French geographer who introduced the concept and term megalopolis for large urban configurations.

A research assistant in human geography at the Sorbonne (1937–41), Gottman was consultant to the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington, D.C. (1942–44), and taught at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1943–48), and the University of Paris (1948–56). He was research director (1956–61) of the Twentieth Century Fund, Inc., a public affairs foundation, and served as director of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1960–84). In 1968 he became professor of geography at the University of Oxford. His writings include A Geography of Europe (1950), Megalopolis: The Urbanized Seaboard of the United States (1961), and Megalopolis Revisited (1987).