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Roger Brunet (born March 30, 1931) is a French
Roger Brunet (born March 30, 1931) is a French geographer
A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...
.
Life
Born inToulouse
Toulouse ( , ; oc, Tolosa ) is the prefecture of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the larger region of Occitania. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, from the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic Ocean and fr ...
, Brunet attended the University of Toulouse
The University of Toulouse (french: Université de Toulouse) was a university in the French city of Toulouse that was established by papal bull in 1229, making it one of the earliest universities to emerge in Europe. Suppressed during the Frenc ...
, where he earned his PhD in 1965. He was subsequently professor at the University of Reims
The University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (; URCA), also known simply as the University of Reims, is a public university based in Reims, France.
In addition to the main campus in Reims, the university has several campuses located throughout t ...
from 1966 to 1976, where he founded IATEUR. He was director of research at CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...
from 1976 to 1981, and from 1981 to 1984 served advisory and research roles in various French government ministries. In 1984, he founded the public interest group RECLUS, which he headed until 1991.
Work
In the early 1970s, Brunet emerged as a leader in a movement to give academic geography a bigger role in practical issues, such asurban planning
Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...
policies and secondary-school geography curricula, and founded the journal '' L'Espace géographique'' in 1972.
He was particularly associated with the development of the chorem, a cartographic approach to representing complex geographic information (including human geography
Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social ...
) using a simplified set of spatial primitives. Chorems gained significant adoption in geography education, but also drew critics for allegedly oversimplifying and focusing too strongly on spatial representation. This cartographic approach to geography was, from the early 1980s, a rival to Yves Lacoste's geopolitical
Geopolitics (from Greek γῆ ''gê'' "earth, land" and πολιτική ''politikḗ'' "politics") is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to ...
approach. Brunet founded the cartographic geography journal '' Mappemonde'' in 1986, which in turn was a rival to Lacoste's '' Hérodote''.
In the popular press, the "blue banana
The Blue Banana (also known as the European Megalopolis or the Liverpool–Milan Axis) is a discontinuous corridor of urbanization spreading over Western and Central Europe, with a population of around 111 million. The conceptualisation of the ...
" is one of his best-known productions. Developed in 1989 as part of a study overseen by Brunet that aimed to study French territory in its contemporary European context, the concept proposed that the backbone of Europe was formed by a curved axis of highly urbanized regions that bypassed France.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brunet, Roger French geographers Recipients of the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize 1931 births Living people