David Frederick Ley OC FRSC is a geographer and a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
Born in Swansea, Wales, Ley attended the Windsor grammar school and then Jesus College at Oxford University, where he studied Geography and earned a bachelor's degree in 1968.
He began forming his critique of the quantitative, statistical and theoretical status quo within the field of Human Geography.
in 1972; his doctoral dissertation, titled The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behavior of a Philadelphia Neighborhood, was published in 1974 by the Association of American Geographers.
In 1976, Ley and Marywan Samuals published a volume of essays entitled Humanistic Geography.