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 of circular and cumulative feedback loops. In particular, he noted the powerful role of the telegraph in the long-distance transmission of information in the 19th century, a technology that greatly reduced uncertainty and accelerated the penetration of the Midwestern regions by east coast capital.

In the 1970s, Pred turned toward the time-geography initiated by Torsten Hägerstrand and began to apply this framework to the U.S. context. Places, he maintained, are always and everywhere times—that is, always coming into being—and geography can never be fruitfully portrayed as a static landscape frozen at one temporal moment. This move led him on the one hand to delve more deeply into issues of individual consciousness, including the notion of sense of place advocated by humanistic geographers, and to integrate individual life trajectories with broader questions of social reproduction on the other.

Pred became a fierce advocate of Anthony Giddens's notion of structuration and worked assiduously to integrate it with geographers’ notions of place and locale. In this reading, the socialization of the individual and the reproduction of society and place are two sides of the same coin—that is, the macrostructures of social relations are interlaced with the microstructures of everyday life. For Pred, people reproduce the world, largely unintentionally, in their everyday lives, and in turn, the world reproduces them through socialization. In forming their biographies every day, people reproduce and transform their social worlds primarily without meaning to do so; individuals are both produced by and producers of history and geography. Because people are endowed with the capacity to resist hegemonic power relations, the production of places is always contingent. Empirically, Pred offered applications to Boston, examining the lives of merchants in the 19th century as the city was catapulted through waves of mercantile capitalism, industrialization, and a rapidly changing world economy.

One facet of this line of thought led Pred to a sustained concern for the role of language in the making of place and people. As a set of representations of the world that simultaneously shape consciousness and define the meanings given to place, language came to assume a central role in his analysis of social reproduction and local politics.

Historical context, the world economy, time-geography, structuration, and language were all parts of his ambitious analysis of 19th-century Stockholm. Having spent considerable time in Sweden, with access to its rich census data, Pred traced the contingent reconstruction of the city's streets and neighborhoods as an emerging bourgeois identity was firmly imposed on its landscapes, both annihilating older, preindustrial meanings and simultaneously defeating alternative, working-class ones. This project lay at the core of a broader agenda to uncover the historical roots and implications of modernity in general.

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