David Harvey (geographer)

David Harvey (born 31 October 1935, Gillingham, Kent, England) is the Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanitiesGill, J. (2009) , Times Higher Education, 26 March 2009, and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form. He is a leading proponent of the idea of The Right to the City.

Life and work

Harvey attended Gillingham Grammar School for Boys and St John's College, Cambridge, for his undergraduate and post-graduate studies. Harvey's early work, beginning with his PhD (on hop production in 19th century Kent), was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time. Historical inquiry runs through his later works (for example on Paris).

By the mid-1960s, he followed trends in the social sciences to employ quantitative methods, contributing to spatial...
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