The human geographer David M. Smith worked around the world from the UK to the USA, South Africa, Israel/Palestine, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The leitmotif guiding his work throughout was August Lösch’s dictum: ‘The real duty of the economist is not to explain our sorry reality, but to improve it.’ From industrial archaeology via industrial location theory, to social inequalities, the formulation of welfare geography and the rigorous geographical extension of moral and ethical concepts, his underlying concern was always with marginalised people – including those in the academy – rather than any professional recognition.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 21