Pred, Allan (1936–2007)

Allan Pred was a longtime professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the discipline's leading practitioners of urban geography and social theory. Pred's [Page 2289]career took him through diverse conceptual approaches in a series of shifts that both reflected and contributed to geography's intellectual transformations.

In the 1960s, Pred's work centered on the historical geography of American manufacturing and its linkages to the country's urban growth patterns. His perspective was resolutely historical, emphasizing the contextualized nature of urban growth rather than abstract processes independent of historical time. Increasingly, the early focus on manufacturing was supplemented by a growing interest in the role of information and its relations to the differential growth of cities. Much of this phenomenon was theorized in terms ...