Don Mitchell (born 1961) is professor of human geography at Uppsala University[1] and Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the geography department at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
[5] Considered an influential Marxist scholar, he is best known for his work on cultural theory, showing how landscapes embody historical links to struggle, oppression, and the unacknowledged labor involved in their creation and maintenance.
In his 2020 book Mean Streets, he examines the structural causes of homelessness and the role capitalism has played in creating and exacerbating it.
[8][9] He posits that as racist and unjust as U.S. capitalism was during the Keynesian period following the New Deal, social welfare programs mitigated its harshest excesses, a situation which changed during the transition to a neoliberal economy starting in the 1970s and accelerating under the Reagan administration.
He argues: "The world can be organized such that it doesn’t simultaneously produce the people we call homeless and the thinking that we have to get rid of them.