Jean Gottmann - Career

Career

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 refuge in the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 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 1957 he married Bernice Adelson.
In 1961, he was invited to join the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris by Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-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.