The Planning Imagination

Peter Hall and the Study of Urban and Regional Planning

Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Nicholas Phelps, Robert Freestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317937210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Knighted in 1998 'for services to the Town and Country Planning Association', and in 2003 named by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a 'Pioneer in the Life of the Nation', Peter Hall is internationally renowned for the breadth and depth of his studies and writings on urban and regional planning. For the last 50 years, he has captured and helped to create the ' planning imagination '.

Here the editors have brought together in five themes a series of critical reflections on Peter's vast and diverse contributions. Those reflections are provided by colleagues familiar with his work.

The five parts are devoted to Peter Hall's breadth of academic work, covering the history of cities and planning, London, spatial planning, connectivity and mobility, and urban globalization. Finally, as a sixth part, the editors have asked Peter Hall himself to reflect on his career and the sources of his imagination.

The story this book tells is not one of a singular, totally consistent theoretical and philosophical view elaborated over several decades. Rather it covers a set of views that necessarily admits signs of Peter's inconsistency and imperfection over the years – the insights and imperfections that inevitably accompany the exercise of a nonetheless remarkably fertile, restless and inspiring planning imagination.

1	Geography, History and the Planning Imagination
	Nicholas A. Phelps, Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Robert Freestone

What is the activity that we refer to as planning? This is a question that has baffled many an academic to the point where it is apparent that there may be almost nothing that can be defined precisely (Harvey, 2000; Huxley, 1999; Reade, 1983; Wildavsky, 1973). And yet – loved or hated, defended or criticized – planning remains an activity seemingly indispensible, and indeed integral, to the practical and on-going organization of the built environment. That it persists as an activity in spite of its apparent nothingness and in the face of continued critique is surely testament to the power and value of an imagination – the planning imagination – that cannot or will not be denied. The planning imagination is one intimately linked to utopianism – a word that also has uncomfortable connotations for many – and yet, at root, is a manifestation of our better nature, our, thankfully, irrepressible desire to improve upon the existing state of affairs and make a better world for the greatest number.

Planning also has an uneasy relationship to other closely related academic disciplines such as history and geography. Arguably these disciplines suffer from the same difficulty in defining their boundaries and core objects of analysis. However, planning might be regarded as one of the very few disciplines where geographers and historians feel they have cultivated a sense of superiority in an environment in which the social sciences manifestly display signs of ‘physics envy’ (Massey, 1999). Yet planning remains as an uncomfortable alter ego of these cognate disciplines – a nagging voice imploring academics to think beyond the analytical to the normative question of ‘what is to be done?’ (Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones, 2008). While the scholarly works of a number of influential geographers have been celebrated recently (see, for example, Castree and Gregory, 2006; Featherstone and Painter, 2013; Peck and Yeung, 2003), fewer individuals stand out in the field of planning quite as Peter Hall does. What better way to re-explore what Bruton (1982) termed the spirit and purpose of planning and reaffirm its meaning and value to society than to explore the planning imagination of one individual – Professor Sir Peter Hall.

This volume brings together a series of critical commentaries on Peter Hall's work spanning the past six decades. They were specially commissioned to cover the major themes and preoccupations in Peter's writing and the majority were initially presented at a two-day conference held in June 2012 at University College London to coincide with Peter's eightieth birthday and to celebrate his contributions to planning.

Populating the Planning Imagination

Peter Hall's academic and policy writings date from 1960 and are still piling up. They encompass over sixty authored and edited books in various editions, about as many book chapters, nearly 200 substantive journal articles, hundreds of short contributions to magazines such as Planning, Town and Country Planning, and the erstwhile New Society, and countless working papers, published addresses, communications, and sundry fugitive publications. It is a CV that continues to grow weekly. Despite its breadth, his published oeuvre traces some clear influences and motivations from his early childhood, through his formative scholarly years at school and university to an on-going engagement with real world events and problems for which he has had an unerring eye from some unique vantage points. We began to unpack some of these influences in several intensive conversations with Peter in 2012 from which we quote below.

Some of Peter's influences stem from his earliest childhood memories. These influences in themselves are diverse and hint at the complex planning imagination apparent in the man and his work. Peter has recalled how:

My first memories were oddly my dad lifting me up and a wall that had glass on the top where you could see the Piccadilly trains coming out of the tunnel between West Kensington and Barons Court between the District Line tracks. That was fascinating… The Underground always fascinated me and I used to draw underground maps endlessly. I think I could actually reproduce the Underground map there at the age of about six and a half … I was so fascinated by it. (Interview, 1 February 2012)

He has retained this detailed fascination with trains (and trams) and indeed the possibilities and practical problems of providing for personal mobility ever since. It is this interest that has driven a fascination with minutely detailed questions of planning practice, such as the routing of public transport and the siting of stations, that is uncommon among his academic peers. Over the years, in numerous presentations and articles, Peter has imagined new rail lines and stations into being and as such in his own modest way is a builder of cities as much as any practicing architect, engineer, or property developer. In chapter 16, David Banister has managed to pull together and evaluate Peter's writings on transport related issues – a body of work that is certainly more diffuse than on many other themes to which he has returned over the years.

Growing up in the 1930s in a simpler era when a child's imagination was untouched by television and a host of other gadgetry entertainments saw him begin a journalistic career which continues today. He created his own newspaper for which he was chief editor and lead columnist:

I remember about the age of six – six and a half – I started producing my own little local newspaper, which filched all the stories out of the national and local papers. (Interview, 1 February 2012)

He has remained true to this calling to broadcast the news accessibly to a wide audience as one of the few genuinely public academics in the social sciences with an international reputation. He began writing for magazines in the very early 1960s shortly after starting his academic teaching career at Birkbeck College in London. He continues to write a regular column for the weekly magazine Planning and has been an important contributor to other journals of social inquiry and professional affairs. Thus, one striking and enduring feature of Peter's work has been its relentless topicality. As he recalls:

I've spent much of my life as a journalist, as a professional journalist… Because I've always been reacting to what's been happening literally that week, it always kept me kind of reacting in terms of the immediate. That you could say was superficial, but I've tried to react to it in an unsuperficial way. (Interview, 30 May 2012)

Moreover, in Peter's case, it has been his shorter, often journalistic, pieces that have garnered the most significant policy impact. Notably it was a short piece that stirred interest in the idea of ‘enterprise zones’ and an article in The Times over the routing of the high-speed rail link into London from the Channel Tunnel that brought him to the attention of Michael Heseltine, Secretary of State for the Environment in Margaret Thatcher's government, and helped trigger a succession of policy interventions (Interview, 30 May 2012).

Peter attended a grammar school in Blackpool and recognized the privileged education he had at that time with teaching conducted in very small classes with a handful of pupils by recent graduates who would, in today's world, likely have become university professors. His early academic interests there and at university were with history as much as they were with geography and planning. Indeed he wrestled with the choice between studying history or geography at Cambridge and has been honest enough to admit that he didn't enjoy his geography studies in the first year to the point that he had thought of transferring. One of the instrumental and inspirational figures who stopped him doing so was Gus Caesar, by all accounts a brilliant teacher with a persuasive interest in applied geography. What Peter recalls taking most from Caesar's tutorials was the skill of presenting arguments in a logical and linear fashion, traits which are clearly apparent in the nature of his academic and journalistic writing alike. Clifford Smith supervised his PhD at Cambridge – because there was no one else to do it – but Smith inspired an historical economic geographical approach to work that eventually appeared as The Industries of London. That keen interest in the economy of London has remained across several publications over the years as Ron Martin alludes to in chapter 6.

Even before he had graduated, his friend at College John Vaizey attempted to fix him up with a research fellowship at Cambridge but failed miserably after over-imbibing at a party leaving Professor Alfred Steers distinctly unimpressed. Instead Peter was offered a post at the Board of Trade dealing with the administration of tariffs on wool trade. After four days Peter drafted a resignation letter. He kept it in a drawer until the new academic appointment season began a year later. He applied to Geography at UCL which would have been a natural home given the lead provided by historical geographer and Head of Department H.C. Darby. Interviewed by Darby, Peter instead ended up with his first academic position at Birkbeck in 1957 having to teach the geography of Germany.

Placing the Planning Imagination

Peter's commitment to writing for an informed general public doubtless goes hand in hand with his political activity. Around the same time he began writing social commentary he also joined the Fabian Society. His politics have become muddied as he himself has acknowledged. This was partly as a result of his own disillusionment with Labour Party politics by the late 1970s and early 1980s and partly as a result of the sorts of suspicions harboured by others as a result of his acting as an adviser to Michael Heseltine and his ideas having been appropriated by Conservative governments of the 1980s. However, across the span of his work and in his day-to-day behaviour there surely can be little doubt that Peter has remained someone intensely interested in a fairer society.

Peter has had, and continues to have, unique footholds in London and the north of England by virtue of his family ties and this is quite evident in his academic writings. It has conferred a perhaps unique vantage point in commenting on issues not only linking North and South in Britain but also urban and regional dimensions.

Peter spent his early years in London before his family moved to Blackpool in the North of England. However, visits to members of his extended family in the North while living in London brought out the contrasts in living conditions between North and South. It was a childhood impression that lasted and has continued to fuel his interest in regional differences. Practical socialist politics have rarely spanned the North–South divide in any subtle or sensitive way, yet Peter could be described as a ‘one nation socialist’ – if one can invent such a term. His planning imagination has been sensitive to spatial variations in life chances in a way which few urban planning academics or policy analysts can boast. Arguably, it is his London vantage point that offers much of the ‘urban’ insight and his commitment to places in the North of England that contributes to the ‘regional’ in the highly successful textbook Urban and Regional Planning which has run to five editions since first appearing in 1974. In chapter 2, Susan Fainstein offers her views on perhaps Peter's most widely read and accessible text.

From his first academic post, Peter has continued to follow changes in London and has been a keen observer of planning issues as they affect the metropolis and the South East of England. While numerous histories have been written on London, fewer futures have been written though Peter's London 2000 first published in 1963 stands out as an early example. Moreover, London's position at the centre of a uniquely scattered pattern of settlements in the South East doubtless proved fertile ground (alongside other notable European influences of the Randstad and the Ruhr) in which, somewhat later, to develop his own perspective on the polycentricity of city-region systems in Europe through the ‘Polynet’ research project and The Polycentric Metropolis as recounted by Robert Kloosterman and Bart Lambregts in chapter 18.

London-related planning issues obviously figure centrally in the specifically urban aspects of Peter's planning imagination although his urban regeneration interests, as explored by Nick Bailey in chapter 12, have drawn to a lesser extent on examples of ‘second tier’ cities across Europe. London has been a recurrent backdrop to his work notably including his futures thinking such as London 2000 and London 2001 reviewed by Michael Hebbert in chapter 7. He has retained his earliest of empirical interests in the economy of London carried over from hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors
• The Photographs
• 1 Geography, History and the Planning Imagination
• Part One History of Cities and Planning
• Part Two London's Growth and Development
• Part Three Spatial Planning
• Part Four Connectivity and Mobility
• Part Five Globalized Urbanization
• Part Six A Unique Combination of Ideas
• Peter Hall Bibliography
• Index