Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space

Preface to the Second Edition

xi Preface to the Second Edition early in the twentieth century, students at Al Azhar University in Egypt went on strike. It was hardly a progressive movement ; they were rebelling against the science of geography, which they rejected as much too innovative and a clear threat to established tradition . Their fears may have been real, but in the end were misfounded. During the twentieth century, the “science of geography” has attended to a gamut of ruling-class agendas in different national and international contexts, and yet by the late 1970s, as global politics moved right, geography moved left. By the end of the 1980s, as the rebellions grew in Eastern Europe, a U.S. state department official grabbed headlines with the desperate optimism that we were facing the “end of history”; American capitalism had won. In its ideological insulation from events non-American, this vision also assumes the end of geography. For the American Empire, if hardly for the oppressed and exploited around the world, news of this freezing of time and space may have come just in time. It presumably obviates any need to confront seriously the reasons and consequences of the fading American century and the deepening crisis of liveability for more and more people around the globe. Viewed from somewhere other than Washington, the events of the 1980s suggest a different perspective. Far from an end to history, we may be witnessing the “beginning of geography.” The deconstruction of a comparatively stable postwar capitalism in its various monopoly and state guises, combined with the consequent social, political, and economic restructurings, have provoked such fragmentation, dissociation, and recombination of places and events at all spatial scales that indeed the production of new landscapes today puts space and nature—the central themes of geographical inquiry—firmly on the political agenda. Geography is being rescripted as an active political process. This is realized in more academic realms too where, to use Ed Soja’s felicitous phrase, there has been a “reassertion of space in critical social theory.” I ended the preface to the first edition by quoting the now familiar sentiment that “all that is solid melts into air.” With the publication of Marshall Berman’s book of that title, this aphorism from Marx and Engels has come to symbolize the fragmentation of experience in the 1980s that led many to reject the global vision of marxism in favor of various localisms. Yet it is increasingly apparent that the melted geographies of the past decade and more are being recast in the 1990s, resolidified, remade as new expressions of restructured constellations of social relations . In this book I argue that the uneven development of capitalism can best be conceived as resulting from contradictory tendencies toward the differentiation and the equalization of levels and conditions of development . If for understandable reasons the processes of differentiation occupied most of our attention in recent years, we will fail to understand the geography of uneven development unless it is understood that differentiation and equalization are inseparable, mutually implicative. Then xii Preface to the Second Edition indeed the innovative, progressive, rebellious potential of the “science of geography” that so offended the students of Al Azhar might also be realized. Many colleagues have helped me to expand my ideas on uneven development in recent years, and although their comments and criticisms are not always incorporated here, I want to acknowledge their help. David Harvey, Cindi Katz, and Ed Soja have been especially sensitive and challenging critics who have quite differently taught me new ways of seeing. As a student, I often thought it patronizing when authors thanked their students for their “stimulating” influence, but since moving to Rutgers I have come to depend considerably on the intellectual excitement engendered by an exceptional group of people: Laura Reid, Leyla Vural, Tanya Steinberg, Andy Herod, Don Mitchell, Tamar Rothenberg, and Julie Tuason have all in different ways contributed time and ideas, and I hope this has been as worthwhile for them as it has been for me. Neil Smith May 1990 Preface to the Second Edition xiii This page intentionally left blank ...