Life

Born in Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

, Brunet attended the University of Toulouse

University of Toulouse

The Université de Toulouse is a consortium of French universities, grandes écoles and other institutions of higher education and research, named after one of the earliest universities established in Europe in 1229, and including the successor universities to that earlier university...

, where he earned his PhD in 1965. He was subsequently professor at the University of Reims from 1966 to 1976, where he founded IATEUR. He was director of research at CNRS 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 as urban planning

Urban planning

Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....

 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

Cartography

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...

 approach to representing complex geographic information (including human geography

Human geography

Human geography is one of the two major sub-fields of the discipline of geography. Human geography is the study of the world, its people, communities, and cultures. Human geography differs from physical geography mainly in that it has a greater focus on studying human activities and is more...

) 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

Yves Lacoste

Yves Lacoste is a French geographer and geopolitician. He was born in Fes, Morocco. In 1976 he established the French geopolitical journal "Hérodote"...

's geopolitical

Geopolitics

Geopolitics, from Greek Γη and Πολιτική in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale....

 approach. Brunet founded the cartographic geography journal Mappemonde in 1986, which in turn was a rival to Lacoste's Hérodote

Hérodote

Hérodote is a French journal about geography and geopolitics. Founded in 1976 by Yves Lacoste, it has been influential in reviving the use of the term geopolitics in France. "Hérodote" is the French version of the name of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus....

.

In the popular press, the "blue banana

Blue Banana

The Blue Banana is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation in Western Europe, with a population of around 110 million. It stretches approximately from North West England in the north to Milan in the south...

" 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.