Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2012, volume 30, pages 947 – 962

doi:10.1068/d306ns

Neil Smith: a critical geographer

Deborah Cowen 947

David Harvey 949
Donna Haraway 950
Max Rameau 951
Nick Bacon, Matthew Bissen, Marnie Brady, Zoltán Glück, Malav Kanuga, 953
Steve McFarland, Jessica Miller, Elizabeth Sibilia, Erin Siodmak, Laurel Mei Turbin
Gerry Kearns 955
Blanca Ramírez 957
Gerry Pratt 958
Alfredo Jaar 960

It has been a month since Neil’s passing. I was set to return from Toronto to New York
today to meet with his people and to tend to his plants. This is a familiar trip—one he and I
took many times over the course of our years together. But as I write, my flight has already
been canceled and rescheduled three times because of hurricane Sandy. The storm wreaked
havoc on many people and places in its path. It also makes the loss of Neil’s voice painfully
acute. Today, an article of his circulates widely online that helps many make sense of the
social life of ‘natural’ disasters. Writing in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina,
Neil (Smith, 2006) insisted on the politics of catastrophic events. He asked us to resist the
ways in which the insertion of ‘natural’ before ‘disaster’ served to naturalize the organized
violence of uneven development, uneven preparedness, and uneven emergency response.
948 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

This was another contribution in a long list where Neil quickly crystallized critical thoughts
on events that leave most of us speechless. Neil’s capacity (or compulsion) to think through
our moment in ways that refuse isolation—geographical, historical, and social—gives us a
critical common sense. If Neil were here for Sandy’s arrival, he might ask us to look to the
lives most invisible in official accounts—from those in Haiti to those on Rikers Island. He
would insist that we think carefully about who governs and who profits from the simultaneous
spectacle and silence of crisis management.
As the authors below suggest, this kind of invaluable contribution is just one among many in
Neil’s arsenal. His work helped define debates on gentrification (Smith, 1979a; 1979b, 1987a;
1987b; 1996; 2002), nature and uneven development (Smith, 1982; 1984; 1989; 2006), scale
(Smith, 1992b; 2003; 2011) geographical knowledge production (Smith, 1987a; 1987b; 1991;
1992a; 1994; 1995, 2000a; 2001; 2003; 2005; 2008); and imperialism (Smith, 2003; 2005).
His work on revolution was unfinished when he died, but even preliminary contributions
circulated widely (Smith, 2007; 2009). Neil’s scholarship furthermore had influence far
beyond academia, particularly his work on gentrification and urban revanchism; The New
Urban Frontier (1996) was required reading for activists and organizers in many cities. In the
time that I knew him, Neil received as many invitations to speak to social movements about
his work as he did to scholars. If Neil’s writing had enormous influence within and beyond
the academy, so did his vibrant personality. Neil could at times be infuriating to argue with,
but the conversation was always energetic, intoxicating, even addictive.
The editor and coeditors of Society and Space felt compelled to organize a memorial
forum for Neil. His profound influence on sociospatial theory is reason enough to honor him
in this way, but Neil also had a very direct impact on the journal’s development in his decade
as coeditor, as Gerry Pratt describes below. We are extremely fortunate to have contributions
from a number of Neil’s colleagues and comrades who speak to different aspects of his life and
work. David Harvey hardly requires introduction to this readership. A prolific scholar, David
was also Neil’s doctoral advisor and dear friend. I will never forget the time at the hospital
during Neil’s final days with David sitting quietly by Neil’s side for hours reading a well-worn
copy of the Grundrisse in preparation for his graduate class. Donna Haraway is renowned for
her work in feminist science studies, but here she shares some reflections on knowing a young
Neil in the 1970s. Max Rameau, another dear friend of Neil’s, is a Haitian-born Pan-African
theorist, organizer, and author. Since the early 1990s, Max has been organizing in the United
States around issues impacting low-income Black communities, including immigrant rights,
economic justice, LGBTQ rights, police abuse, and voting rights, particularly for ex-felons.
We are extremely fortunate to have a collective contribution from a group of Neil’s current
doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center. If Neil has made a powerful contribution
with his own scholarship, his work mentoring others is another of his impressive legacies.
The words from this group are a beautiful testimony of his impact. Gerry Kearns, professor at
the National University of Ireland Maynooth, was also a repeat interlocutor of Neil’s. I recall
many generative debates between them at pubs in Galway, Ireland. Blanca Ramírez of the
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, in Xochimilco, México was a comrade of Neil’s and
fellow organizer of the International Critical Geography group, and shares her reflections on
this important work. The work of Chilean-born artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar
hung in the apartment in New York. Their exchanges were a gift to Neil and their friendship
deeply valued. Gerry Pratt, professor at the University of British Columbia, and longtime
editor of this journal, also held a special place in his heart. Gerry offers her reflections on
Neil’s contributions to the journal and scholarship more broadly.
I did the sketch that appears above for Neil almost a decade ago. It hung over his desk
at home in New York. I love that he loved it, precisely because it suggests that he could see
himself as I saw him—beautiful, generous, and gentle, though always with a hint of mischief.
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 949

The challenges of getting to New York today are a painful echo for me of the struggles many
of us experienced in reaching Neil towards the end of his life. Alcoholism is a devastating
experience for those who live with it, and for those who love those who are lost to it. I am
profoundly grateful to all of the authors who honor Neil so beautifully here. I am also deeply
grateful to Stuart Elden, who has been essential in making this memorial forum happen.
I am forever indebted to those who made it possible to live and work through the final days
of Neil’s life in New York—Ruthie and Craig Gilmore, Don Mitchell, David Harvey,
Louise Lennihan, Cindi Katz, Ros Petchesky, Eliza Darling, Sheila Moore, Iggy Keaney,
Sallie Marston, J P Jones, Rupal Oza, Ida Susser, Jen Ridgley, and Julian Brash. To all of
you, and to the hundreds more who wrote, and gathered, and cried, and laughed, and swore,
and renewed commitments to the struggles for justice that animated Neil’s life—thank you.
Deborah Cowen
◊ ◊ ◊
I first met Neil in the fall of 1977 when he took up graduate studies in the Department of
Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins. Joe Docherty, his advisor at
St Andrews, had suggested Hopkins as the best place to go for a radical/Marxist education.
I played no part in bringing Neil to Hopkins since I had been on sabbatical in Paris during the
preceding year. But the then Chair of the Department, Reds Wolman, had been on the lookout
for good students for me and told me he had signed up a great prospect while I was away.
He was not wrong. Neil and I immediately bonded because my maternal grandfather was born
just outside of Leith, and as a young kid I had on occasion vacationed in Edinburgh and was
familiar with the landscape that he plainly loved. I had climbed Arthur’s Seat many times.
When Neil arrived I was in the middle of writing The Limits to Capital (1982), while
wrestling with various other facets of Marx’s thought through the organization of seminars
and reading groups. Neil had some background, of course, in this literature and in addition was
intensely active in the International Socialist Organization. I quickly learned of his immense
capacity for passionate engagement with both politics and theory. Within a couple of years I
lost count of the number of picket lines he insisted I join, while he also raced ahead of me in
taking up the critique of nature and the production of space. I had originally imagined he would
write a dissertation on gentrification and urbanization—an arena of work in which his work
later became definitive. Although he published several articles on these themes as a student
[including one on the ‘rent gap’ which he loved to remind me I had thoroughly disapproved
of at the time! See Smith (1979b)], he took me totally by surprise by writing what became his
masterpiece, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Smith, 1984),
as his dissertation. While, obviously, he had pieces of this work already in place, the bulk of it
was written in about four months, at breakneck speed and with an astonishing intensity during the
first months of his tenure in the Geography Department at Columbia. It was and is brilliant stuff.
I suppose I should not have been surprised, because as a participant and organizer in
seminars and discussion groups Neil always showed not only an amazing level of intellectual
and political commitment but also a critical capacity that deeply impressed almost everyone
who came in contact with him. Neil engaged with many faculty from other disciplines
(Nancy Hartsock in Political Science, Donna Haraway in History of Science, John Pocock in
History) and soon had a reputation across the campus as an intellectual force to be reckoned
with. He plainly enjoyed the freedom that came with being in Geography where his position
was secure (Reds Wolman, in particular, continued to support and admire him) while fiercely
contesting and arguing for radical positions in the seminars of others and creating not a
little political turmoil on campus. And when Neil fiercely contested, you really felt it!
He considered my preference for wine over beer as a sign of my bourgeois decadence (only
later did he change his opinion on that).
950 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

The interdisciplinarity of the Hopkins experience plainly appealed to him. It shaped,

I believe, the genius he later exhibited for structuring interdisciplinary dialogue first at the Center
for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers and subsequently at the very successful
Center for Place, Culture and Politics which he founded at the CUNY Graduate Center.
As a sympathetic critic, Neil was invaluable to me throughout his graduate years and
beyond. I owed a lot to him in the writing of Limits to Capital and, later on, he played a
very supportive if critical role in helping me complete Justice, Nature and the Geography
of Difference (1996). I had the same experience with him that I know many of his students
have subsequently had: he was an intensely involved, sympathetic, generous, and always
encouraging advisor and critic. His impulse to “go for it, no matter what” was both infectious
and compelling. I was often as much his student as his advisor. His encouragement and
generosity were priceless.
While Neil ranged widely in his intellectual interests, his passion for geography—and a
critical geography at that—never wavered. In his Hopkins days Neil was part of an ongoing
dialogue between Clark and Hopkins geographers, and the two groups of students and
faculty developed strong activist ties that carried over to the critical and often subversive
interventions at the national AAG meetings (the parties were great!). Neil later played a
crucial part in the formation of the International Critical Geography group. Meanwhile, his
prolific writings on the production of nature and space, on gentrification and urbanization,
and on geopolitics and the history of geography played a leading role in reorienting
geographical work along critical and Marxist lines. These writings helped shape the ‘spatial
turn’ in academia, and Neil therefore acquired a deserved reputation across many disciplines.
It was also while a graduate student that he conceived the idea of studying the life and
career of Isaiah Bowman, some of whose papers were lodged at Hopkins. With the eventual
publication of the award-winning Bowman book (Smith, 2003) many years later, Neil brought
this particular project to fruition.
Neil lived his life all along in a passionate, seamless, and thoroughly engaged way. He
was always gregarious and social, adventurous and deeply committed. He loved an argument,
inspired people around him, and was one of the most knowledgeable bird-watchers (along
with Jim Blaut, with whom he often vociferously disagreed on political matters but never on
bird-watching) I have ever known. He could carouse until ‘the wee hours’ but next morning
chug down a half gallon of milk and be ready for anything, while everyone else nursed
hangovers. He was for me a loyal friend and colleague, a studious critic, and a wonderful
inspiration. I will miss him terribly as, I know, will many others.
David Harvey
◊ ◊ ◊
Neil Smith taught me how to see, literally and materially, urban space-in-the-making. He also
taught me to understand what every good Marxist needs to know: how the making of urban
space powers the metabolism of lives and deaths, well-being and deprivation, justice and
exploitation. I met Neil in David Harvey’s Capital vol 1 reading group at Johns Hopkins in
1977–78, when I was a baby assistant professor in the History of Science department and
Neil was a graduate student in geography. The science writer Rusten Hogness, who became
my life partner, was in the group; love interleaved with Marx is not a bad start for socialists.
Neil made us laugh and kept us in place. Nancy Hartsock was also in that amazing group; we
were comrades and sisters in Baltimore’s Marxist feminist worlds, which remained evident
in our work from then on. With David’s guiding touch leading us through the intricacies
of Marx’s beautiful and necessary book, reading and rereading, we shaped each other into
lifelong scholars of the forces of capital in the tissues of the earth and its residents, human and
nonhuman. Neil was funny, smart, and generous; and he talked in a Scots English to die for.
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 951

In my ear, Marx talked like that, or at least must have wanted to talk like that. In later
years Neil’s publications continued to teach me and many others so much. He remained
an inspiration and a friend, even though we rarely found ourselves in the same places. I am
not finished learning from and with him, especially in these times when big, speculative,
grounded materialist thinking is more necessary than ever. I am grateful to Neil, and I miss
his being here in the flesh, even though I know his ongoing material presence, in place and
space, has many modalities.
Donna Haraway
◊ ◊ ◊
While I had been aware of him for years, I first delved into Neil Smith’s work during the
summer of 2006. At the time, a small group of long-standing black organizers and activists
were huddling up regularly in Miami, conjuring ways to address the crisis of gentrification
ripping through our communities. As the forced removal of low-income people from
historically black communities in Miami reached epidemic proportions, we sought to engage
in organizing and direct action designed to address the ‘root cause’ of gentrification, not
merely to score rhetorical points around the periphery.
As we debated how exactly to do this, it became apparent that we each individually
harbored some rough sketch of what gentrification looked like—low-income black people
forced out of their longtime communities in order to make room for wealthier, often whiter,
people—but lacked a commonly held understanding of what gentrification actually was and
the mechanics of how it worked. Without such an understanding, our dreams to strategically
engage its root causes were futile.
Our respective theories captured components of the problem, but none stood up against
any harsh level of scrutiny around the causes, functions, and vulnerabilities of the crisis.
In pursuit of a unified theory of gentrification, among a list of other suggestions, I casually
recommended we take a gander at this ‘rent gap theory’. To say it was one of the better
readings would woefully understate its importance.
Neil Smith’s rent gap theory was dazzling. It was academic and complex, while
simultaneously refreshingly simple and stripped down to the bare essentials of economic
motivations and transactions. Moving beyond the loosely defined concept, the theory
provided a production-side analysis of gentrification as a particular economic phenomenon
and cycle, with a beginning and end, which could be understood and tested in the real world.
Our group evolved into Take Back the Land, and the rent gap theory served as the core
document informing our understanding of gentrification. In addition to helping us understand
what gentrification is and why it occurs, the rent gap theory enabled us, through a process
of reverse engineering, to divine theories on how to stop gentrification, even if we lacked
the power to implement those theories. To this day, Take Back the Land campaigns are
substantially designed based on the implications of the rent gap theory.
I made many presentations about the theory and eventually collaborated on a long essay,
Gentrification is Dead (http://www.takebacktheland.org/images/misc/Gentrification%20is%20
Dead.pdf ), arguing that, at the end of the housing ‘boom’ in Miami, gentrification, as a specific
economic phenomenon and cycle, was effectively over, and that organizations must shift to
address the new realities—not just fight against a hurricane that was real but had already done
its damage and moved on.
To be clear, I am quite certain that Take Back the Land would exist today even without
the benefit of Neil’s theories. However, it is not an exaggeration to say our analysis of
gentrification in particular, and the production-side economic cycles of housing in general,
is primarily rooted in Neil’s. Further, Take Back the Land campaigns are fundamentally
drawn from reverse engineering of that analysis.
952 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

While he by no means invented the tactics of land liberation or eviction defense in the
face of foreclosure, the implementation of Neil’s brilliant insights and rock-solid theories
enabled us to give strategic content to the use of those tactics in the context of a broader
meta-campaign.
Neil did not awaken us politically or inspire us to charge mindlessly up the hill against
all odds. His work, instead, compelled us to scientifically examine economic and social
phenomena for what they actually were, not for their socially constructed value. That is to
say, while gentrification, on the surface, looks like whites moving black people out of their
historic communities, it is actually a particular and measurable economic cycle.
In 2010, during one of my many pilgrimages to New York City, one of our mutual
friends, Rob Robinson, arranged for me to meet Neil Smith. So, I journeyed into the heart
of Manhattan and made the climb to the CUNY grad center. Neil was burly and instantly
captivating, as his bushy mane, together with his patterned facial hair, conspired to reinforce
the nutty professor stereotype. His thick Scottish accent took me totally by surprise, only
adding to the mix of quirkiness and brilliance. He was Einstein with a geography degree and
a kilt (Neil was not wearing a kilt).
I was a bit intimidated, but he was completely engaged in our conversation, listening
intently to my points while animating his own with gestures and body movements. He had
clearly researched Take Back the Land’s work, so was able to ask poignant questions and
provide snippets of insight: ideas which he expounded during our subsequent encounters.
Over the years Neil gently—but firmly—challenged me on some of our race analysis,
not dismissing it, but arguing for the primacy of economic analysis. When I offered our
reverse-engineered countergentrification strategy, Neil smiled that infectious smile, called it
“brilliant”, and encouraged us to continue the theory’s development, although I suspect he
long ago worked out his own version of the same.
Neil’s repertoire was not limited to ivory tower political theory. He asked about the
types of interorganizational relationships, nuanced organizing scenarios and dilemmas, and
implementation of academic theory that reveal a personal history in organizing.
Over the next three years Neil and I discussed the implications of the global economic
collapse, the Occupy movement, and the prospects for a robust US-based land liberation and
anti-eviction movement. Neil’s insights were consistently nothing short of brilliant.
In November 2011 Neil organized a series of events designed to allow Take Back the Land
to engage the academic and social justice communities. The trip was wildly successful on every
imaginable level, establishing new relationships and solidifying existing ones. Neil’s take?
He was extremely apologetic for not organizing more students and workers into the process.
Subsequently, Neil helped shape a framework to help us think about radical public
policy. He agreed to help launch a radical policy conference designed to produce objectives,
demands, and policy positions for this particular moment in history.
At the very end of the summer, with fall foreboding, Neil e-mailed and apologetically
bowed out due to health and other issues. We communicated back and forth a bit, and I
offered to visit during my October 3rd trip to New York.
On a crisp Chicago Saturday morning, September 29th, as I awaited the 81 bus to start
my journey home before going to New York, our mutual friend Rob Robinson texted me the
news of our loss. I wept on the corner of W. Lawrence and Springfield.
Neil Smith’s contributions to our movement are real and tangible. He lent his credibility
to grassroots movements and his access to academia to the collective problems we face.
His presence and the force of his intellect will leave us wanting.
Neil Smith: Presente!
Max Rameau
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 953

Contours of a spatialized influence: a tribute to Neil Smith

Neil’s death set off a flurry of activities—gatherings of colleagues and comrades in New York
City, hundreds of posts to memorial websites, tributes on international listservs. Several of
his doctoral students assembled over e-mail, at bars, and in each other’s homes to mourn
and take measure of his influence on our academic, political, and personal lives. Some of
us decided to author this eulogy for Neil along the lines he laid down in his influential 1992
Social Text article “Contours of a spatialized politics”. In the piece he established a flexible
schema for understanding the capitalist production of scale at distinct but related levels:
body, home, community, urban, region, nation, and global. We believe it is a testament to
the breadth of Neil’s influence as a teacher, mentor, friend, and comrade that his students can
readily reflect on our time with him on each of these scales.
Body
Lefebvre once wrote,
“ Any revolutionary ‘project’ today … must … make the reappropriation of the body, in
association with the reappropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda”
(1991, pages 166–167).
This provocation unlocks the image of Neil in that first thirty seconds of the many classes and
dissertation meetings I had with him: those first moments, when he would situate himself and
make eye contact. He always made direct eye contact. As if there was no other way to look at
someone. His brilliant eyes. Can someone’s eyes embody a revolutionary project? Yes. The
revolutions that sustained Neil Smith could be seen in that first glimmer. The glimmer that
would indicate that we’d likely go somewhere special in class today; or that the converse was
equally possible. The clear view through his eyes, deep into his struggle. A struggle that we
were all in together. For a better world, a better body, a better mind, and a limitless spirit. We
all take our nonnegotiable revolutions forward where Neil will always be present, intently
focused on a view of a brilliant future.
Home
Neil’s home was a place where the contradictions between advisor and graduate student were
confronted and mediated. It was an inclusive place where food, drink, and political conversation
fostered a passionate sense of home, family, and community. This was especially important
since many of us came to him overworked, underpaid, and in need of home and comradeship.
Reflecting on contestations over the home arising from the patriarchal organization of social
reproduction, Neil argued that it’s no coincidence that women are often the fiercest tenant
and housing organizers because their experiences often necessitate a view of community as
an almost borderless extension of their home. This is vintage Neil, who always believed that
home lies within the community and that the community provides the home. He brought
that same conviviality to the classroom as well as the bar, where discussions from the
former routinely spilled into the latter, and where opinions and perspectives were unpacked,
examined, and rewoven in the light of his generous intellect. Much of Neil’s influence on his
students as a thinker, teacher, and friend was produced at this scale—somewhere between
that of the body and that of the community.
Community
When Neil moved to Carroll Gardens in 2009 he wanted to learn more about the history of his
neighborhood. I was conducting research in nearby Gowanus, and our mutual interest led us
to collaborate on a walk and lecture on the production of nature in the midst of gentrification.
During the process he became troubled by the relationship between the two neighborhoods
and the current state of redevelopment. Naturally, he took part in several small acts against
the tide of gentrification of the area. During our lecture he provoked unsuspecting participants
954 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

by stating the need for Marxist environmental planners in the redevelopment of Gowanus. He
also planted rogue, nonornamental plants in the overly manicured courtyard at his apartment
building. Both were small revolts that exemplify the ways he used actions and words to
challenge people to think critically and act politically.
Urban
In 2007 Neil created the course ‘Urban Revolution’, because he was frustrated by the lack
of revolutionary imagination in a city shaped by revolt since the Munsee resisted Dutch
occupation in 1655. Midway through the semester, our class decided to excavate the city’s
revolutionary landscape and immediately dug into archives and history books at the library.
But Neil showed us another way to narrate history. He took us on his now-famous walking
tour of the Lower East Side. Several of us stopped in our tracks when Neil, in the midst of a
fervid speech about squatters’ battles against gentrification in the 1980s, spotted a red-tailed
hawk in Tompkins Square Park. Everywhere in the city, Neil’s ideas are with us, pushing
us to see the place we live in differently and to see the politics and history underlying our
experiences of the city.
Region
Neil often discussed regions as networks of production that, by virtue of their close relations
to global/national scales, were often subject to radical changes in structure. He influenced
my tracing of the new contours of southern New England, a region that served for him
as a paradigmatic example of his idea of scale at that level. Neil worked closely with me on
a project looking at deindustrialized places that lost regional identities, and that consequently
became perceived by developers and residents alike as insignificant ‘podunks’. Whether
pinned down masterfully in writing or half sung in his conversational critiques at the pub,
Neil’s revolutionary voice transformed my project’s possibilities.
Nation
Neil’s work reminds us that the nation (and the nation-state) is a significant scale in which
capital seeks to resolve its contradictions, and consequently a perpetual terrain of conflict and
struggle. During the past year of uprisings, we often spoke of difficulties facing burgeoning
movements around the world. As we debated the challenges and limits of Occupy Wall
Street, one theme that emerged prominently was what Neil might have called the necessity
but insufficiency of the concept of ‘internationalism’. He was interested in how Occupy
produced its own scales of political action, and it was one of the great intellectual joys of
the past year to sit and think with him about this. The question of strategy was never far
from our conversations. How do we oppose and grapple with capital at its established scales
of power (national, urban, etc) without unwittingly reproducing those scales in our own
movements? As we move into a period of deepening crisis, and as we contend with the
many contradictions of capital’s scalar fixes, Neil’s arsenal of thought will surely guide our
thinking and our political resolve.
Global
Neil’s curiosity and insight consistently framed sets of questions that pushed my research on ship
breaking. In our conversations he often shared childhood experiences related to the breaking
yards of Scotland, yards where he could see half-ships being broken down as he passed by on
the train as a young boy. Neil taught me to question how my subject was geographic and global.
At some point we uncovered that the story of ship breaking was in fact a global story of uneven
development. It felt like we were on a road together. In the gaps between meetings, when he
was working away from New York, he often found something related to my subject, either a
photograph or an article that he would save until our next meeting. Neil lived his life on a global
scale, but no matter where he traveled, he always had his students in mind.
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 955

Conclusion
Neil concludes his article from 1992 on a hopeful note: “a politics of scale can also become
a weapon of expansion and inclusion, a means of enlarging identities.” At each scale he
asked: what makes things cohere and what makes them fall apart? What allows each scale
to criss-cross with others, and what is possible to do or to think when we ‘jump scales’? It is
clear to his students—and no doubt to many others for whom he was a source of intellectual,
political, and everyday vitality—that Neil lived life on multiple scales, with coherence as
well as its dialectical other.
We’ve collected these moments from a reservoir of many happy and inspirational
memories from our time with Neil—in the seminars he taught, the spry conversations we
had, the scenes of community and care we shared—in which he generously gave himself and
found himself. It is clear that Neil’s influence and his resolve will endure in many new scales
and spaces of possibility. He expanded, included, and enlarged so many of the minds and
hearts he touched. Therewithin, and indeed at every scale, Neil Smith lives on.
Nick Bacon, Matthew Bissen, Marnie Brady, Zoltán Glück, Malav Kanuga, Steve McFarland,
Jessica Miller, Elizabeth Sibilia, Erin Siodmak, Laurel Mei Turbin (1)
◊ ◊ ◊
Globalization and empire
Neil’s profound contribution to political geography is encapsulated in two books differing
in style but unified in argument. American Empire (Smith, 2003) is, among very many other
things, a brilliant and scholarly intellectual biography of Isaiah Bowman, a geographer
and public intellectual deeply implicated in the elaboration of US foreign policy for three
decades, beginning in 1917 with his recruitment to the committee charged with devising the
US negotiating position for the international settlement following World War I. The Endgame
of Globalization (Smith, 2005) is an altogether more urgent and polemical work, responding
to the so-called Global War on Terror and the associated US invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq. Both books by turn scold and explain the liberal ideologies of globalization.
Both books explicate a related set of contrasts that are presented both as structural
contradictions and as historical transitions. When Lenin (1952 [1917]) wrote of the New
Imperialism of the early 20th century, he understood it as the consequences of a change in
the character of capitalism. In this new monopoly phase, he suggested, giant corporations
organized by powerful banks goaded imperialist countries to fight for privileged access to
markets and resources. For Neil this distinction between an earlier territorial colonialism
and a later economic imperialism was also a transition from a global order of absolute space
to one organized as relative space. Yet it was also a structural contradiction; for even as, for
example, the US planned for the relative space of global economic ambition, it found, as Neil
explained in American Empire in a riveting account of the House Committee and the Versailles
Peace Conference, that this required it to engage in the design of absolute space hoping to
form stable countries out of localized ethnicities, and forging alliances and dependencies
to serve the territorial aim of strategically containing its great rivals, Germany and the Soviet
Union. In Endgame this same contrast is presented again both as a transition—in this case
from the relative space of economic neoliberalism to the absolute space of chauvinistic
neoconservatism—and as a structural contradiction between the market spaces that concern
Wall Street (with its servants in the Democratic Party) and the territorial imperative of the
search for oil that animates the energy companies (and its servants in the Republican Party).
In Endgame Neil insisted upon the fundamental continuity rather than apparent novelty
represented by the neoconservative adventure in Iraq and argued that economic globalization
and militaristic empire share liberal roots.
(1)
Doctoral students of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
956 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

The contradictions, nay the hypocrisies, of liberalism are a recurring theme in Neil’s
geopolitical studies: universals in rhetoric serve national and racial exception in practice.
Bowman was an exemplar. At one time the president of Johns Hopkins University, where
Neil later studied for his doctorate, Bowman fondly appealed to the authority of objective
science while besmirching social science as dubious because communist, bemoaning the
presence at his own university of too many Jewish academics, and resolutely refusing to
consider the admission of black students or faculty. Countering the democratic ambitions of
Albert Einstein, Bowman was instrumental in limiting public accountability and promoting
corporate influence within the National Science Council. Responding to his own homophobia,
Bowman was relaxed about the demise of Geography at Harvard where the sexuality of its
primary professor, Derwent Whittlesey, was disgracefully made a matter of public confidence;
and when Owen Lattimore was vilified by the anticommunist bigots associated with the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Bowman promptly ended their long friendship.
The contradiction is more than personal. In a splendid dissection of Bowman’s (1921) most
significant academic work, The New World, Neil contrasts the universalism of its claim to
be a purely objective account of global economic and political geography to the insistent
chauvinism of its master narrative: that everywhere undemocratic European colonialism was
ceding position to a US influence equally designed to manage the affairs of backward peoples
unable to be trusted with the direction of their own affairs. Bowman later proposed an openly
racist constitution for the United Nations.
As Neil delights in showing in Endgame, the nationalist inflection of globalization continues
to the present. Although they speak ‘cosmopolitan’, US liberals are all too keen to insist upon
and practice US exceptionalism. Their American Empire announces itself as a crusade to
bring democracy to the downtrodden, but those most in need of liberation seem also to live
in places where the consolidation of Islamic states limits US influence or where economic
autarky secures local resources for local use. Neil makes the point very clearly in the case
of Iraq, noting that, when the British ended colonial rule and came to craft the new state in
1920, they first divided up the oil reserves (reserving half for British companies); and then,
when the US in turn occupied Iraq after the invasion of 2003, one of its first acts, through
Paul Bremer, Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, was to rescind
an Iraqi constitutional provision that prevented the privatization of vital economic assets.
The allocation of oilfields to US companies quickly followed.
In the sixth of his theses “On the concept of history”, Walter Benjamin (2005 [1940])
writes that
“ To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was’ [Ranke]. It means
to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism
it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust
itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.”
Neil had been working on Bowman for many years when on 11 September 2001 his city
was traumatized by the two planes flown by members of al-Qaeda into the twin towers of
the World Trade Center. He completed American Empire and wrote Endgame under the
impress of that trauma, and his socialist internationalism did not fail him in that moment of
present danger, nor did his historical materialism. In American Empire he recognized the
exploitation of 9/11 for imperialist purposes as the third such moment of US global ambition:
the adventures in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 and the masters-of-the-universe crafting
of international institutions to serve US purposes in 1945–47 flashed up as George W Bush
pursued global and full-spectrum dominance after 2001. In Endgame he recognized that for
many in the world the US was a space of aspiration and that, in consequence, 9/11 was felt
as a global trauma. In this journal (Smith, 2001), and less than a month after the slaughter,
he reflected on how it became possible for the Bush administration to claim this global
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 957

event as a purely national tragedy, and how it made precisely the chauvinistic rendition
of globalism to nationalist purpose that he was to explore historically and theoretically in
American Empire and in Endgame. This was public and relevant scholarship of rare quality.
We are immeasurably impoverished by his death!
Gerry Kearns
◊ ◊ ◊
Promoter, mentor, and internationalist: a legacy
I first met Neil in Mexico during the winter of 1995. He had come to hold a conference at the
Geography School, invited by Graciela Uribe. She had met him at a geography meeting in
the US, and I knew the relevance of his work through his book Uneven Development. The book
had a profound impact on me, as it is a critique of capitalism sustained by Marxist thinking
with a logical and coherent theoretical structure. At that point, and since the breakdown of
the paradigm in social sciences caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed that Marxism
could only be buried, and other directions should be taken in the thinking of the social and
political world.
This meeting had great importance for my future professional practice as a geographer
for two reasons. First, despite the fact I did not work in Mexico’s School of Geography,
I welcomed the new direction in geography teaching in this country resulting from visits by
professional critics like him to such a traditional space. Second, and probably more important,
we agreed not only on the need for such spaces to be opened in countries or schools that had
none but also on the importance of an international critical discussion that moved us away
from the nihilism of the predominant paradigm in that moment: postmodernism.
And so it began, or possibly went on—because with colleagues from the University of
British Columbia and the Simon Fraser University, he had already started planning a meeting
in Vancouver in August 1997. It brought together 300 geographers from different countries and
latitudes with different approaches to critical thinking. Our aim was to create a group that could
give a geographical answer to global and local events generated by globalized neoliberalism.
We attended in an optimistic spirit opposing the disillusionment and nihilism expanding
every day in the academic and political fields. On a very sunny and warm day during the
Canadian summer I arrived to register for the conference and met him there. I will not forget
how he embraced me and said in a triumphant voice: “Blanca, we made it, we’re here.”
After a long and eclectic conference, a steering committee was formed of sixteen
geographers from different latitudes in order to build up an agenda, summarized in the
statement of purpose written by Neil and Caroline Desbiens (1999). “A world to win!” is
the slogan reflecting the founding statement of this international association, as an alternative
to the increasingly institutionalized and corporate culture of universities as well as a tool for
a more equal world. The International Critical Geography group (ICG) was born.
Our objectives were clear but ambitious; five other conferences followed the Vancouver
Conference, and Neil was a direct promoter of the first four: Taegu, Korea in 2000; Békéscsaba,
Hungary in 2002; Mexico City in 2005; and Mumbai in 2007. For different reasons, he did
not attend Mumbai or Frankfurt in 2011. Our alleged academicism and some strong criticism
of our limited links with social movements certainly affected his promotion of the group
and his participation in its activities in later years. In my opinion, this was a false dilemma
right from the foundation of the group which has persisted during its fifteen-year existence.
His position was clear, as he turned to link with the movements rather than to academicism
or academic militancy.
The internationalist sense of the group was strongly promoted by him all the time he
participated in its development. He involved groups that otherwise we would not have known,
and he was also an important mentor for many of us, encouraging us to present our ideas
958 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

in the forums we organized and to publish them in spaces which were otherwise denied to
non-English-speaking geographers.
After a long talk on the phone in which I questioned his absence at the Frankfurt meeting,
we wrote and shared an email with Swapna Banerjee-Guha on 30 October 2011, in which he
made a short assessment of the ICG as follows:
“ The ICG has succeeded in doing three things. First, it has kept alive a significant radical
politics in a neoliberal moment when all of us were on the defensive or largely working
alone, or otherwise needed political support. Second, I think it has helped bring a new
generation of radicals into play, refuel what we were doing, and provide something
to them. I am especially thinking of folks from Latin America (NOT British cultural
geographers) but it’s broader than that. This is not a huge group but it is significant.
Third, it has been especially important in establishing international contacts for all of us;
contacts that were not there previously. Personally, as a result of the ICG I know people
in South America, Europe and Asia I would not have known otherwise and I am sure
everyone else has a parallel experience.”
This is a quick and direct assessment of the results obtained to date by the ICG, and it
summarizes part of Neil’s legacy to geography and the world. Some thoughts remain, but
they need a larger space and a deeper discussion. Let us just say that we deeply regret his
absence, but we remember with joy his creative and innovative spirit in the intellectual and
political fields, because as a mentor and friend he gave us inspiration to continue to produce
critical knowledge and denounce inequalities in the neoliberal world that still prevails.
Blanca Ramírez
◊ ◊ ◊
When I agreed to take over as editor of Society and Space in 1992 I had no appetite for presiding
over a journal known (unfairly) at the time for its ‘Gucci Marxism’ or as a left-liberal alternative
to its more radical counterpart, Antipode. Hoping to shake up these preconceptions and generate
new and different kinds of theoretical and political discussion and debate, I asked Neil to join
the journal as one of three coeditors; to my amazement and pleasure he agreed, and began in
1993 to make a decade of extraordinary contributions. Ten years after Neil joined the journal,
Greig Crysler wrote that
“ In a way that certainly could not have been predicted when the journal began, Society and
Space has managed to construct a forum in which competing positions are represented
and their interconnections traced, without imposing a fixed hierarchy upon them” (2003,
page 178).
He rightly noted the importance of the editorials “that make provocative connections between
research published in the journal and … the world at large … . Perhaps the most valuable
contribution of the editors is the attention they pay to the politics of knowledge and intellectual”
debate (pages 177–178). For the most part, he was writing about Neil.
Neil’s first in-print contribution in 1995 was the introduction to a session that he organized
and chaired at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in
Chicago in 1995, which was staged as a debate between David Harvey and Donna Haraway
(and in some ways between Marxism and feminism 1995). In his introduction Neil wrote
about his dissatisfaction with the state of debate among those who should be in conversation:
“ it seems that the habitual style of slash-and-burn exchanges may have intensified the
more the debates became purely academic, to the point where differences are everything
and the common abhorrence of exploitation and oppression, and the commitment to
different possible futures, has been allowed to diffuse.”
The debate and discussion staged between Haraway and Harvey was “a deliberate attempt” to
find “a world of agreement about political and intellectual aims and ambitions” and to create
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 959

“a language and practice” adequate to our political challenges. Which is not to argue for the
end of scholarly and political debate: one of the only points where Neil inserted himself into
the printed transcript of the debate between Harvey and Haraway is when David says “And
actually I suppose I disagree a little with Donna …”, to which Neil interjected: “Finally!”
By his own analysis, Neil understood the promise and productivity of disagreement
because his work was rarely ‘purely academic’; Neil is among the few ‘public intellectuals’
in the discipline of geography, able to bring the weight of his formidable geographical
imagination to bear on contemporary events. He was the person I turned to to write editorials
(which he wrote almost immediately) on events that demanded commentary: after the ‘Battle
in Seattle’ (Smith, 2000b) and September 11, 2001 (Smith, 2001). In the latter he deployed
his extensive theorization of the politics of scale and of a history of American geopolitical
exceptionalism and antigeographical ideology to analyze September 11 and the events that
followed. Both editorials were written with an eye to reframing what he termed a ‘resurgent’
political internationalism.
He worked passionately to create the organizational and intellectual framework for his
kind of internationalism within geography. He brought to the journal the transcript of a
conversation that he and Cindi Katz had in 2001 with Edward Said about the future of
Palestine (Katz and Smith, 2003), and another that he and Caroline Desbiens had with
Graciela Uribe Ortega about her history as an activist–geographer in Chile and then Mexico
(Smith and Desbiens, 2000). And I can still conjure the slightly sick feeling of watching Neil
bound onto a large stage at the annual meetings of the AAG in 1996 to announce the first
meeting of the ICGG in Vancouver in 1997, having moments before extracted a colleague’s
and my agreement to coorganise it with him. His enthusiasm and commitment were simply
impossible to resist. There was as yet no group of Critical Geographers, and we had no
idea whether fifty or 500 people would attend. Over 300 geographers, activists, and other
academics from more than thirty countries came to that first meeting, and the ICGG continues
more than fifteen years later, having now met in large meetings in South Korea, Mexico,
Hungary, India, and Germany. Rallying under the slogan ‘A world to win!’, Neil articulated
with Caroline Desbiens the first statement of purpose for the organization, declaring its
task to be that of developing new theoretical tools and a political practice rooted in specific
locations while remaining relational and wide ranging (Smith and Desbiens, 1999). Their
call was to develop a new and radical vision of ‘applied geography’.
One of the events at the Vancouver conference took place at the Downtown Eastside
Seniors Centre, at the heart of the city’s poorest neighborhood. Neil joined Bud Osborn,
a poet and activist from the area, and local novelist Pete Trower in an evening of poetry,
discussion, and comparisons entitled ‘New York–Vancouver: gentrification and memory’.
The discussions begun that night in 1997 have continued; a photograph that Nick Blomley
circulated immediately after Neil’s death shows him speaking on a panel of the Downtown
Eastside Neighbourhood Council meeting on gentrification last summer, sitting informally
on (and not behind) a long table—his arm a blur because he is gesturing vigorously as he
speaks.
A poem that Bud read in 1997 begins with a quote from Neil’s writing: “the myth of
the frontier is an invention that rationalizes the violence of gentrification and displacement”
(Smith, 1996). Bud’s long poem, published in Society and Space (Blomley, 1998), is titled
‘raise shit: downtown eastside poem of resistance’, and ends with the revelation that leadership
emerges within the community:
our community
our community itself
has emerged as our leader
960 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

the downtown eastside

leads us
and it is to our credit that this is so
for it is from our
prophetic courageous conflictual and loving
unity
that our community
raises shit
and resists
Here’s to geography. Here’s to raising shit. For Neil.
Gerry Pratt
◊ ◊ ◊

In cages? Yes, in cages.

Dear Neil,
You never accepted the cages around you, or around us. You rejected the physical cages in
our streets, and you rejected the intellectual cages in our classrooms. You taught us how to
get out of them. You taught us that the politics of public space is not about cages. And that the
production in of public space is not about cages.
With infinite gratitude. Missing you.
Alfredo Jaar—South Africa, October 22, 2012
◊ ◊ ◊
Neil Smith: a critical geographer 961

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