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 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 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 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.