Sir Peter Hall, 1932–2014: “Seize the hour and the day”

1. Sir Peter Hall (left), with Bob Catterall, San Francisco, CA, April 2007 (photograph courtesy of Elvin Wyly)

I’ve spoken for more than long enough. But someone will expect a ringing conclusion. I’m not sure I have one. If I do, it reads something like this. First, above all, planners should understand history and the importance of the historical moment. They should seize the hour and the day: there are moments, a very few moments, that actually matter in the history of cities as of everything else, and the critical point is to be there, and to act. Second, there are certain values that are inseparable from being a planner, rather like a doctor’s Hippocratic oath. You cannot just be opportunistic; you have to define what it is that you want to achieve, even if you have to modify and temper those objectives in the course of day-to-day practice. I once heard the great systems planner, C. West Churchman, give a seminar in Berkeley. It was a bit of a disaster because he refused to say anything, insisting that first the students had to ask questions and he’d answer those; and in the resulting silence, I recall, a large dog walked in and made off with his lunch in its teeth. But he did eventually say something that I thought odd at the time, and have been thinking about ever since: he said, “If you’re going to be a planner, you’d better first work out your religious beliefs, because until you’ve done that you can’t even start.” I think that I now know what he meant, which was that you’d better get your value systems straight in your head. (Hall, 1996a, pp. 11–12)

Peter Hall was a geographer whose prolific scholarship focused on cities and urbanization. He combined a highly distinguished academic career with advising successive British governments on planning policy, and his advocacy shaped both the theory and practice of planning. He was one of the very few thinkers capable of a credible vision of future city regions, and his contributions stand comparison to those of the likes of Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Abercrombie, and Dudley Stamp.

Professor Hall received his Master’s (1957) and PhD (1959) degrees in Geography from the University of Cambridge. His academic career began at Birkbeck College, London, where he was a lecturer in Geography. He went on to become a Reader in Geography at the London School of Economics (1966) and Professor of Geography and Dean of the Faculty of Urban and Regional Studies at Reading University (1968–1989). While at Reading, he also held a professorship in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he took up the chair of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School, University College London, where he was active until his death.

Every aspect of Professor Hall’s work pivoted around an emphasis on the dynamism of city regions. He was an ardent advocate of the relevance of centrally coordinated town planning and in particular, the high social ideals of the Garden City Movement. Planning, he argued, should be grounded in a broad understanding of the long-term processes of urban growth and decline, the critical importance of urban networks—especially transport infrastructure—and of agglomeration economies.

His work sprang from a deep knowledge of history combined with a commitment to the analysis of contemporary aspects of urbanization and an enthusiasm for the positive economic and social dimensions of urban settings. He first gained widespread attention with the publication in 1963 of his book London 2000. Hall saw planning as an applied branch of welfare economics, something that was essential to the fulfillment of the welfare state established by Britain’s post-war Labour government. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan and the government’s New Towns program formed the backdrop for Hall’s futuristic reimagining of the metropolis, comprehensively rebuilt along Modernist lines and incorporating an orbital motorway (that subsequently materialized in the form of the M25).

An advocate of rigorous strategic analysis, Hall helped set up the Regional Studies Association and became founding editor of its influential journal, Regional Studies. Hall himself was a fine writer, with a journalist’s eye for telling detail and enlivening anecdote. He demystified academia, making both urban studies and planning accessible to a broad readership. He contributed regularly, for example, to New Society, a weekly magazine of social inquiry and social and cultural comment, published from 1962 to 1988. In addition to the impact of such writing on an informed readership, Hall’s engagement with practical social and economic issues was important in preparing the ground for the decisive shift toward “relevance” within academic human geography in Britain in the early 1970s.

His enthusiasm for travel and his ability to establish networks among innovative thinkers around the world made him one of the first to point to the emerging impact of globalization on a few key cities. While his editorial work and introduction for the English translation of Von Thünen’s Isolated State (Hall, 1966b) led an ensemble of influential books contributing to the “wide impact” of “ideas and methods thought to be revolutionary a decade earlier” (Adams, 2001, p. 535), in the same year his book The World Cities charted an entirely new direction toward the cosmopolitan, planetary perspective that defines today’s urban studies. His other books include Planning and Urban Growth: An Anglo-American Comparison (with M. Clawson, 1973), Urban and Regional Planning (1975), Europe 2000 (ed., 1977), Great Planning Disasters (1980), Growth Centres in the European Urban System (with D. Hay, 1980), The Inner City in Context (ed., 1981), Silicon Landscapes (with A. Markusen, 1985), Can Rail save the City? (with C. Hass-Klau, 1985), High-Tech America (with A. Markusen and A. Glasmeier, 1986), The Carrier Wave (with P. Preston, 1988), Cities of Tomorrow (1988), London 2001 (1989), The Rise of the Gunbelt (with A. Markusen, S. Campbell and S. Deitrick, 1991), Technopoles of the World (with M. Castells, 1994), Sociable Cities (with C. Ward, 1998), Cities in Civilization (1998), Urban Future 21 (with U. Pfeiffer, 2000), Working Capital (with N. Buck et al., 2002), The Polycentric Metropolis (with K. Pain, 2006), and London Voices London Lives (2007). His last book, Good Cities, Better Lives (2013), lays out the challenges facing contemporary urban planning and provides examples of innovative urban development from across Europe.

In the course of advising governments and government agencies, he conceived several influential planning strategies. He is widely credited with developing the concept of enterprise zones as a means of kick-starting economic development in run-down inner-city areas. The concept found immediate expression in the Urban Development Corporations that transformed Canary Wharf and other UK urban centers in the 1980s. Later (1991–1994), when Hall was appointed as a special adviser on strategic planning to the Conservative Environment secretary Michael Heseltine, he helped shape the strategic vision of the East Thames Corridor (now referred to as Thames Gateway) and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Subsequently, working with Labour Transport secretary Lord Adonis, he was a strong advocate of congestion charging, of London’s Overground and Crossrail projects, and the HS2 high-speed rail network linking the major cities of the Midlands and the North with London and continental Europe, to bring them all to fruition. More recently, he turned his attention to spatial planning at the European scale, developing the archipelago concept of metropolitan regions through a European Commission-funded Polynet project. He subsequently became the Director of Sintropher, a €23 m EU program aimed at enhancing local and regional transport provision to, from, and within five peripheral regions in North-West Europe.

Recognition of his scholarship, professional service, and creativity included the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for distinction in research, Honorary Membership of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europea. He held 14 honorary doctorates and was knighted in 1998 for services to the Town and Country Planning Association. In 2001, he was awarded the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, the highest award in the field of geography, and in 2003, he was named by Queen Elizabeth II as a “Pioneer in the Life of the Nation” at a reception in Buckingham Palace. Also in 2003, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute, the first to be awarded for 20 years. In 2005, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Deputy Prime Minister for his contributions to urban regeneration and planning and was awarded the Balzan Prize for his work on the Social and Cultural History of Cities. In 2008, he received the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize of the International Union of Architects.

To meet Peter Hall was to encounter a person of acute intelligence and enormous generosity of spirit. He was modest and charming, and also approachable and enthusiastic. His legacy can be measured not only in terms of his scholarship and professional service but also in terms of his inspirational appetite for everything to do with cities, his advocacy of geography and his adopted discipline of town planning, and his commitment to making cities better places for people to live in.