Harvey, David

Bio Sketch

David Harvey (b. 1935) is one of the most influential Marxist geographers and social theorists, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work on the circuits of capital, the spatial fix, accumulation by dispossession, and the right to the city underpins Geoffrey's capitalism, urbanization & gentrification, neoliberalism & architecture, and the everyday research areas.

Key Works

• Social Justice and the City (1973); The Limits to Capital (1982); The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).
• "The Urban Process under Capitalism" (1978/1981) — circuits of capital and the built environment.
• *The Enigma of Capital* (2010); A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005); Rebel Cities (2012).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Neoliberal Metropolis
• Gentrification
• Ideology
• Capitalist Realism

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Harvey is fundamental to Geoffrey's capitalism, urbanization & gentrification and neoliberalism & architecture areas: his theory of capital switching, the "spatial fix," accumulation by dispossession, and the manufacture of daily life explains the icon economy, gentrification, and the financialized built environment (cf. Bismarck, Goudsmit, Brummet & Reed).

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• The Urban Process under Capitalism (1981)
• The Enigma of Capital (2010)
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
• Parametricism Can Never Become a Dominant Architecture Style Now That the Forces of Capitalism Are No Longer Interested in the Lives of the Masses
• Architecture and Capital in the 21st Century: An Interview with Matthew Soules
• Is the Era of the Skyscraper Over?
• Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Willis 1995) — the built environment as circuits of capital and real-estate / finance-driven form
• The Influence of Local Fiscal Structure and Growth Control Choices on 'Big Box' Urban Sprawl in the American West
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — Harvey named (with Soja) in the urban-geographic lineage behind Borden's "space of flows"; the chapter's case is set in Harvey's terrain: Broadgate, "constructed for the post 'Big Bang' (1986) financial centre in the City of London," the financialised enclave a decade before the financialisation literature named the phenomenon. See space-of-flows, neoliberal-metropolis, privatised-public-space.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Harvey as Postmetropolis's pivotal chapter: Social Justice and the City (1973) assessed as the era's most agenda-setting book — the liberal formulations ("the only adequate conceptual framework for understanding the city is one which encompasses and builds upon both the sociological and the geographical imaginations," 1973, quoted p. 106); "the 'normal workings' of the urban system… tend all on their own to produce and reproduce a regressive redistribution of real income" (p. 107); the Marxist turn rerooting injustice in "the class-structured 'specific geography' of capitalism" (p. 108); the headquote "Capital represents itself in the form of a physical landscape created in its own image" (1978, quoted p. 95); the spatial fix (p. 99) as "precisely this creative spatialization of Marx's analysis… that may, in retrospect, prove to be Harvey's greatest achievement" (p. 100); the palimpsest epigraph (Harvey 1988, quoted p. 117); and the Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) reading of postfordism's environmental dark side (p. 175, n. 11). Soja's caveat: the near-absence of gender in Social Justice and the City ("Of the 144 authors cited in the Author Index… only four are women," p. 108, n. 7).