David Harvey (geographer)
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David Harvey was born in 1935 in Kent, England. Today, he remains the world's most cited academic geographer, and the author of many books and essays that have been central to the development of geography (as a discipline), and to broader social and political debate, particulalry in urban studies (in which, he argues, geography and the study of space must also figure). His career has seen him move through three areas of geographical enquiry. While excelling at each, he is best known for 35 years of commitment to Marxism and radical geography.
Harvey's early work, beginning with his PhD (on hop production in c.19th Kent), was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time. Historical enquiry runs through his later works, for example on Paris.
By the mid 1960s he followed trends in the social sciences to employ quantitative methods, contributing to spatial science and positivist theory. Roots of this work were visible while he was at Cambridge, a Department that also housed Dick Chorley and Peter Haggett. His Explanation in Geography (1969) was a landmark text in the methodology and philosophy of geography, containing pages of calculus and arguing for 'rational' theory, But after its publication Harvey moved on again, to become concerned with issues of social injustice and the nature of the capitalist system itself. He has never returned to embrace the arguments made in Explanation.
Moving from Bristol University to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the USA, he positioned himself centrally in the newly-emerging field of radical and Marxist geography. Injustice, racism, and exploitation were visible in Baltimore, and activism around these issues was tangible in early 1970s East Coast USA - perhaps more so than in Britain. The journal Antipode was formed at Clark University, and Harvey was one of the first contributors. The Boston Association of American Geographers meetings in 1971 were a landmark, with Harvey and others disrupting the dull objectivism of their peers. In 1972, in a famous essay on ghetto formation, he argued for the creation of “revolutionary theory,”, theory “validated through revolutionary practice”.
Social Justice and the City (1973) expressed Harvey's position that geography could not remain 'objective' in the face of urban poverty and associated ills. It has been cited widely (over 1000 times, by 2005, in a discipline where 50 citations are rare), and it makes a significant contribution to Marxian theory by arguing that capitalism annihilates space to insure its own reproduction. Dialectical Marxism has guided his subsequent work, notably the theoretically sophisticated Limits to Capital (1982). LTC furthers the geographical analysis of capitalism, and several books on urban processes and urban life have followed it. The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), written while Oxford, was a bestseller (the London Independent named it as one of the fify most important works of nonfiction to be published since 1945). It is a materialist assault on postmodern ideas and arguments, locating postmodernism in capitalist processes and the responses to its own contradictions. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) focusses on social and environmental justice (although its dialectical perspective has attracted the ire of some Greens). Spaces of Hope (2000) has a utopian theme and indulges in futurology. But the onset of a new round of US imperialism since 2001 has provoked a blistering critique - in the New Imperialism (2003) he arges that the war on Iraq allows US neo-cons to divert attention from the failures of capitalism 'at home'.
Harvey returned to JHU from Oxford in 1993, but spent increasing time elsewhere as a speaker and visitor, notably as a salaried Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s. He moved to the City University of New York in 2001 as a Distinguished Professor, now residing in its Department of Anthropology. He has, therefore, spent virtually his entire academic career in Anglo-America (and he retains properties in the USA, UK, and Paris) using prestigious and well-paid academic appointments to permit his writing, and supervision of many PhD students. Several of these, like Neil Smith, Richard Walker, and Eric Swyngedouw now hold important academic positions themselves. Personal anecdotes about Harvey's life and work abound, but two constants have been teaching a course on Marxism, and his support for student activism and community and labour movements - notably in Baltimore.
Critical response to Harvey's work has been sustained. In the early years, there was little love lost between Harvey and proponents of quantitative of supposedly 'objective' geography, notably Brian Berry of the University of Texas. As interest in Marxist thought has waned in recent years, Harvey's continued commitment to it has led to reappraisals and in some cases rejection by younger left scholars. Some find Marxism too dogmatic; others criticise its attachment to class as a concept, rather than social and cultural difference and gender; and many find human agency is still alive and fighting the 'logics' of capital, particularly in the developing world, which is not central to Harvey's work. Harvey generally rises above these criticisms. Occasionally he responds to them in print or at conferences and meetings.
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Career
- B.A. (Hons) St Johns College, Cambridge, 1957
- Ph.D. St Johns College, Cambridge, 1961.
- Post-doc, University of Uppsala, Sweden 1962?
- Lecturer, Geography, University of Bristol, UK (1961-1969)
- Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, (1969-1973)
- Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University (1973-1987, and 1993-2001)
- Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford (1987-1993)
- Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, City University of New York (2001-present)
Several honorary doctorates and awards.
Major Works
- Explanation in Geography (1969)
- Social Justice and the City (1973)
- The Limits to Capital (1982)
- The Urbanization of Capital (1985)
- Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985)
- The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)
- Teresa Hayter, David Harvey (eds.) (1994) The Factory and the City: The Story of the Cowley Automobile Workers in Oxford. Thomson Learning
- Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996)
- Spaces of Hope (2000)
- Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (2001)
- The New Imperialism (2003)
- Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003)
Refs.
- Castree, N. 2004. David Harvey. In Key Thinkers on Space and Place, eds. Hubbard, Kitchin, Valentine. Sage Pubs.
- Castree, N, and Gregory, D. 2004. David Harvey: a critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Trevor Barnes chapter
- Harvey, D. 2002. Chapter in Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical Essays. Ed. p Gould and FR Pitts. Syracuse University Press.