Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall

Abstract

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall 1932–2014 Source: Reproduced with kind permission of the Blackpool Gazette The death of Peter Hall on 30 July 2014 ended the long and distinguished career of a scholar and practitioner of international renown, who straddled the academic disciplines of geography and urban planning and did so much to promote their intellectual and practical advancement. Born in London and raised in Blackpool, Peter was one of a cohort of distinguished geography students tutored and mentored at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, by Gus Caesar. His PhD research involved detailed archival work and mapping of London's changing industrial structure between 1861 and 1931. This historical bent was a permanent part of his career, with several books on the history of planning and on Ebenezer Howard and garden cities (Sociable Cities, co-authored with Colin Ward, was published in 1998, with a new edition in 2014), for example. His 1,150-page magnum opus Cities in Civilization – also published in 1998 – explored in great detail through numerous case studies (Peter's favoured research method) his thesis that every cultural golden age was an urban age, that human creativity and the cultural shifts it engenders are focused in cities. He sought the preconditions that either enjoin or powerfully encourage urban innovation – then, now, and in the future. Peter's PhD was awarded in 1959 – and extended and published as The Industries of London in 1962 – by which time, after a year as a civil servant, he had been appointed to a lectureship at Birkbeck College (in 1957) and had begun his deep interest in city planning (though because of his teaching assignments the first summer was taken up learning German). This focus was crystallised in his pioneering London 2000 (1963) – what he called an ‘academic polemic’ – identifying London's emerging planning problems and setting out a prolegomenon for a blueprint of the capital's future as an integrated city region rather than a monocentric leviathan. This attracted considerable public attention: he revised it in 1969, and in 1989 published London 2001, reviewing what had happened in the intervening decades and pleading again for an integrated regional policy. In 1966 he moved to the London School of Economics as a Reader, where he inaugurated the pioneering taught masters' degree in Regional and Urban Planning Studies designed by Michael Wise and others and initially funded by the University Grants Committee. He also launched his first major funded project into England's urban pasts and futures, published in two co-authored volumes as The Containment of Urban England (1973). Its detailed analysis of recent urban growth provided the basis for a constructive critique of the principles on which the country's planning system was built – themes that characterised Peter's interventions for the next 40 years (as in his associated critique of the ‘containment’ policy in The Future of the Green Belt, 1974). Alongside his research contributions and teaching – which stimulated his three multi-edition texts (Urban and Regional Planning; Cities of Tomorrow; and The World Cities) – Peter became increasingly involved in debates about the British planning system, initially through the Fabian Society. He produced a range of pamphlets (such as A Radical Agenda for London in 1980) and contributions to Labour Party policy discussions – an edited volume, Labour's New Frontiers, appeared just prior to the 1964 general election. In the 1980s Peter was Vice-Chairman of the Tawney Society – the Social Democratic Party's ‘Fabian-style policy think-tank’ according to its historians – and co-edited a pre-1983 election manifesto pamphlet, The Middle of the Night. He also published a telling critique of a number of major projects in Great Planning Disasters (1980): when Sir Keith Joseph, as Secretary of State for Education, addressed an audience of geographers he was asked if he had read the book, to which he replied of course, he had been responsible for some of them! Peter's stay at the LSE was short; in 1968 (aged 36) he was appointed to a chair in the Department of Geography at the University of Reading (which he headed until 1980). Early in his tenure there he obtained a large grant to build land use-transport models and gathered around him a number of colleagues who developed that work. He also founded – and chaired – the University's School of Planning Studies, now the School of Real Estate and Planning within the University's Henley Business School; it too offered a taught postgraduate course in regional and urban planning. In 1980 he was appointed a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, retaining his Reading links until 1988. (In 1988 he accepted appointment as Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, but then withdrew because he opposed the move of its offices to Swindon.) His American years stimulated much research on urban areas and regions as cradles of innovation with a number of books on technopoles. Peter returned to England in 1992, taking up a permanent post at University College London's Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, where he remained until his death: for three years he combined that post with the Directorship of the Institute of Community Studies and he encouraged the creation of UCL's Centre for Applied Spatial Analysis, continuing his support for quantitative work that he pioneered at Reading. Alongside so much else during that last two decades – as hectic, it seemed, as their predecessors – was further research on London. This included Working Capital (2002) and London Voices, London Lives (2007), which deployed a rich source of ethnographic material to explore individual and family lives – adapting his case study approach to this much smaller scale and illustrating his core belief that planning is undertaken to make cities better places for people to live in. Good Cities, Better Lives (2014) explored that core belief once again. It was based on detailed European case studies where the UK's five basic challenges – rebalancing urban economies, building sufficient homes, improving the transport infrastructure, ensuring sustainability, and fixing the planning machinery – had been successfully met. It appeared contemporaneously with a festschrift edited by colleagues – The Planning Imagination (2014) – in which 21 authors reviewed Peter's career according to his five main research and writing foci (the history of cities and planning; London's growth and development; spatial planning; connectivity and mobility; and globalized urbanization); it also contained a Foreword by Lord Heseltine (for whom Peter acted as Chief Planning Advisor when he was Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment in John Major's Conservative administrations) and Peter's own ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’. His early views on the role of planning reflected the ‘master planning, paternalist, welfare-state zeitgeist’ of the post-Attlee welfare state, as sustained by the Fabian Society, with its focus on structure planning, land use segregation, urban containment, and infrastructural development – notably of roads, which Peter championed (not least the M25: with an engineer he produced a detailed study in 1976 on Better Use of Rail Ways – in effect, convert them to roads with busways: he later became converted back to support for his childhood interest – rail travel). But he was a pragmatist, and over time embraced more laissez faire approaches such as his concept of freeports – which to his embarrassment was taken up, modified and implemented as Urban Enterprise Zones by Geoffrey Howe when Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Thatcher administration. His core principles reflected those enunciated in Andrew Gamble's exposition of Thatcherism – The Free Economy and the Strong State: the state provided the infrastructural framework within which individuals and communities could flourish – though Peter's politics were always to the left of centre. He ‘thought big’, about major concepts and projects such as the Thames Gateway and the Channel Tunnel for example, but his underpinning concerns were always for individual, family and community quality of life; he used the fictional Dumill family in several publications to illustrate his conception of life in a future London region. Peter gave much to a wide range of bodies promoting the study of urbanism and the creation of liveable cities – notably the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association (he was President of both). He served on many government commissions and advisory boards (including the chairmanship of his home town's urban regeneration company) and was a very frequent media commentator. He was a regular columnist for New Society during its all-too-short life, and more recently contributed commentaries to several magazines as well as online, covering a wide range of issues relating to urban development and redevelopment, and transport. He once estimated that he had written over 2,000 articles; they included his collaboration in the famous/notorious 1969 edition of New Society on ‘Non-Plan’, suggesting an experiment to see if market forces alone would produce worse outcomes than the then-current planning policies. He travelled widely (another estimate was that he did 70,000 miles a year), forever seeking out new information about cities worldwide, collating information about how they were changing and being planned, collecting masses of material to inform his books and other writing, lecturing, and advising. His energy seemed exhaustless, his fascination and interest unceasing. And yet he always had time to stop and talk – burying his head in his hands as he thought through the next contribution. Many honours and awards came Peter's way, including the Society's Founder's Medal in 1988. He was one of the first geographers elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy (in 1983), received the Prix Vautrin Lud (the geographers' Nobel) in 2001, and the Balzan Prize in 2005, having been knighted in 1998 and named a ‘pioneer in the life of the nation’ by the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception in 2003. These reflect the massive esteem in which this most humane and engaging scholar was held. His academic corpus of more than 50 books authored and edited, plus several hundred chapters and journal articles, alone places him among his twin disciplines' leaders, but alongside that massive output was at least as comparable an amount of work as a public intellectual, promoting better lives through better urban and regional planning. His contributions will long be recognised – in concrete form in the urban Britain he helped to shape as much as in his books and the ideas he shared with us all