David Harvey

Abstract

David Harvey (b. 1935) is an influential urban theorist, and the world’s most widely cited geographer. He is a distinguished professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, and was formerly a professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, as well as Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. Since earning a BA (1957), MA, and PhD (1962) at Cambridge, Harvey has been a central figure in every major transformation of geography’s philosophy, methodology, and politics. As the “spatial turn” became more influential across the social sciences and humanities, Harvey became a leading interdisciplinary theorist of how urbanization brings together a multitude of diverse economic, sociocultural, and natural processes. Capitalist production is urbanizing. So are social difference, diversity, and inequality. So are relations between humans and animals, plants, and viruses—all the diversity of more-than-human worlds of “nature.” Harvey first achieved prominence at the University of Bristol in the “Quantitative Revolution,” a movement in geography, planning, and urban studies challenging dominant historical, descriptive narratives of locally unique regions and cities. Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969) was called “the bible” by a new generation committed to a spatial science of positivist analytical rigor, quantified precision, and the development of hypotheses and laws—sifting through the unique and particular to find what is general and universal. Harvey completed Explanation just as he took up a position at Johns Hopkins in 1969, as protests shook cities around the world. In Baltimore and other US cities thrown into crisis by generations of racism and white-flight suburbanization, protests intensified after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with spreading rebellion against young men being drafted to serve in the neocolonial Vietnam War. Diving into research on the class and race segregation of Baltimore’s inner city, Harvey found Engels and Marx more reliable guides than modern urban economics. Harvey’s resulting Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973) inaugurated a new, Marxist revolution in urban studies, geography, and beyond. In the subsequent half-century, Harvey has introduced successive generations to Marxist theory and praxis while adapting and refining Marx’s (somewhat) Eurocentric theory of industrial capitalism—making it relevant for understanding today’s planetary, urban, cosmopolitan, postindustrial, and algorithmic capitalism. Harvey has put his urban historical-geographical materialist methods into sustained dialogue with every generation of New Left academics (feminists, environmentalists, ecofeminists, anarchists, postmodernists, cultural studies theorists, posthumanists, and decolonization/indigenous theorists) as well as “Right to the City” activists fighting for housing and tenants’ rights and racial justice.