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We know from the Grundrisse that Marx felt the division of town and country to be as vital to political economy as the division of classes. From the Manifesto we know that he saw this division as a homological version of the dependency created by capitalism of global South on global North. It was, however, the cultural theorists of twentieth‐century Marxism who internalized this geopolitical imagination...
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 hagiography, 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...
In this essay, part of a special issue acknowledging the scholarship of Neil Smith, we trace his contributions to conceptualizing scale. From his important foundational text, Uneven Development, to his later works that fashioned a more malleable, constructivist, and socio‐cultural approach, Neil Smith made lifelong contributions to our understanding of the processes of scale production—contributions...
This article attempts to untangle two threads of the intellectual and political legacy of Neil Smith. The first concerns the work that Neil and I did together on the The Politics of Public Space (Low and Smith [, 2006], Routledge) on public space and the public sphere and then explains how our paths diverged. I elaborate some of the ways that the public space and public sphere have been expanded by...
Southern Africa is probably the most unevenly developed region on earth, combining the most modern technologies and an advanced working class with the world's extremes of inequality and social militancy. The two most extreme countries, both with settler–colonial populations and accumulation processes that created durable class/race/gender distortions and extreme environmental degradation, are South...
Neil Smith's writings about capitalism and what we call “nature” were insightful and influential. This paper asks what Smith would make of the “radical turn” today occurring in the world of international geoscience. If we “think with” Smith, how should we view Naomi Klein's recent statement that geoscientists can act as fifth columnists calling the capitalist way of life into question? In the first...
In this essay we examine the case of Kivalina, Alaska, twice threatened with destruction, in order to understand the importance of the specifically geological concept of the Anthropocene. We argue that the Anthropocene is best understood as part of what Neil Smith called a “tight dialectic” between the history of geography (the production of environmental knowledge) and historical geography (the production...
Using the debate over Scottish independence as a case study, this article analyses how calculating creditworthiness—or “sovereign risk”—has increasingly become the investment yardstick used by the political class to chart the limits to national self‐determination. In considering other species of predatory lending—municipal debt and household debt‐the article also charts the migration of the so‐called...
In this paper I recapitulate the origins, structure, and purpose of Neil Smith's rent gap theory, and assess the frequently discussed but rarely dissected empirical studies of rent gaps, in order to trace the key analytical and political shifts Smith effected (from consumer preference to mortgage capital circulation, from “natural areas” to state structures, from house prices to capital depreciation,...
In Neil Smith's American Empire (2003, University of California Press), he makes the case that the current moment of US global ambition is characterized by a network of imperial power that is “exercised in the first place through the world market and only secondarily, when and if necessary, in geopolitical terms”. For Smith, it was crucial that in the din of US geopolitics in the post‐9/11 period...
Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing...
This article explores relationships of solidarity constructed between London and the British coalfields from 1968 until the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Foregrounding the development of a culture of solidarity over this period resituates the support movement during the 1984–1985 strike as embedded in longer‐term relationships, which suggests a more equal relationship between coalfield and metropolitan...
Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through...
Migration and border scholars have argued that the Europeanization and securitization of borders and migration have led to forms of population regulation that constitute a questionable divide between EU and non‐EU groups, as well as between different non‐EU groups. This paper argues that these processes have impacted not only centrifugally, on non‐EU populations, but also centripetally, on the “intra‐EU”...
There exists a longstanding association between youth and revolution, partly due to the assumption that the politics of the former are inherently “prefigurative” in nature. Youth politics can often actually be quite conservative, however, as can be observed in contemporary Nicaragua, where rather than attempting to “change the world” in the way that previous militant youth generations were famously...
This article addresses the spatial differentiation of statehood in the process of European integration, looking at its consequences for the reorganization of political rule. First, we elaborate our theoretical foundations resting in materialist theories of the state. It is argued that hitherto analytical approaches have hardly been able to systematically integrate the societal generation of space...
Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist...
In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen...
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