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David Harvey
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David Harvey

1935

British geographer who explained the city as a product of capital: where it invests, who stays and who is pushed out.

Harvey trained a whole generation of urbanists by showing that geography is not a stage on which the economy happens, but one of its instruments. When capital runs out of room to grow, it moves into land and buildings: that is what he called the «spatial fix», and it explains the cycles of construction, bubble and crisis that repeat across very different cities.

From there comes his most cited concept, «accumulation by dispossession»: urban growth that advances by taking away — affordable housing, public land, entire neighbourhoods. Picking up Lefebvre's right to the city, Harvey turned it into a concrete demand: being able to live in the city is not enough, you have to be able to decide what it becomes.

Born in Gillingham, England, in 1935 and trained at Cambridge, Harvey began as a quantitative geographer, with Explanation in Geography (1969), and converted to Marxism on arriving in Baltimore in 1969, where the city's poverty made him change his questions. Social Justice and the City (1973) was the result, and The Limits to Capital (1982) his major theoretical work: capital needs space, the city and infrastructure to resolve its crises, and produces and destroys them at its own pace.

A professor at Johns Hopkins, Oxford and, since 2001, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he has written on Paris as capital of modernity (2003), on neoliberalism (2005) and on rebel cities (2012), and his video lectures on Capital have been followed by hundreds of thousands of people. He is the most cited geographer in the world. Critics reproach him for an economism that leaves little room for race, gender and the Global South; his framework remains the one critical urban theory uses to understand why the city is built the way it is.

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