David Harvey is a British geographer born in 1935, a Cambridge University graduate and a professor at the City University of New York. With a Marxist orientation, Harvey is one of the leading names in contemporary Human Geography, having been awarded in 1995 the Vautrin Lud Prize, the Nobel Prize for Geography.
Among the most famous and widespread works by David Harvey are: The social justice and the city,Post-Modern Condition,Spaces of Hope and The capitalist production of space. Currently, the author has been working on a series of books aimed at the analysis and understanding of The capital, by Karl Marx.
Harvey began to stand out in the geographical intellectual scene as early as the 1960s, with the publication of the work Explanation In Geography, in which he adopted a discourse closer to Quantitative Geography, then in vogue at the time. Subsequently, the author turned to urban studies, adopting a Marxist stance more consistent with the current of thought that came to dominate geographic thinking from the 1970s onwards, Geography Criticism.
One of the basic premises of this author's work is the centrality of theory. For him, there is no satisfactory analysis of geographic space and the transformations related to it if there is no theoretical basis to support it. In this sense, one of his goals throughout his intellectual journey was to understand the functioning and spatial dynamics of the capitalist system and its role in contemporary social relations.
Another important merit of David Harvey's studies was to address the idea of space that distinguishes the conceptions of absolute space (Cartesian), relative space (inspired in the contributions of Albert Einstein) and the relational space, incorporating philosophical elements that move away from exact measurements and encompass the relations of possibility.
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In evolution to this reasoning, the British geographer developed one of the most important concepts of geographical thought in recent decades: the space-time compression. In the wake of this conception, he was able to visualize the emerging dynamics in the context of the globalization of overcoming distances, in which technical and technological changes were able to accelerate events and levels of economic production and integration politics.
With his left-wing political position, heavily influenced by the thoughts of Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey constituted an Urban and Economic Geography of contesting neoliberal thinking and the capitalist system as a whole, seeking to express and denounce the way in which social contradictions manifest themselves in space geographical.
David Harvey's intellectual and scientific work is extremely widespread and praised around the world, which demonstrates the relevance of his theoretical and pragmatic contributions. His studies are – alongside names like Horacio Capel, Paul Claval, Doreen Massey, Milton Santos and many others – one of the most prominent in recent decades in the context of thought geographical.
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* Image Credits: beao / Wikimedia Commons
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
PENA, Rodolfo F. Alves. "David Harvey"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/geografia/david-harvey.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
