Jean Gottmann

(Iona) Jean Gottmann (October 10, 1915 – February 28, 1994) was a French geographer who was most widely known for coining the term megalopolis to describe the condition of the Boston-Washington corridor. His main contributions to human geography were in the sub-fields of urban, political, economic, historical and regional geography. His regional specializations ranged from France and the Mediterranean to the United States, Israel and Japan.

He was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, though at the time it was a part of the Russian Empire. He was the only child of prosperous Jewish parents, Elie Gottmann and Sonia-Fanny Ettinger. His parents were killed in the revolution in 1917. His uncle, Michel Berchin, escaped with him to Paris, where he was raised by his uncle and aunt among an extended family.

Gottmann started out as a research assistant in human geography at the Sorbonne (1937–41) under the guidance of Albert Demangeon, but was forced to leave his post with the Nazi invasion of France. He found rescue in the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. During the war, he contributed also to the U.S. effort by consulting for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington and other agencies; he also joined the exiled French academic community teaching at the New School for Social Research and became one of Isaiah Bowman's professors at the new institute of geography of the Johns Hopkins University (1943-48). He also spent two years as international officer at the United Nations (1946-47).

After the war, he started to commute between France and the United States in an effort to explain America's human geography to the French public and Europe's to the American. His multicultural perspective allowed him to get a grant from Paul Mellon to produce the first regional study of Virginia (1953-55) and financial support from the 20th Century Foundation to study the megalopolis of the North-Eastern seaboard of the United States, which soon became a paradigm in urban geography and planning to define polinuclear global city-regions.
In 1961 he was invited to join the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris by Fernand Braudel, Claude Levi-Strauss and Alexandre Koyré and in 1968 became the director of the school of geography at Oxford University where he remained until the end of his life.

Beyond his contribution to the study of megalopolis and urban geography, his theoretical work on the political partitioning of geographical space as a result of the interplay between movement flows and symbolic systems (iconographies) is to be remembered.

Bibliography

* De la méthode d'analyse en géographie humaine, Annales de Géographie (1947)
* L'Amerique (1949)
* A geography of Europe (1950, 1969)
* La politique des Etats et leur géographie (1952)
* Virginia at mid-Century (1955)
* Les marchés des matières premières (1957)
* Etudes sur l'Etat d'Israel (1958)
* Megalopolis (1961)
* Essais sur l'amenagement de l'espace habité (1966)
* The significance of territory (1973)
* Centre and Periphery (1980)
* La città invincibile (1983)
* Since Megalopolis (1990)

ources

Muscarà Luca (2003), "The Long Road to Megalopolis", Ekistics, vol. 70, n.418-9, pp.23-35, ISSN 0013-2942
Muscarà Luca (2005), "Territory as a Psychosomatic Device: Gottmann’s Kinetic Political Geography", Geopolitics, 10, pp. 24-49, ISSN 1465-0045

References

* Oxford Dictionary of National Biography