Jackson, John Brinckerhoff (1909–1996)

Although not officially a geographer, J. B. Jackson was widely revered as an insightful and prolific analyst of cultural landscapes. Dominating mid-20th-century scholarship on this topic, he was claimed by several disciplines, including landscape architecture, geography, history, literature, and American studies.

Born in France, Jackson spent much of his early life in Europe, including school in Switzerland, as well as the Washington, D.C., area. Later, he went for 1 year to the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin and then to Harvard, where he completed his BA in 1932. In the military as an intelligence officer during World War II, he acquired cartographic skills and a mastery of aerial photo interpretation, which likely fueled his interest in landscape formation and meaning. Jackson's understanding of cultural landscapes was derived from several sources, such as the influential French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache and the American Carl Sauer, whom he met in Berkeley. He taught numerous courses at Harvard and at the University of California at Berkeley and was widely influential pedagogically. His later life was largely spent in New Mexico.

In 1951, Jackson launched the magazine Landscape: The Human Geography of the Southwest, which he edited until 1968. Its influence was far greater than its narrow label might suggest. Numerous well-known geographers contributed to it, as did Jackson himself, sometimes using pseudonyms. Although its subscription base was small, it played a significant role in popularizing views of vernacular landscapes, particularly illustrating the human role in imposing meaning on places that might otherwise escape attention. When most academics disdained the vernacular, he celebrated the ordinary and everyday. He focused on American popular landscapes, drawing on his extensive travels across the United States, including mundane phenomena such as parking lots, bus stations, front lawns, roadside restaurants, and strip malls, adapting cultural geography to the age of the automobile. Roads and highways merited special focus as linkages among places and communities. His works blended diverse elements of landscape architecture, historical preservation, and urban planning. Through architecture, he held, people organized space and materialized the aesthetic. His insights were peppered with a disdain for modernism and a love of the baroque, although his work concentrated on the ordinary rather than the unusual or spectacular. He emphasized landscapes as largely unplanned, contingent, often ambiguous, and usually improvised entities. His writings helped move the study of cultural landscapes from its previous focus on relic rural places to contemporary urban ones, and they formed the foundation for the notion that landscapes could be read or interpreted like texts.

Jackson's efforts earned widespread acclaim, including conferences held in his honor. In recognition of his contributions, the Association of American Geographers established the J. B. Jackson Prize, awarded to those who disseminate geographical ideas to a popular, nonprofessional audience.