Berry, Brian J. L.

One of geography's most productive scholars, Brian Berry has played an enormously influential role in urban and economic geography, primarily as the steadfast defender of traditional quantitative modeling. Not without reason, Gordon Clark argues that “Brian Berry is perhaps the most important of a handful of people who transformed human geography over the second half of the twentieth century.”

Born in 1934 to working-class parents in England (both of whom left school at age 14), Berry defied the confines of the British class system to rise to the top-most tiers of academia. He completed a BS in economics at the London School of Economics in 1955, where he was exposed to historical geography and introduced to the quantitative modeling of spatial phenomena. Immediately thereafter, he traveled to the University of Washington in Seattle just as the geography program there initiated the quantitative revolution in American geography. Berry thus formed both part of the “British invasion” of influential geographers in the 1960s and one of the famous “space cadets,” along with Duane Marble, William Bunge, Michael Dacey, Arthur Getis, Richard Morrill, John Nystuen, and Walter Tobler, arguably the discipline's most successful and famous single cohort of students.

Three years later, armed with a PhD—at age 22—he began the first of a long list of academic positions at prestigious institutions, including the University of Chicago (1958–1976), where he was the Irving Harris Professor of Urban Geography, chair of the Department of Geography, and director of the Center for Urban Studies. From 1976 to [Page 74]1981, he taught at Harvard University, where he served as the Frank Backus Williams Professor of City and Regional Planning, chair of the PhD program in urban planning, director of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, professor of sociology, and as a faculty fellow of the Harvard Institute for International Development. From 1981 to 1986 he served as Dean of the School of Urban Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1986 he taught at the University of Texas, Dallas, where, in 1991, he became the Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor of Political Economy and, in 2006, dean of the School of Social Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and medals. In 1968, he received the Association of American Geographers' Meritorious Contributions Award. In 1975, he became the first geographer and youngest social scientist ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1977–1978, he served as president of the Association of American Geographers. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1987, awarded the Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1988, and made a fellow of the British Academy in 1989. He also served as a founding coeditor and editor in chief of the journal Urban Geography from 1980 to 2006.

Berry's publication record—including in toto more than 500 books, articles, and other publications—has earned him enormous recognition as one of geography's most fecund scholars. He followed Fred K. Schaefer's famous critique of “exceptionalist” geography in advocating for a discipline that was self-consciously nomothetic in outlook and positivist in epistemology, thus em phasizing the need for general laws of explanation, quantitative methods, and rigorous empirical testing of hypotheses. Throughout his long career, he subscribed to a paradigm that privileged the abstract over the concrete, deduction over induction, and the universal over the specific. Drawing on a Cartesian view of space, Berry emphasized the use of models as a means to simplify and shed light on the bewildering complexity of the world. He was instrumental in the adoption of multivariate statistics in the discipline. His early papers stressed the applicability of central place models of urban systems and detailed studies of retail shopping patterns. Subsequent work on market centers and retailing was very influential in geography and business and economics. He also delved into the rank-size distributions of cities, hierarchal diffusion processes, and the impacts of transportation systems. In addition, Berry had a long-standing interest in urban morphology and urban problems such as inner-city poverty. Over time, Berry's works came to be characterized by increasing conceptual sophistication and a sustained concern for the role of public policy. In doing so, he abandoned much of the earlier emphasis on simplified models in exchange for rigorous empirical and statistical analyses.

...