And Now for Something (Not) Completely Different

Brief Biography

At the start my university career was fundamentally shaped by the spatial–quantitative revolution, which I still regard as the great hinge of geography's development in the twentieth century, even while my use of statistics is now much more explicitly descriptive in character. During graduate work, and quite by accident, I had become interested in geographic studies of voting behaviour, so spatializing and modelling became central to what I was doing at that time. This would change quite drastically at the beginning of the seventies. Urban conflict became much more central to my interests, and that has persisted down to the present day, though with a more definite focus on the politics of local development. My approach has, from the start, been historical materialist, deepening as I came to understand the basic arguments in a more profound way. During the nineties, and under the influence of students from that country, I became very interested in South Africa, but again with a focus on development and through a Marxist optic. On the other hand, my approach has also been heavily influenced by an immersion in the different currents of thought that human geography has experienced over the last 50 or so years.