Alan Eyre


Lawrence Alan Eyre was a British-born Jamaican geographer and environmentalist. He is also a member of the Christadelphian church.
Alan Eyre was co-founder of the Department of Geography of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His academic work has focused on the political geography of shanty towns and the degradation of the tropical rain forest.

Work on shanty towns

In 1972 Eyre published one of the first Caribbean studies on urban geography, showing that the inner city tenements and not the shanty town was the first destination of rural migrants, then, when stable work is found and income saved, outward to the shanty towns; and noting income variance in the shanty towns. Eyre was one of the first urban geographers in Caribbean-Latin American context to clearly document the inner-city/peri-urban shanty distinction. In a later study Eyre found evidence of both marginality and self-improvement in the Jamaican shanty towns. Eyre's work also documented party political violence as a component of peri-urban geography, hurricane housing and self-help housing.

Rainforest preservation

In Slow death of a tropical rainforest: The Cockpit Country of Jamaica, West Indies Eyre proposed that the Cockpit Country, Jamaica's largest remaining contiguous rainforest be zoned a World Heritage Site in the face of continuing encroachment and degradation, despite proposals for protection having originated as early as Cotterell and Aiken. Eyre's study was one of the main academic starting points for a petition sponsored by the Cockpit Country Stakeholders' Group and Jamaica Environmental Advocacy Network which was submitted to Prime Minister Bruce Golding in 2006.

Academic publications

For a partial bibliography of Eyre's many papers on peri-urban geography see Robert B. Potter, Dennis Conway, Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean, University of Tennessee Press, 1997, p. 101.
Eyre's religious publications primarily concern the Polish Brethren and other antecedents of Christadelphian and Biblical Unitarian views: