Jean Gottmann

(Iona) Jean Gottmann (23 October 1915, in Kharkov – 28 February 1994, in Oxford) was a French geographer 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.

Gottmann was born in Kharkov, 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 de facto adopted by his aunt, Emily Gottmann and uncle, Michel Berchin, and escaped with them to Paris in 1921 via Constantinople.

Gottmann started out as a research assistant in economic 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 and the 1940 Statute of Jews which banned him from public employment. He found refuge in the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the seminar of Edward M. Earle. 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 La France Libre and the exiled French academic community teaching at the New School for Social Research. Isaiah Bowman hired him as a non-tenured professor at his new institute of geography of the Johns Hopkins University (1943–48). In 1945 he returned to France to work for the French Ministry of the Economy, and he also spent two years as director of research at the United Nations (1946–47).

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