Michael Peter Smith

Smith's transnational urbanism corrects a false but comfortable image: the migrant who leaves their country, assimilates and ends up being from here. What is actually observed is something else. Families keep a house, a business, relatives and a vote in both places; money, information and people circulate in both directions for generations, and the two cities end up stitched together by those threads.

His argument with Saskia Sassen is his clearest contribution. Against the global city defined from above, by financial flows and advanced services, Smith proposed looking from below: the remittances that sustain a Mexican town, the hometown association that pays for the road, the election campaign of a candidate from Puebla who holds rallies in Los Angeles. That globalisation does not show up in the indices, but it moves more people.

Michael Peter Smith was professor of community studies and regional planning at the University of California, Davis for more than three decades, and edited the Comparative Urban and Community Research series, which for twenty years published much of American critical urban research.

The Capitalist City (1987) and City, State and Market (1988) set out his theoretical position: between a structuralism that makes the city a mere effect of capital and an individualism that sees only personal choices, Smith insisted on concrete agents, their networks and their practices. Transnational Urbanism (2001) is his most cited book and the one that named an entire field.