[2] 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 policies and secondary-school geography curricula, and founded the journal L'Espace géographique in 1972.
[3] He was particularly associated with the development of the chorem, a cartographic approach to representing complex geographic information (including human geography) using a simplified set of spatial primitives.
[3] Chorems gained significant adoption in geography education, but also drew critics for allegedly oversimplifying and focusing too strongly on spatial representation.
Brunet founded the cartographic geography journal Mappemonde in 1986, which in turn was a rival to Lacoste's Hérodote.
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.