Jean Gottmann (October 10, 1915 – February 28, 1994) was a French geographer who was most widely known for coining the term megalopolis to describe the condition of the Boston-Washington corridor. His main contributions to human geography were in the sub-fields of urban, political, economic, historical and regional geography. His regional specializations ranged from France and the Mediterranean to the United States, Israel and Japan. He was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, though at the time it was a part of the Russian Empire. Gottmann started out as a research assistant in human geography at the Sorbonne (1937–41) under the guidance of Albert Demangeon, but was forced to leave his post with the Nazi invasion of France. He found rescue in the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. During the war, he contributed also to the U.S. effort by consulting for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington and other agencies; he also joined the exiled French academic community teaching at the New School for Social Research and became one of Isaiah Bowman's professors at the new institute of geography of the Johns Hopkins University (1943-48). He also spent two years as international officer at the United Nations (1946-47).
After the war, he started to commute between France and the United States in an effort to explain America's human geography to the French public and Europe's to the American. His multicultural perspective allowed him to get a grant from Paul Mellon to produce the first regional study of Virginia (1953-55) and financial support from the 20th Century Foundation to study the megalopolis of the North-Eastern seaboard of the United States, which soon became a paradigm in urban geography and planning to define polinuclear global city-regions.
In 1961 he was invited to join the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris by Fernand Braudel, Claude Levi-Strauss and Alexander Koyré and in 1968 became the director of the school of geography at Oxford University where he remained until the end of his life. October 10 is the 283rd day of the year (284th in Leap years). ... 1915 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... February 28 is the 59th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... A geographer is a crazy psycho whose area of study is geocrap, the pseudoscientific study of Earths physical environment and human habitat and the study of boring students to death. ... Megalopolis (Greek: large city, great city) can mean: The city of Megalopolis, Greece. ... The BosWash or Bosnywash or Boshington megalopolis is the name for a group of metropolitan areas in the northeastern United States, extending from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., including New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ... Kharkov (rus: Ха́рьков) or Kharkiv (ukr: Ха́рків) is the second largest city in Ukraine, a center of Kharkivska oblast. It is situated in the northeast of the country and has a population of two million. ... Imperial Russia is the term used to cover the period of Russian history from the expansion of Russia under Peter the Great, through the expansion of the Russian Empire from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, to the deposal of Nicholas II of Russia, the last tsar, at the start... They are poorly paid, scientifically skilled, highly educated cheap labor. ... Human geography, also known as anthropogeography, is the most boring subject devised by mankind. ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The Sorbonne today, from the same point of view The Sorbonne is frequently used in ordinary parlance as synonymous with the faculty of theology of Paris or the University of Paris in its entirety. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ...

Bibliography

L'Amerique (1949)
A geography of Europe (1950, 1969)
La politique des Etats et leur géographie (1952)
Virginia at mid-Century (1955)
Etudes sur l'Etat d'Israel (1958)
Megalopolis (1961)
Essais sur l'amenagement de l'espace habité (1966)
The significance of territory (1973)

Sources

Muscarà Luca (2003), "The Long Road to Megalopolis", Ekistics, vol. 70, n.418-9, pp.23-35, ISSN 0013-2942
Muscarà Luca (2005), "Territory as a Psychosomatic Device: Gottmann’s Kinetic Political Geography", Geopolitics, 10, pp. 24-49, ISSN 1465-0045