Brian Berry

Berry proved with data what had until then been intuition: cities are not scattered points but a hierarchical system. Each serves a catchment area, and the size of that area depends on the goods and services it offers. A village has a bakery; a county town, a hospital; a metropolis, an international airport and a stock exchange. The hierarchy can be measured, and he measured it.

His tool was factor analysis applied to hundreds of urban variables, a radical novelty in the 1960s. With it he turned Christaller's central place theory, until then an elegant and barely tested German model, into verifiable empirical geography, and classified American cities by function and by position in the network.

Born in Sedgley, England, in 1934 and later based in the United States, Brian J. L. Berry taught at Chicago, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and, from 1986, at the University of Texas at Dallas. He was the most cited geographer in the world during the 1960s and 1970s and the first in his discipline elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution (1967) is his classic textbook.

In 1976 he coined the term counterurbanisation after spotting in the American census something that contradicted a century of trend: for the first time non-metropolitan areas were growing faster than metropolitan ones. He later spent two decades on Kondratiev long waves, looking for the rhythm of economic cycles in urban growth and political behaviour. His work is the quantitative base against which almost all later urban geography argues, whether to accept it or to reject it.