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

doi:10.1068/d306ns Neil Smith: a critical geographer

Deborah Cowen 947 949 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 fl ight 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 offi cial accounts—from those in Haiti to those on Rikers Island. He would insist that we think carefully about who governs and who profi ts 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 defi ne debates on gentrifi cation (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 unfi nished when he died, but even preliminary contributions circulated widely (Smith, 2007; 2009). Neil’s scholarship furthermore had infl uence far beyond academia, particularly his work on gentrifi cation 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 infl uence 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 infl uence 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 prolifi c scholar, David was also Neil’s doctoral advisor and dear friend. I will never forget the time at the hospital during Neil’s fi nal 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 refl ections 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 refl ections on this important work. The work of Chilean-born artist, architect, and fi lmmaker 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 refl ections 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 fi nal 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 fi rst 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 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 gentrifi cation and urbanization—an arena of work in which his work later became defi nitive. 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 fi rst 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 fi ercely contesting and arguing for radical positions in the seminars of others and creating not a little political turmoil on campus. And when Neil fi ercely 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 fi rst 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 prolifi c writings on the production of nature and space, on gentrifi cation 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 , 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 fi nished 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 fl esh, 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 fi rst 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 gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation, 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 gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation 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 unifi ed theory of gentrifi cation, 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 defi ned concept, the theory provided a production-side analysis of gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation. In addition to helping us understand what gentrifi cation is and why it occurs, the rent gap theory enabled us, through a process of reverse engineering, to divine theories on how to stop gentrifi cation, 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, Gentrifi cation is Dead (http://www.takebacktheland.org/images/misc/Gentrifi cation%20is%20 Dead.pdf ), arguing that, at the end of the housing ‘boom’ in Miami, gentrifi cation, as a specifi c economic phenomenon and cycle, was effectively over, and that organizations must shift to address the new realities—not just fi ght 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 benefi t of Neil’s theories. However, it is not an exaggeration to say our analysis of gentrifi cation 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 scientifi cally examine economic and social phenomena for what they actually were, not for their socially constructed value. That is to say, while gentrifi cation, 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 fi rmly—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 countergentrifi cation 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 Springfi eld. 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 infl uence: a tribute to Neil Smith Neil’s death set off a fl urry 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 infl uence 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 infl uential 1992 Social Text article “Contours of a spatialized politics”. In the piece he established a fl exible 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 infl uence as a teacher, mentor, friend, and comrade that his students can readily refl ect 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 fi rst thirty seconds of the many classes and dissertation meetings I had with him: those fi rst 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 fi rst 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. Refl ecting 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 fi ercest 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 infl uence 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 gentrifi cation. 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 gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation 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 infl uenced 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 insignifi cant ‘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 signifi cant scale in which capital seeks to resolve its contradictions, and consequently a perpetual terrain of confl ict and struggle. During the past year of uprisings, we often spoke of diffi culties 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 insuffi ciency 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 fi xes, 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 infl uence 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 unifi ed 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 fi ght 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 , 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 infl uence 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 confi dence; and when Owen Lattimore was vilifi ed 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 signifi cant 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 infl uence 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 infl ection 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 infl uence 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 oilfi elds 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 fl ashes 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 fl own 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 fl ashed 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 refl ected 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 fi rst 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 fi elds. 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 refl ecting 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; fi ve other conferences followed the Vancouver Conference, and Neil was a direct promoter of the fi rst 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 fi fteen-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 signifi cant 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 signifi cant. 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 fi elds, 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 fi xed 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 fi rst 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 intensifi ed 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 fi nd “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 fi rst 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 fi fty or 500 people would attend. Over 300 geographers, activists, and other academics from more than thirty countries came to that fi rst meeting, and the ICGG continues more than fi fteen 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 fi rst statement of purpose for the organization, declaring its task to be that of developing new theoretical tools and a political practice rooted in specifi c 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: gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation 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 gentrifi cation 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 confl ictual 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 infi nite gratitude. Missing you. Alfredo Jaar—South Africa, October 22, 2012 ◊ ◊ ◊ Neil Smith: a critical geographer 961

References Benjamin W, 2005 [1940], “On the concept of history”, translated by D Redmond, http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html Blomley N, 1998, “The poetic geography of gentrifi cation” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 279–288 Bowman I, 1921 The New World: Problems in Political Geography (World Books, Yonkers-on- Hudson, NY) Crysler C G, 2003 Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism, and the Built Environment, 1960–2000 (Routledge, New York) Harvey D, 1982 The Limits to Capital (Basil Blackwell, Oxford) Harvey D, 1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, Oxford) Harvey D, Haraway D, 1995, “Nature, politics, and possibilities: a debate and discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 507–527 Katz C, Smith N, 2003, “An interview with Edward Said” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 635—651 Lefebvre H, 1991 The Production of Space translated by D Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, Oxford) Lenin V I, 1952 [1917] Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow) Smith N, 1979a, “Gentrifi cation and capital: practice and ideology in Society Hill” Antipode 11(3) 24–35 Smith N, 1979b, “Toward a theory of gentrifi cation: a back to the city movement by capital, not people” Journal of the American Planning Association 45 538–548 Smith N, 1982, “Gentrifi cation and uneven development” Economic Geography 58 139–155 Smith N, 1984 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Basil Blackwell, Moscow) Smith N, 1987a, “Academic War Over the Field of Geography: the elimination of geography at Harvard” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 155–172 Smith N, 1987b, “Rascal concepts, minimalizing discourse, and the politics of geography” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 377–383 Smith N, 1989, “Expertease: making m/other nature” Artforum 28(4) 17–18 Smith N, 1991, “What’s left? A lot’s left” Antipode 23 406–418 Smith N, 1992a, “Real wars, theory wars” Progress in Human Geography 16 257–271 Smith N, 1992b, “Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of geographical scale” Social Text number 33, 54–81 Smith N, 1994, “Geography, empire and social theory” Progress in Human Geography 18 550–560 Smith N, 1995, “Trespassing on the future” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 505–506 Smith N, 1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrifi cation and the Revanchist City (Routledge, London) Smith N, 2000a, “Who rules this sausage factory?” Antipode 32 330–339 Smith N, 2000b, “Global Seattle” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 1–5 Smith N, 2001, “Scales of terror and the resort to geography: September 11, October 7” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 631–637 Smith N, 2002, “New globalism, new urbanism: gentrifi cation as global urban strategy” Antipode 34 427–450 Smith N, 2003 American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA) Smith N, 2005 The Endgame of Globalization (Routledge, New York) Smith N, 2006, “There’s no such thing as a natural disaster”, SSRC Perspectives from the Social Sciences, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/ Smith N, 2007, “Another revolution is possible: Foucault, ethics, and politics” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 191–193 Smith N, 2009, “The revolutionary imperative” Antipode 41(S1) 50–65 962 Neil Smith: a critical geographer

Smith N, 2011, “Uneven development redux” New Political Economy 16 261–265 Smith N, Desbiens C, 1999, “The International Critical Geography Group: forbidden optimism?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 379–382 Smith N, Desbiens C, 2000, “An interview with Graciela Uribe Ortega” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 545—556

© 2012 Pion and its Licensors