Iconography and circulation on the Atlantic seaboards: Europe and North America

From his appointment as a lecturer in 1950, the author has spent all his academic career within the Department of Geography of the Université de Haute-Bretagne à Rennes, of which he was acting Head for a long while, until his retirement in 1984, when he became an emeritus fellow. After his doctorate thesis in 1955 and a short stay at Chicago and Northwestern Universities, in 1956 he met in Princeton Jean Gottmann who was then putting the first touches to his major work Megalopolis. Jean Gottmann was to play a decisive role in directing the young Breton geographer towards research work in applied geography. In France, applied geography suffered from severe backwardness until the publication of Géographie et action. Introduction à la géographie appliquée (1960). Forty years later, La Géographie appliquée: Du géographe universitaire au géographe professionnel (1999) showed the way covered on a national and worldwide scale. Michel Phlipponneau was chairman of the Commission on Applied Geography of the I.G.U from 1968 to 1980. He was himself an actor in regional planning in Brittany and abroad as an expert for the United Nations, and at a political level as a departmental and regional Counsellor and as Deputy-Mayor of Rennes and President of the Urban District.