Michael Dear

Born in Wales in 1944 and a professor for decades at the University of Southern California and later at Berkeley, Dear came to Los Angeles from the geography of mental health: Landscapes of Despair (1987), with Jennifer Wolch, showed how psychiatric deinstitutionalisation produced service-dependent neighbourhoods and homelessness in inner cities. That attention to the margins marked his later work.

In the 1990s he gathered Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Mike Davis and others under the name of the Los Angeles School, and The Postmodern Urban Condition (2000) fixed his thesis: against the Chicago city, organised from the centre in rings, Los Angeles shows an urbanisation in which the periphery organises the centre, uses fragment across a board with no single logic and planning loses its capacity to order. He called that process keno capitalism, after the game of chance.

From Chicago to L.A. (2002) confronted the two schools, and Why Walls Won't Work (2013) studied the border between Mexico and the United States as a third nation no wall divides. Critics reproached him for exaggerating the novelty of Los Angeles and the break with Chicago; his contribution was to open urban theory to postmodernism and to the dispersed city that has since become general.

Dear also devoted much of his work to neighbourhood opposition to social services, the phenomenon known as NIMBY, not in my backyard. He studied how mental health centres, shelters and supported housing meet resistance wherever they are proposed, and how that resistance ends up concentrating them in the neighbourhoods least able to push back. His conclusion, that the distribution of social services is a question of territorial justice, still guides policies for sharing them fairly between districts.