ajkgdasjk Dedicated to Isabella DeRiso Antipode Volume 49 Supplement 1 CONTENTS The Revolutionary Imperative: Engaging the Work of Neil Smith Neil Smith's Long Revolutionary Imperative Nik Heynen, Andrew Kent, Katherine McKittrick, Vinay Gidwani, and Wendy Larner 5 Calculating the Debt Gap Andrew Ross 19 On the Image of the Country and the City Timothy Brennan 34 Unfree Radicals: Geoscientists, the Anthropocene, and Left Politics Noel Castree 52 The Tight Dialectic: The Anthropocene and the Capitalist Production of Nature Susan W.S. Millar and Don Mitchell 75 Geoeconomics in the Long War John Morrissey 94 Planetary Rent Gaps Tom Slater 114 Neil Smith's Scale John Paul Jones III, Helga Leitner, Sallie A. Marston, and Eric Sheppard 138 Public Space and the Public Sphere: The Legacy of Neil Smith Setha Low 153 Uneven Development and Scale Politics in Southern Africa: What We Learn from Neil Smith Patrick Bond and Greg Ruiters 171 Index 190 ajkgdasjk Neil Smith’s Long Revolutionary Imperative Nik Heynen Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA; [email protected] Andrew Kent Editorial Office, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Cardiff, UK Katherine McKittrick Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada Vinay Gidwani Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Wendy Larner Office of the Provost, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand Abstract: Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiog- raphy, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith’s work—not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned essays by comrades from across the human sciences, it considers the entire range of Smith’s oeuvre. This paper introduces the essays by offering not only some thoughts about Smith’s intellectual contributions generally, but also new insight into the role he played in Antipode. Keywords: Neil Smith, history of geography, revolution, knowledge production Introduction Neil Smith was born in 1954 in Leith, Scotland, something he was always proud of. And he passed away on 29 September 2012 in New York, a city he also came to love. Smith started his formal geographic training at the University of St Andrews under the mentorship of Joe Doherty, who would through the entirety of his life be a dear friend and close confidant. After completing a PhD at Johns Hopkins University, where he worked with David Harvey, Smith got his first faculty position at Columbia University, and then in the Department of Geography at Rutgers be- tween 1988 and 2000. He then moved to the Graduate Centre at the City University of New York, where he was Distinguished Professor (in the Anthropology program) Antipode Vol. 49 No. S1 2017 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 5–18 doi: 10.1111/anti.12313 © 2017 The Author. Antipode © 2017 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 6 Antipode until his death. As often happens when individuals who make important contribu- tions to any community pass away, there was a great deal of grieving, celebration, and confusion when Smith died. All of this served to collectively memorialize his achievements, but also helps to consolidate his contributions and his intellectual legacy moving forward, so that his ideas can continue to be pondered, critiqued, adapted, and otherwise put to work. Smith’s legacy is mixed, but his contributions certainly continue to help us understand the spatial politics that enable differential social power relations to unevenly shape the worlds we inhabit. At the same time, his contributions foster a revolutionary creativity that can be the wellspring for tac- tics, approaches, and strategies for tackling uneven development and its attendant injustices head on. There has already been a fair bit written about Smith’s contribu- tions and legacy (see Castree 2004; Cowen et al. 2012; Mitchell 2014). Despite the fact that Smith detested hagiography, as Don Mitchell (2014) observes in his extended essay about Smith’s life and work, and a point that we reiterated to this project’s contributors, we thought it was important to not only offer some thoughts about Smith’s intellectual contributions generally, but also specifically offer some insight about the role he played in Antipode. After Smith’s death, Mitchell became the literary executor of his estate and spent countless hours organizing and reading Smith’s wide-ranging catalog of letters, notes, and other archives. Those who knew Smith are aware that he built extensive archives with a keen eye, and produced substantial archival marginalia. Mitchell knew what we were doing, and generously shared with us a series of letters—yet to be made public (and given some of the personal details included might not ever be)—that shed light on Smith’s unique role in the life of Antipode, and beyond. These letters led us to another set of letters between Doherty and Smith, and to oral history interviews with Joe Doherty and Eric Sheppard (the two edited Antipode together from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s). For this brief introductory essay, these archives were a veritable font of information to think with. There was one letter, however, which stands out as perhaps the most interesting and prefigurative of any archival document we have seen. The 13-page, hand-writ- ten letter from Smith to Doherty, dated 8 December 1979, offers incredible insight into who Smith was, and who he was going to become. In it, Smith describes his early struggles with Marx and Harvey’s interpretation of Marx while in the midst of offering Harvey extensive comments on a draft of The Limits to Capital (Harvey 1982). He connects this to his own political activism at the time in Baltimore. He talks about, as a graduate student, teaching two courses at Morgan State University (an important historically black college in Baltimore) and one at Johns Hopkins, and how it took a toll on his efforts to write. And, he talks about Antipode, which at the time he was heavily involved in, more so, perhaps, than most realize. We use this one letter to structure the introduction to this special bundle of essays, but also to offer some insights into Neil Smith beyond those that have emerged since his death. In the letter to Doherty, Smith shares with excitement that he has figured out a plan for his dissertation. He then proceeds to outline some of the most important ideas that he would grapple with from the end of the 1970s through 2012. Three pages of the letter include a detailed sketch of how Smith envisioned the structure of his dissertation project. It mentions 10 chapters and the project’s tentative title: © 2017 The Author. Antipode © 2017 Antipode Foundation Ltd. Neil Smith’s Long Revolutionary Imperative 7 “Uneven Development and Capital Accumulation”. Like many enthusiastic PhD stu- dents, Smith recognizes that his vision was ambitious, perhaps overly so, and says as much to Doherty: “Clearly, that’s a handful for a dissertation, but whether the dissertation ends up being only a part of it or not, this is the project I am working on”. Interestingly, there is no mention of “nature” in the outline to Doherty, which is of course one of the key ideas many people associate with Smith’s work, especially his early work, and it looms large in his brilliant Uneven Development (Smith 1984a). The absence of “nature” and perennial questions about the “coherence” of Uneven Development were clarified on 26 March 2009 at the Las Vegas meeting of the American Association of Geographers in a session celebrating the 25th anniversary of the book. In a not uncommonly self-deprecating way, Smith shared that at “some point” during his PhD Harvey, his supervisor, proclaimed that it was time for him to be done; that he needed to just pull together what he had been working on, call it a dissertation, and “get on with it”. Interesting, then, was the fact that the dissertation Smith (1982a) graduated with was titled “Uneven Development: The Production of Nature Under Capitalism”, despite his original outline to Doherty having nothing in it about “nature”. Laying the draft overview next to the table of contents of the actual book, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Pro- duction of Space, first published in 1984 (and re-issued in 1990a and 2008a), it becomes clear that what he envisioned writing in 1979 was condensed in the second half (Chapters 4–6) of the book. Smith had, of course, already written about nature elsewhere, most importantly in two papers published in 1980—one with Phil O′Keefe in Antipode and one by himself in Science and Society (Smith 1980; Smith and O’Keefe 1980). Foreshadowing the sentiment he shared with Doherty—“whether the dissertation ends up being only a part of it or not, this is the project I am working on”—in the conclusion of the Antipode essay, Smith and O’Keefe (1980:38) proclaimed: As with nature, a sophisticated understanding of how space is produced depends on an equally sophisticated understanding of the capitalist mode of production. Space and place are produced as part of the mode of production. An understanding of uneven development is therefore central. Doherty, after Smith’s death, relayed to us that: The whole thing [writing the dissertation] took place in four months essentially. He hadn’t written anything substantive really … he’d written a lot … nothing that could be directly related to the PhD, and then he kind of suddenly got the notion that he needed to finish it and just sat down and in four months wrote the damn thing.