Is Megalopolis one of the greatest innovations of post-WW2 geography? Or is it a fictional representation disconnected from reality on the ground? Does it relate to the French tradition of regional monograph? Or was it the precursor of the global city-regions paradigm in contemporary urbanization? And, finally, if its functional/formal and economic aspects were immediately understood, was its cultural, political, and social significance overlooked in the ideologically polarized Cold War context?
Gottmann discovered Vidalian geography in interwar Paris. In 1933 Demangeon sponsored his fieldwork for a regional monograph on Palestine’s irrigated agriculture. Attracted by the local cultural variety and the pioneer fringe’s psychology, he expanded his horizon to the Mediterranean arid regions, but the war disrupted his plan.
Fleeing to the US, he started 2 decades of academic unsettlement, and a long Atlantic Transhumance, resulting in his turn towards urban geography and Megalopolis.
Yet, at the time of his study of the US hinge-region (1949-51), he was also trying to renew the French school’s methods of analysis in human & political geography, to make it more scientific after the model of physics (1947). From Demangeon’s reversal of the regional monograph's plan to prioritize movement, he elaborated Vidal’s 'carrefour' with his ‘chains of crossroads', anticipating network analysis of urban/regional phenomena.
Through this interest in cultural regionalism, he tried to improve the 'genres de vie' and 'personality of a region and its people’. With his notion of regional iconography (1952) he had already compared L’Amérique and Europe (1949, 1950), but Megalopolis (1961) stemmed from comparing Virginia (1955) to the Northeast in terms of their psychology toward change: one dwelled on its past, the other moved by its migrants’ Prometheanism. If this contributed to an American iconography (and related search for security), he may have aimed at the heart of an 'uncertain empire'.
Mots clés : Jean Gottmann|cultural regionalism|iconography|Megalopolis|global city networks
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