the Geography Department (1991–94) and a senior fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture.
Smith lived in New York, latterly splitting his time between New York and Toronto, Canada, where he owned a house with his partner. From 2008 to 2012 he held a 20 percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen in his native Scotland.
Smith's research explored the broad intersections between space, nature, social theory, and history. His dissertation at Johns Hopkins University was supposed to have been on urban processes, but was in fact a major theoretical treatise that became the book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984). In this major work of social theory, Smith proposed that uneven spatial development is a function of the procedural logic of capital markets; thus society and economies "produce" space.
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