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Neil Smith
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Neil Smith

1954–2012

Scottish-American geographer who explained gentrification with an equation: the gap between what land earns and what it could earn.

Against those who explained gentrification by the tastes of a new middle class, Smith pointed at the money. His «rent gap» measures the distance between what run-down land yields and what it would yield reinvested. When that gap is wide enough, investment arrives — and it arrives for the whole neighbourhood, not one house.

He also described the «revanchist city»: urban policy that treats poverty as a public-order problem and answers with evictions, by-laws and surveillance. Smith wrote it about 1990s New York, but the description is recognisable in many cities thirty years on.

A Scottish geographer born in Leith in 1954, a student of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University and a professor at Rutgers and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York until his death in 2012, Smith formulated in 1979, at twenty-five, the rent gap theory: gentrification happens when the difference between what land yields and what it could yield makes reinvestment in the disinvested neighbourhood profitable. It was the first explanation of gentrification from the supply of capital and not from consumers' taste.

Uneven Development (1984) generalised the idea to every scale, and The New Urban Frontier (1996) read 1990s New York as a revanchist city reconquering central neighbourhoods by expelling the poor and the homeless, with Tompkins Square Park as its case. In 2002 he argued that gentrification had become a global urban strategy. He was also a historian of geography, with American Empire (2003) on Isaiah Bowman, and his work remains the starting point of critical research on gentrification.

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