ancient cities

74 Berry, Brian J. L.
1981, he taught at Harvard University, where he
served as the Frank Backus Williams Professor of
City and Regional Planning, chair of the PhD program
in urban planning, director of the Laboratory
for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, professor
of sociology, and as a faculty fellow of the
Harvard Institute for International Development.
From 1981 to 1986 he served as Dean of the
School of Urban Public Affairs at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh. Beginning in 1986 he
taught at the University of Texas, Dallas, where, in
1991, he became the Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental
Professor of Political Economy and, in 2006, dean
of the School of Social Sciences. He is the recipient
of numerous awards and medals. In 1968, he
received the Association of American Geographers’
Meritorious Contributions Award. In 1975, he
became the first geographer and youngest social
scientist ever elected to the National Academy of
Sciences. In 1977–1978, he served as president of
the Association of American Geographers. He was
elected a fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in 1987, awarded the
Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical
Society in 1988, and made a fellow of the British
Academy in 1989. He also served as a founding
coeditor and editor in chief of the journal Urban
Geography from 1980 to 2006.
Berry’s publication record—including in toto
more than 500 books, articles, and other publications—has
earned him enormous recognition as
one of geography’s most fecund scholars. He followed
Fred K. Schaefer’s famous critique of
“exceptionalist” geography in advocating for a
discipline that was self-consciously nomothetic
in outlook and positivist in epistemology, thus
em phasizing the need for general laws of explanation,
quantitative methods, and rigorous empirical
testing of hypotheses. Throughout his long career,
he subscribed to a paradigm that privileged the
abstract over the concrete, deduction over induction,
and the universal over the specific. Drawing
on a Cartesian view of space, Berry emphasized the
use of models as a means to simplify and shed light
on the bewildering complexity of the world. He
was instrumental in the adoption of multivariate
statistics in the discipline. His early papers stressed
the applicability of central place models of urban
systems and detailed studies of retail shopping patterns.
Subsequent work on market centers and
retailing was very influential in geography and
business and economics. He also delved into the
rank-size distributions of cities, hierarchal diffusion
processes, and the impacts of transportation
systems. In addition, Berry had a long-standing
interest in urban morphology and urban problems
such as inner-city poverty. Over time, Berry’s
works came to be characterized by increasing conceptual
sophistication and a sustained concern for
the role of public policy. In doing so, he abandoned
much of the earlier emphasis on simplified
models in exchange for rigorous empirical and
statistical analyses.
Berry’s later career focused on the dynamics of
regional development in different national contexts.
He conducted extensive work in India, Australia,
Indonesia, and other countries. Com parative analyses
of urbanization bridged these national contexts.
Urban trends in the United States received considerable
attention as well, including the question of
counterurbanization and the specific development
patterns of Chicago. A persistent theme was the
relation of demographic shifts and migration to
regional change. This phase of his career was characterized
by a mounting interest in issues of globalization,
particularly the ways in which multinational
corporations intersected with state policies to shape
urban growth around the world. In the 1990s,
Berry turned his focus to the role of long wave
cycles, or Kondratief waves, and their relation to
regional development and political relations.
Subsequent work viewed utopian communities as
attempts to escape the maelstrom of change and
turmoil associated with the periodic restructuring
brought about by long waves.
As the embodiment of positivism and the quantitative
revolution, Berry’s intellectual position
came under mounting criticism from the 1980s
onward. A newer generation of geographers
attuned to political economy and social theory
began increasingly to question the relevance of
abstract, ahistorical models and the unrealistic neoclassical
logic of utility maximization. This schism
was exemplified in a famous debate between Brian
Berry and the Marxist geographer David Harvey.
As a result of academic geography’s shift to political
economy, Berry appeared, to many observers,
as increasingly conservative and disconnected from
the field. Never one to give up, Berry is known to
this day for the enthusiasm and commitment with