Haggett, Peter (1933-)

Peter Haggett is one of the world's preeminent geographers and professor (now emeritus) of urban and regional geography in the School of Geographic Sciences at the University of Bristol. His fame rests on major contributions in three scientific areas: (1) the nature of geography as a discipline, (2) quantitative methods and location analysis in geography, and (3) the geography of infectious diseases, in particular the analysis of epidemics.

He was born in rural Somerset and took his undergraduate studies at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, graduating “double first” in 1954. He first taught at University College, London, in 1957, returned to Cambridge from 1957 to 1966, and then went to the University of Bristol, where he taught until his retirement in 1995. He was a visiting professor in many countries, but especially in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He has received many awards and honors, including the ones from the Royal Geographical Society and the American Geographical Society, the Anders Retzius medal (Sweden), Vautrid Lud prize (France), and the Laureat d'Honneur of the International Geographical Union. He has received six honorary degrees and also served as the vice chancellor of his university and as the vice president of the British Academy.

Haggett is the author or editor of more than 30 books, emphasizing geographic practice theory and methods in the earlier part of his career and the study of epidemics and the distribution and spatial relations of infectious diseases in the latter half. Along with Richard Chorley, he was a British pioneer of the “quantitative revolution,” and his famous and revolutionary book, Locational Analysis in Human Geography, was published in 1965, preceding the earliest American texts. This volume was followed by additional books on models and spatial theory: Network Analysis in Geography in 1969, Elements of Spatial Structure in 1975, Locational Analysis in 1977, and Locational Methods in 1977.

In the broader area of geography as a scientific discipline are more influential books, most especially Geography: A Modern Synthesis (1972), with three subsequent editions and six translations; Models in Geography (1967), with Richard Chorley; The Geographer's Art (1990); and Geography: A Global Synthesis (2001). With his Cambridge colleagues, he established two preeminent journals, Progress in Physical Geography and Progress in Human Geography.

Haggett generated sustained research since 1977 to understand the geography of infectious diseases, producing monographs on the geography of disease and on the spatial understanding of epidemics. Major works include Spatial Aspects of Influenza Epidemics (1986), Atlas of Disease Distributions (1988), World Atlas of Epidemic Diseases (2004), and Geographic Structure of Epidemics (2000).