Revisiting and trying to make sense of uneven development was still a tough concept for me to wrap my head around this time around, despite reading more literature on the topic at hand, in particular Neil Smith’s work on it and Thomas Roger’s Review on his works. Personally, I found it very helpful that Smith used New York and the gentrification of Tompkins Square Parks as the case study on the topic at hand, as I am quite familiar with the surrounding area and was able to visualize the spatial issues surrounding this problem.
Our contradictory understandings of space prevent us from recognizing that capitalist production actually ‘produces’ space, through environmental transformation.
Thomas Rogers, 2012
Rogers touches on it in his review, stating that “‘spatialized’ historical analysis, or environmental history, has developed ‘unevenly’ between the North Atlantic and Latin America” and that, ”Our contradictory understandings of space prevent us from recognizing that capitalist production actually ‘produces’ space, through environmental transformation.” The Smith reading only really hit home for me toward the end, where he talked about the Third Worlding of the US city, where immigrants come to the city from every country where US capital was used to open markets, disrupt local economies, extract resources, and remove people from the land. This comparison of NYC to the streets of Sudan having primitive conditions makes sense when you talk about the third worlding of US cities, but still does not necessarily connect when it comes to uneven development specifically? What in particular is uneven? Is it the social classes across the board, or the ability to have a fair shot at development in the race for economic capital, or am I totally off and is it neither?
Sources:
Thomas Rogers. Review of Smith, Neil, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space.. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. October, 2012.
Neil Smith. 1996. Chapter 1 from The New Urban Frontier : Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Routledge, Florence.
Lubna Alli 
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