Dialect Anthropol DOI 10.1007/s10624-012-9285-7 OBITUARY Neil Smith 1954–2012 Eliza Jane Darling Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012 Neil R. Smith, radical geographer, revolutionary socialist and redoubtable birder, died in New York City on September 29, 2012 at the age of 58. With his passing ebbs a socialism of the spirit long gone and scarce as hen’s teeth in the academic sweatshop Neil trenchantly termed ‘‘the sausage factory.’’ I met him through anthropologist Louise Lennihan in 1998. I was a third-year student in the PhD Program in Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, a fleeting term away from advancement to candidacy. ‘‘By the by,’’ said Louise in her breezy way, ‘‘we’ve got a guest prof coming in next semester and I think you should take his course. Neil Smith. Geographer. Ever heard of him?’’ I hadn’t. He arrived at CUNY on the eventide of the postmodern stampede historian Ellen Meiksens Wood had pegged ‘‘the retreat from class’’ at its high noon under the inveterate capitalist cowboy Reagan, making landfall in a department whose materialist roots in political economy seemed set to wane as an older generation of Marxists dwindled through death, departure or impending retirement. CUNY was still CUNY, the faculty excellent, the reading critical, the students radical. Yet a shadow of doubt hung over us all. The rank revanchism of Rudolph Guiliani’s assault on the university of the poor, the immigrant and the working class was already in the works by the time Neil put a name to its more generalized urban manifestation, but worse, the academic left seemed to give way before its ilk, consumed by a textual cannibalism that left us gorged to bursting on the bitter backwash of neoliberal defeat. I found solace in political ecology (nature, at least, was still solid, wasn’t it?) and prepared for fieldwork, but I hadn’t heard much of anything that truly lit my intellectual fire in a month of Sundays. I’d gone to see our E. J. Darling (&) Bleecker, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 E. J. Darling Head of Department for dissertation advice, which Louise provided with her habitual sagacious enthusiasm. This was an afterthought on my way out the door. ‘‘I know you’re going the rural route and he’s teaching urban social theory, but trust me, you need to meet Neil Smith.’’ I trusted her, and duly signed up for the vaunted Neil Smith experience. Professor Smith pitched up on the first day of class in woebegone trainers and blue jeans with better days behind them, gaping collar providing egress for an errant tuft of chest hair competing for pride of place with his rusty Celtic curls, disputatious eyebrows and unrepentant moustache, a low-rent version of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. I did an inward eye-roll; I’d heard he was a Big Deal and immediately sussed him for a slummer, that particularly odious species of bourgeois posturer who dips a calculated sartorial toe into the plebeian sea from the heights of his lofty academic perch. Then he opened his mouth, and started talking. Within five minutes, it was clear the man couldn’t wear pretension if he tried it on. Half an hour later, I knew this would be the best course I’d ever take in my life. By the time we’d overrun our allotted schedule so far that we’d forgotten the time of day because the debate was too hot and the hour too brief, I decided this guy would be my dissertation advisor come hell or high water, even if I had to leave CUNY at the eleventh hour to work with him. We had him on loan from the Geography Department at Rutgers just across the river, but frankly I would’ve crossed the world. I caught up with him at the elevator to request an appointment. ‘‘Professor Smith!’’ He eye-rolled me right back, knowingly. ‘‘It’s Neil. And you’re Eliza. Let’s talk.’’ It was one of those soul-shifting moments I’ve heard recounted in endless iterations since his death, from students and professors, activists and organizers, socialists and environmentalists, gardeners and twitchers. Some discovered him through his writing, and shouted aloud right there in the sanctity of the library at the revelation. Some approached him nervously at a conference, and were shocked and gratified in equal measure an hour and a pint later for the time and wisdom he shared. Some encountered him in the streets, and forged the bond in the joyful flame of protest. Some found him through their mutual admiration for the Sandhill Crane, or the Senita Cactus. Whatever the vector, no one ever met Neil Smith with a shrug. You walked away blinking, startled; the world looked different—drained of its dull grey shadows and filled up with Kodachrome possibility—because it was. He was born in Leith, a port town on the northern outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1954. Presaging the restless peripatetic predilections that would define his days, he did not remain there long, though his formative years right up through university at St. Andrews, where he completed a BSc in Geograpaphy in 1977, would be spent somewhere in the vicinity of the Firth of Forth, the great glacial estuary spilling the ancient waters of its riparian namesake into the North Sea— excepting a brief sojourn to Philadelphia during this period, on an exchange to the University of Pennsylvania, that would prove prognostic. Upon completing his undergraduate degree, he moved Stateside to study with David Harvey in Baltimore, where he would earn his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. From here, Neil moved rapidly up the academic food chain, landing appointments at Columbia, where he was hired to assistant professor fresh from the doctorate, Rutgers, where 123 Neil Smith 1954–2012 he achieved tenure in 1990, and finally CUNY, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Anthropology (and later Geography) in 1999, also accepting a part-time post as Sixth Century Chair in Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen in 2009. Visiting appointments would take him to Belfast and Barcelona, Sheffield and Sao Paolo, Eugene and Utrecht, and many shores besides to accept a preponderance of fellowships, keynote lectures, and assorted honors. Along the way he produced a body of scholarship prolific in its immense quantity but all the more astonishing in its consistent quality, in both intellectual and literary terms, all the while keeping one foot on the terra firma of political organizing in the true vein of the committed scholar-activist. Neil stamped his most indelible mark on scholarship as an urbanist, and he put the boot in early, publishing a broadside derived from his undergraduate research in the radical geography journal Antipode in 1979 (Smith 1979a). Such was his primal perspicuity that this early piece would form the blueprint for his lifelong intellectual architecture, not simply in what he thought, but how he thought, and by extension, how he would teach his students to think by way of example: to dig below the form of appearance, to avoid conflating consequence with causality, to understand how the contours of the local are carved by forces at work on expansive spatial scales, and most importantly, to articulate the political implications of theoretical silences, the better to muster some coherent strategy against them. His window for this quintessentially dialectical way of thinking, which simultaneously historicized and spatialized a temporally and geographically delimited phenomenon, was gentrifi- cation, a term that would come to be associated with his scholarship throughout his life. Gentrification theory was in the awkward throes of adolescence in the late 1970s, dominated by naı¨ve neoclassical economic assumptions pointing to consumption, demand and cultural predilection to account for the alleged ‘‘revitalization’’ of the inner city, a green and pleasant cock-and-bull terminology that both obscured and justified the abject violence inflicted upon those inhabitants displaced by the savage swing of its deracinating plough. Gentrification, for its early archivists, was a product of consumer preference, the choices made by a bekhakied clientele of middle class means in the great shopping mall of urban real estate. This explanation, for Neil, did not explain anything: ‘‘Consumer sovereignty explanations have taken for granted the availability of areas ripe for gentrification when this was precisely what had to be explained’’ (Smith 1979b, pp. 540–541). He would fill this void himself with the development of a concept that would change our thinking about gentrification forever: the rent gap, a terrain of investment opportunity mulched by an overripening of the urban built environment through purposeful decay, the rotten fruit of disinvestment laying fertile ground for the sowing of profitable new seeds of rent extraction. The silence in gentrification theory was capital, its specific cycling in and out and of residential neighborhoods in the context of far greater shifts in the spatial and economic organization of cities through deindustrialization and restructuring in the postwar era. The rent gap made its debut in a 1979 article for the Journal of the American Planning Association whose title took a pointed swipe at demand-side exposition: ‘‘Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People.’’ 123 E. J. Darling Such a brazen shot fired over the bow of the gentrification establishment could hardly go unanswered, and Neil’s fiery intervention roiled the pot of neoclassical complacency. It both galvanized and divided gentrification theorists, producing some memorable clashes with the champions of taste.