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Jean Gottmann




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


  • 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)



SOURCES

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