At Rutgers he was Chair of the Geography Department (1991–94) and a senior fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture.
From 2008 to 2012 he held a 20 percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory at the University of Aberdeen in his native Scotland.
His dissertation at Johns Hopkins University was supposed to have been on urban processes, but was in fact a major theoretical treatise that became the book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1984).
In this major work of social theory, Smith borrowed Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space and proposed that uneven spatial development is intrinsic to capital markets: capitalism needs to "produce" unevenness to keep accumulating and sustain itself.
The book won several awards, including the Henry Adams Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government.