(Ivan) Jean Gottmann (10 October 1915, in Kharkiv, Ukraine – 28 February 1994, in Oxford, England) was a French Jewishgeographer who was best known for his seminal study on the urban region of the Northeast megalopolis. 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.
Early life and education
Gottmann was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Russian Empire. He was the only child of prosperous Jewish parents, Elie Gottmann and Sonia-Fanny Ettinger, who were killed in February 1918, following the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was adopted de facto by his aunt, Emily Gottmann, and uncle, Michel Berchin, and escaped with them to Paris in 1921 through what was then Constantinople in present-day Istanbul. In Constantinople, he changed his first name, Ivan, to the French cognate Jean.
After World War II, 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 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 polynuclear global city-regions.
In 1957, he married Bernice Adelson. In 1961, he was invited to join the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris by Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Alexandre Koyré and in 1968 became Professor of Geography and Head of Department at the School of Geography at the University of Oxford (1968–1983). In the 1980s, Gottman wrote numerous essays to develop his ideas about ‘transactional’ cities, whose primary economic function is the processing and distribution of information.[1] After retiring as emeritus professor, he remained in Oxford until the end of his life.[2]
Beyond his contribution to the study of megalopolis and to urban geography, his theoretical work on the political partitioning of geographical space as a result of the interplay between movement flows and symbolic systems (iconographies) has been rediscovered after his death.