Berry, Brian (1934–)

One of geography's most well-known and productive scholars, Brian Berry has played an enormously influential role in urban and economic geography, primarily as the steadfast defender of traditional quantitative modeling.

Born in 1934 to working-class parents in England, Berry defied the confines of the British class system to rise to the topmost tiers of academia. He completed a BS in economics at the London School of Economics in 1955, where he was exposed to historical geography and introduced to the quantitative modeling of spatial phenomena. Immediately thereafter, he traveled to the University of Washington in Seattle just as the geography program there initiated the quantitative revolution in American geography. Berry thus formed one of William Garrison's cadre of “space cadets,” along with Duane Marble, William Bunge, ...