Gottmann, Jean (1915–1994)

Jean Gottmann was one of the premier urbanists of the 20th century. Born in the Ukraine, Gottmann was raised in France. After a traditional French education, he studied geography within the French regional tradition of Paul Vidal de la Blache. It is from this tradition that Gottmann started to develop his own ideas on the nature and meaning of geography, including the spatial theory that eventually led to his most famous work.

It was through the 1961 publication of Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States that Gottmann established himself as one of the most influential geographers of the 20th century. While he used the term megalopolis to refer specifically to the 600-mile-long metropolitan corridor between Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., the term has been used to refer to any similar agglomeration of large [Page 1356]urban areas. The idea of a megalopolis is more than just a descriptive term for a system of functionally integrated cities; it is also a concept that embodies the notion of how and why space is organized. In Megalopolis, Gottmann's view of space is presented as a dialectic between a constantly changing circulation of goods, information, and people and the attempt by individuals/groups to offset the tenuousness of change with the stability of a partitioned, iconographic territory. What Megalopolis represented was a new form of this ongoing dialectic away from the political nation-state to the economic urban region.

Two other aspects of Megalopolis make Gottmann's contribution to the discipline of geography important. First, Megalopolis was published at the nexus of the transition in geography from the traditional descriptive, regional (idiographic) approach to the more “scientific” approach using deductive logic and the scientific method. Some argued that Megalopolis had too much description and not enough explanation. What Gottmann did in Megalopolis was bridge the gulf between the idiographic and nomothetic traditions in geography, which is why this work is still relevant today. Second, Gottmann's observations concerning the formation of a megalopolis seem prescient. For example, in Megalopolis, he posits the idea that communications technology may, at some point, offset the “need” for businesses and populations to cluster. This idea continues to be one of the fundamental themes explored in both urban and economic geography. This is just one example of the remarkable work of the geographer Jean Gottmann.