David Harvey

Moving from Bristol University to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US, he positioned himself centrally in the newly emerging field of radical and Marxist geography. Injustice, racism, and exploitation were visible in Baltimore, and activism around these issues was tangible in early 1970s East Coast, perhaps more so than in Britain. The journal Antipode was formed at Clark University; Harvey was one of the first contributors. The Boston Association of American Geographers meetings in 1971 were a landmark, with Harvey and others disrupting the traditional approach of their peers. In 1972, in a famous essay on ghetto formation, he argued for the creation of "revolutionary theory", theory "validated through revolutionary practice".

Harvey resides in New York. He has a daughter, Delfina, born in January, 1990.

Harvey returned to Johns Hopkins from Oxford in 1993, but spent increasing time elsewhere as a speaker and visitor, notably as a salaried Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s. In 1996, he delivered the Ellen Churchill Semple lecture at UK Geography. He moved to the City University of New York in 2001 as a Distinguished Professor, now residing in its Department of Anthropology. He has spent most of his academic career in Anglo-America, with brief sojourns in France and a range of foreign visiting appointments (currently as acting Advisory Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai). He has supervised many PhD students. Several of these, such as Neil Smith, Richard Walker, Erik Swyngedouw, Michael Johns, Maarten Hajer, Patrick Bond, Melissa Wright, and Greg Ruiters now hold or held important academic positions themselves. In 2013 Harvey was asked by the Republic of Ecuador to help set up the National Strategic Center for the Right to the Territory (CENEDET), which he directed with the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán until its alleged forced closure in 2017.

David Harvey is widely recognized as a foundational scholar in urban geography. Harvey's books have been widely translated. He holds honorary doctorates from Roskilde (Denmark), Buenos Aires (Argentina), the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University (Sweden), Ohio State University (USA), Lund University (Sweden), the University of the Republic (Uruguay) and the University of Kent (UK). Among other awards he has received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography (France). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1998, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He is a member of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.

David Harvey: “We have to call off this capitalist urbanization dynamic” | Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

A tour d’horizon of “movements creating alternative spaces in which an anti-austerity politics can be articulated….The politics of daily life should be central to what we are doing.” Happy birthday…