Gottmann received a French education and became early a research assistant in economic geography at the Sorbonne (1937–41) under the guidance of Albert Demangeon, but was forced to leave his post with the Nazi invasion of France and the 1940 Statute of Jews, which banned him from public employment.
He found refuge in the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the seminar of Edward M. Earle.
During the war, he contributed to the U.S. effort by consulting for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington and other agencies; he also joined Free France and the exiled French academic community teaching at the New School for Social Research.
After World War II, he started to commute between France and the United States in an effort to explain America's human geography to the French public and Europe's to the American.
[2] Beyond his contribution to the study of megalopolis and to urban geography, his theoretical work on the political partitioning of geographical space as a result of the interplay between movement flows and symbolic systems (iconographies) has been rediscovered after his death.