Neil Robert Smith 18 June 1954 – 29 September 2012 was a Scottish geographer together with academic. He was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at a Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and winner of many awards, including the Globe Book Award of the Association of American Geographers.
Smith's research explored the broad intersections between space, nature, social theory, and history. His dissertation at Johns Hopkins University was supposed to take been on urban processes, but was in fact a major theoretical treatise that became the book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space 1984. In this major develope of social theory, Smith present that uneven spatial developing is a function of the procedural logical system of capital markets; thus society and economies "produce" space.
Smith is credited with theories approximately the gentrification of the inner city as an economic process propelled by urban land prices and city land speculation, rather than by cultural preferences for alive in the city in his seminal article "Toward a theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, non People" 1979.
Smith's curiosity about why such(a) critical study of space and place came so gradual to the discipline of geography lead to his inspect of early 20th-century geographer Isaiah Bowman and the book American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization 2003, which traced America's rise to global energy through geographical ignorance. The book won several awards, including the Henry Adams Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government. Smith's critique of American-led, capitalist neoliberalism was further developed in The Endgame of Globalization 2005.