After completing his doctorate in geography at Clark University on the "Growth of Suburbanism West of Boston" (1952), under the supervision of Raymond Murphy, Vance held teaching positions at the University of Arkansas (1953 - 1955), the University of Wyoming (1955-1957), the University of Nebraska (1957-1958).There has been a lot of city models throughout history and the Urban Realms model is the last one. Hailing originally from Natick, Massachusetts, Vance retained great pride in his New England roots. Vance's interests focused especially on what he called "urban morphogenesis-the creation and subsequent transformation of city form" (1990, 38). He was an urban geographer with a distinctive historical approach that emphasized the evolution and structure of city systems, the roles of transportation and trade in shaping settlement, and the social processes that internally differentiate urban areas. Such personal qualities in large part shaped Vance's influential scholarly contributions to the discipline of geography. Remarkably, given his many accomplishments, his active scholarly curiosity carried no trace of pretens ion. ![]() He was also staunchly loyal to his friends, unfailingly supportive of his students, and despite his many deeply held views, often open-minded. Fiercely independent, Vance took pride in acting the curmudgeon. He loved to tweak people's sensibilities with irreverent and often comical asides, as when he referred to Queen Elizabeth II as "Betty Windsor," to the mock horror of his English wife. For Vance, whose work often made a point of contesting popular opinions, was clearly unafraid of taking unfashionable stances in fact, he relished going against the grain. Vance's strong temperament inevitably affected and even stimulated his ten books and monographs, thirty articles and book chapters, and twenty reviews. With the passing of this eminent geographer, I am stuck by the degree to which his colorful personality loomed large in his work: To appreciate his approach to geography, one must begin with his persona. Referring to herself as a "fallen geographer, Tiffany Va nce now works on marine geographical information systems in a demonstration of loyalty to her genealogy. The Vances are survived by their daughter, Tiffany, a geography major at Dartmouth College who broke the family mold by pursuing graduate work in oceanography. One of the greatest joys of this gourmet was to host dinner parties with his English-born wife, Jean, a professional geographer who taught at San Francisco State University for many years and whose death in 1992 came as an emotional blow from which Jay never quite recovered. ![]() Known affectionately as "Jay" to his family, friends, and students, Vance was a physically imposing man with a renowned love of fine cuisine, good drink, and wide-ranging conversation (Figure 1). ![]() ![]() Vance will be best remembered for a prodigious body of scholarship on urban and transportation geography, particularly on how evolving transportation-settlement relationships have shaped modern human geography. died at the age of seventy-three in his Berkeley, California, home on 3 August 1999. It was always my intention to think about cities as permanently in harness with another central aspect of Western civilization, an ever-evolving technology and geography of transportation.
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