Books That Shaped Our Thinking
We asked editorial board members to consider which book during their career has had the greatest influence on them; to describe the book; to discuss its impact generally; and to consider whether it is still relevant today. This issue is the result.
About this issue
Summary
We asked editorial board members to consider which book during their career has had the greatest influence on them; to describe the book; to discuss its impact generally; and to consider whether it is still relevant today. This issue is the result.
Contents
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Books That Have Shaped Our Thinking
DAVID BANISTER -
Moralism and Urban Evolution: Excavating Mumford’s The City in History
LAWRENCE C. VALE -
Culture and Urban Development: Revisiting the Legacy of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity on Urban Studies 25 Years On
CLAIRE COLOMB -
Forces of Agglomeration: Allen Scott’s The Cultural Economy of Cities Revisited
ROBERT C. KLOOSTERMAN -
The Sound of the City – Charlie Gillett
MARTIN CROOKSTON -
Observing the Public Realm: William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
YASSER ELSHESHTAWY -
John F.C. Turner and Housing as a Verb
MICHAEL COHEN -
Hugh Stretton: Ideas for Australian Cities
STEPHEN HAMNETT -
Great Cities and Their Traffic: Michael Thomson Revisited
DAVID BANISTER - Publication Reviews
Great British Plans: Who Made Them and How They Worked
Can the British plan? Sometimes it seems unlikely. Across the world we see grand designs and visionary projects: new airport terminals, nuclear power stations, high-speed railways, and glittering buildings. It all seems an unattainable goal on Britain’s small and crowded island; and yet perhaps this is too pessimistic. For the British have always planned, and much of what they have today is the result of past plans, successfully implemented.
Ranging widely, from London’s squares and the new city of Milton Keynes, to ‘High Speed One’, the motorways, and the secret first electronic computers, Ian Wray’s remarkable book puts successful infrastructure plans under the microscope. Who made these plans and what made them stick? How does this reflect the defining characteristics of British government? And what does that say about the individuals who drew them up and saw them through?
In so doing the book casts refreshing new light on how big decisions have actually been made, revealing the hidden sources of drive and initiative in British society, as seen through the lens of ‘plans past’. And it asks some searching questions about the mechanisms we might need for successful ‘plans future’, in Britain and elsewhere.
Ian Wray is a Visiting Professor in Geography and Planning and Visiting Fellow in the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool. He was Chief Planner, Northwest Development Agency, 2000–2010. He has written for The Architects’ Journal, Management Today and The Guardian and is currently a trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association and of World Heritage UK, and a member of the general assembly of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
Contents
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Foreword
The Right Honourable the Lord Heseltine CH - Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations and Sources
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Part One: Context
1 Manoeuvre Well Executed? On Rational Plans and British Plans -
Part Two: Case Studies
2 Landlords and Objectors: London’s Roads and Squares
3 The Making of an English Landscape: Capability Brown and the New Aesthetic
4 Urban Pastoral: The Building of Birkenhead Park
5 The Uses of Disorder: Bletchley Park and the World’s First Computer
6 The Cambridge Paradox: Phenomenal Growth; Planned Restraint
7 Driving Ambitions: Engineering the British Motorways
8 The City as Chessboard: Constructing the New City of Milton Keynes
9 The Dream of Caligula: The Channel Tunnel and Its Rail Link
10 The Pedaller’s Tale: Pioneering the National Cycle Network -
Part Three: Explanations and Implications
11 Common Threads: Drawing Together the Case Studies
12 Who’s in Charge? The British Government Machine
13 How Britain Works: Pluralism, Autonomy and Individualism
14 British Futures, British Plans: Conclusions and Implications
Remaking the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge: A Case of Shadowboxing with Nature
Now available in paperback
- If safety was the reason to replace the bridge, why did it take almost 25 years to doso?
- How did an original estimate of $250 million in 1995 soar to $6.5 billion by 2014?
- And why was such a complex design chosen?
Contents
- Acknowledgements
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List of Illustrations and Sources
1. Mind over Matter
2. Field Guide to Megaproject Interpretation -
Part 1: Time in Suspension
3. Past as Prologue
4. Engineering between the Fault Lines -
Part 2: A Race Against Time
5. Shockwaves by Design
6. Ground Motions when Pedalling for a Pathway and Train Tracks -
Part 3: Hurry up and Wait … and Wait
7. Freefalling to Vertigo
8. Back to the Future: the ‘Big One’ of Skyrocketing Costs
9. Aftershock: Hubris and Shadowboxing with Nature - List of Abbreviations
- Appendix A1. Bay Bridge Cost Increases
- Appendix A2. Key State Legislation for Bay Bridge’s New East Span
- References
Meeting the Housing Challenge: British Experience, European Lessons
The papers in this issue indicate that there are things that could be done to help solve some of the seemingly intractable problems that face the British housing system, but that current trends and policies are as likely to be moving in the wrong direction as in the right one.
This paper is also available via Ingenta Connect
About this issue
Summary
The papers in this issue indicate that there are things that could be done to help solve some of the seemingly intractable problems that face the British housing system, but that current trends and policies are as likely to be moving in the wrong direction as in the right one.
Contents
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Meeting the Housing Challenge: British Experience, European Lessons
Martin Crookston -
Pushing on String: Demand and Supply
Glen Bramley -
Why Don’t We Build Enough New Homes in England
Pete Jefferys and Toby Lloyd -
Germany, Country of Tenants
Florian Urban -
Playing Happy Families? Private Renting for Middle-Income Households with Children in London, Berlin and New York
Kath Scanlon -
Meeting the British Housing Challenge: Dutch Experiences and Reflections
Frank Wassenberg -
Asset Price Keynesianism, Regional Imbalances and the Irish and Spanish Housing Booms and Busts
Michelle Norris and Michael Byrne -
From Social Housing to Subsidized Housing? Accommodating Low-Income Households in Europe
Christine M.E. Whitehead -
The Rise and Fall of the Private Rented Sector in England
David Rhodes -
Exploring the Impact of the Recession on British Volume Housebuilders: A Behavioural Analysis
Sarah Payne -
The Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder Programme – A Drop of Keynes in a Neo-Liberal Ocean?
Ian Cole -
Scandinavian Housing Design Since the Mid 1990s: Selected Lessons from Practice
Richard Simmons and Karin Krokfors -
The Future of City Living: How a Post-Industrial Area could become a Sustainable Neighbourhood for the Long Term
Rachael Unsworth
Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events
This book reveals the recent urban history of ten major Latin American cities – Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Bogotá, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires – through studies of their public spaces and the events that have taken place there. The case studies provide an unprecedented opportunity to look at cities with comparable cultural and political histories, and to investigate the use and meaning of urban space by ordinary people in extraordinary, history-making events.
While some argue that public spaces are a prerequisite for the expression, representation and reinforcement of democracy, equally they can be said to be used in the pursuit of totalitarianism. In Latin America, there have been the experiences of the Santiago of Pinochet, the Buenos Aires of Videla, the Asuncion of Strossner, or the Caracas of Pérez Jiménez, among others. Yet even here political demonstrations in public spaces played a critical role in the eventual revocation of those regimes, and/or in the subsequent re-establishment of democracy.
For the two opposing political visions – democracy versus totalitarianism – public streets and spaces, in both the past and present, have been the site for the enactment and contestation of various stances on democracy and citizenship. Indeed, the public sphere, as the intangible realm for the expression, reproduction, and/or recreation of a society’s culture and polity, usually encompasses opposing political visions and nurtures acute social confrontations which are played out in tangible space.
By exploring the use and meaning of public spaces in Latin American cities over time, the book sheds light on contemporary redefinitions of citizenship and democracy in the Americas, and by extrapolation, the world.
Clara Irazábal is the Latin Lab Director and Assistant Professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York City.
Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Prologue Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events in Latin America
- Clara Irazábal
- 1 Citizenship, Democracy, and Public Space in Latin America
- Clara Irazábal
- Part I: Cities, Democracies and Powers
- 2 Political Appropriation of Public Space: Extraordinary Events in the Zócalo of Mexico City
- Sergio Tamayo and Xóchitl Cruz-Guzmán
- 3 Reinventing the Void: São Paulo’s Museum of Art and Public Life along Avenida Paulista
- Zeuler R. Lima and Vera M. Pallamin
- 4 A Memorable Public Space:The Plaza of the Central Station in Santiago de Chile
- Rodrigo Vidal Rojas and Hans Fox Timmling
- 5 Lima’s Historic Centre: Old Places Shaping New Social Arrangements
- Miriam Chion and Wiley Ludeña Urquizo
- 6 The Plaza de Bolívar of Bogotá: Uniqueness of Place, Multiplicity of Events
- Alberto Saldarriaga Roa
- Part II: Place, Citizenship and Nationhood
- 7 Space, Revolution and Resistance: Ordinary Places and Extraordinary Events in Caracas
- Clara Irazábal and John Foley
- 8 The Struggle for Urban TerritoriesHuman Rights Activists in Buenos Aires
- Susana Kaiser
- 9 Iconic Voids and Social Identity in a Polycentric City: Havana from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century
- Roberto Segre
- 10 Unresolved Public Expressions of Anti-Trujilloism in Santo Domingo
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Robert Alexander González
Planning the Great Metropolis
As the Regional Plan Association embarks on a Fourth Regional Plan, there can be no better time for a paperback edition of David Johnson’s critically acclaimed assessment of the 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs. As he says in his preface to this edition, the questions faced by the regional planners of today are little changed from those their predecessors faced in the 1920s.
Derided by some, accused by others of being the root cause of New York City’s relative economic and physical decline, the 1929 Plan was in reality an important source of ideas for many projects built during the New Deal era of the 1930s.
In his detailed examination of the Plan, Johnson traces its origins to Progressive era and Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. He describes the making of the Plan under the direction of Scotsman Thomas Adams, its reception in the New York Region, and its partial realization.
The story he tells has important lessons for planners, decision-makers and citizens facing an increasingly urban future where the physical plan approach may again have a critical role to play.
David A. Johnson, FAICP, is Professor Emeritus of Planning at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a past President of the Fulbright Association of the United States and has directed educational projects in Slovenia, Brazil, and Portugal. Professor Johnson also has served on the staffs of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Washington National Capital Planning Commission and the Regional
Contents
- Preface to the Paperback Edition
- Preface
- 1 Introduction 1
- 2 The Making of the New York Metropolitan Region 13
- 3 The Emergence of a Planning Tradition 26
- 4 First Steps Towards a Metropolitan Regional Plan 48
- 5 The Search for Scope and Substance 70
- 6 Technological and Ideological Inputs 116
- 7 From Survey to Plan 147
- 8 Conflict Amidst Planning: Three Decisions 200
- 9 Carrying Out the Plan: 1929 to 1941 244
- 10 Plan and Reality: 1965 253
- 11 The Regional Plan as an Artefact and Process 273
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Bibliography 286
Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires
Capital cities seem to be a natural phenomenon: a state, especially a nation state, needs a central city from which it is governed and administered. However, in history this has not always been the case, and how much capital cities are cultural constructions driven by specific political agendas is impressively demonstrated in Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires, which deals with the planning of capital cities for the new states which emerged gradually from the declining Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires in Central and Southeastern Europe between c. 1830 and 1940. Bringing those cases of ambitious urban planning together for the first time, this book, which has been compiled by the two architectural historians Emily Gunzburger Makaš and Tanja Damljanović Conley, not only closes an important gap in European planning history – usually overlooked by a more Western European center historiography – but also offers a special European facet of postcolonial studies.
Wolfgang Sonne, Technical University in Dortmund
This book explores the planning and architectural histories of the cities across Central and Southeastern Europe transformed into the cultural and political capitals of the new nation-states created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their introduction, editors Makaš and Conley discuss the interrelated processes of nationalization, modernization, and Europeanization in the region at that time, with special attention paid to the way architectural and urban models from Western and Central Europe were adapted to fit the varying local physical and political contexts.
Individual studies provide summaries of proposed and realized projects in fourteen cities. Each addresses the political and ideological aspects of the city’s urban history, including the idea of becoming a cultural and/or political capital as well as the relationship between national and urban development. The concluding chapter builds on the introductory argument about how the search for national identity combined with the pursuit of modernization and desire to be more European drove the development of these cities in the aftermath of empires.
Emily Gunzburger Makaš is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Tanja Damljanović Conley teaches architectural history at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Contents
- The Contributors
- Introduction
-
1 Shaping Central and Southeastern European Capital Cities in the Age of Nationalism
Emily Gunzburger Makaš and Tanja Damljanović Conley - Part I South-Eastern European Capitals after the Ottoman Empire
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2 Athens
Eleni Bastéa -
3 Belgrade
Tanja Damljanović Conley -
4 Bucharest
Maria Raluca Popa -
5 Cetinje
Maja Dragičević & Rachel Rossner -
6 Sofia
Elitza Stanoeva -
7 Tirana
Gentiana Kera -
8 Ankara
Zeynep Kezer - Part II Central European Capitals within and after the Hapsburg Empire
-
9 Budapest
Robert Nemes -
10 Prague
Cathleen Giustino
11 Bratislava -
Henrieta Moravcíková
12 Cracow and Warsaw -
Patrice Dabrowski
13 Zagreb -
Sarah A. Kent
14 Ljubljana -
Jörg Stabenow
15 Sarajevo - Emily Gunzburger Makaš
- Conclusion
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16 Not Just the National: Modernity and the Myth of Europe in the Capital Cities of Central and Southeastern Europe
Nathaniel D. Wood
Meet the editors
About this issue
Summary
This issue of Built Environment is devoted to the strategic question of how the complex evolution of cities can be managed, with a view to achieving sustainable development, economic vitality, cohesive social capital and strong infrastructural connectivity in modern urban agglomerations.
Peter Nijkamp is a Professor in Regional and Urban Economics and in Economic Geography at the Free University, Amsterdam. His main research interests cover plan evaluation, multicriteria analysis, regional and urban planning, transport systems analysis, mathematical modelling, technological innovation, and resource management. He is a former President of the European Regional Science Association and of the Regional Science Association International. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Since 2002, he has been serving as the President of the governing board of the Netherlands Research Council (NWO). In addition, he is the former President of the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCs).
Karima Kourtit is a Researcher at the Free University, Amsterdam. Her main research interests cover entrepreneurship, innovation, geographic location and spatial clustering of industries. In recent years, she has focused in particular on new qualitative and quantitative methods for business and policy analysis, as well as on spatial-behavioural analysis of economic agents. She plays an active role in several (inter)national scientific networks and is leader on various international research projects related to sustainable diversity and the complex space-economy of sustainable urban development.
Luigi Fusco Girard is Professor of Economics and Environmental Evaluation in the Department of Architecture, University of Naples ‘Federico II’. He is President of the International Scientific Committee for Economics of Conservation, International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Vice President of CESET (Italian Centre of Evaluation and Territory Economics). His research interests include sustainable cities development and the methods and assessment tools for sustainability. He has published on several national and international journals and books.
Professor Sir Peter Hall: Role Model
About this issue
Summary
In a guest-editorial introduction to the ‘Built Environment’ special issue in celebration of Peter Hall, Michael Hebbert reflects on the range and variety of his accomplishment. Diversity was a striking feature of the obituaries published after his death in 2014 and it shows through even more strongly in the present collection of papers from former students and collaborators.
In a guest-editorial introduction to the ‘Built Environment’ special issue in celebration of Peter Hall, Michael Hebbert reflects on the range and variety of his accomplishment. Diversity was a striking feature of the obituaries published after his death in 2014 and it shows through even more strongly in the present collection of papers from former students and collaborators. They reflect on his legacy in a very personal way. Here was a man who modelled many roles and touched many lives: easy to love, hard to emulate, impossible to forget.
… we were having a very enjoyable lunch at the Garrick, when he [Terry Heiser, Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Environment] suddenly sprang a Heiser-type question: ‘Who are your role models?’ It more or less completely floored me and the other guest, who has produced some notable movies in his time. I don’t think either of us adequately rewarded Terry for that lunch. I've been thinking about the question ever since, and this is by way of recompense.
Thus Peter Hall introduced the memorable inaugural lecture marking his professorial appointment to University College London in 1992. The lecture took shape as an intellectual autobiography spanning the entire trajectory from boyhood in West Kensington through wartime years in Blackpool, undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Cambridge, journalism, teaching and policy engagements in swinging sixties London, his first youthful professorship at the University of Reading, the move to the University of California at Berkeley in 1980 and his return to England to take up the UCL chair at the age of sixty. Peter updated his narrative two decades later in an ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ written as a personal contribution to our eightieth birthday festschrift The Planning Imagination. After his death it was reprinted in the August 2014 issue of Town and Country Planning.
So who were his role models ? It’s a long roll-call but there are consistent patterns. As a writer he prized clarity and moral honesty, values learned from George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Frank Leavis, his Cambridge tutor Gus Caesar, and Paul Barker (editor of New Society) among others. As a geographer he admired social scientists who engaged with the evidence on the big scale: Alfred Marshall, Charles Booth, Beatrice Webb, Joseph Schumpeter. In his planning pantheon were decision-makers such as Frank Pick, Patrick Abercrombie, Michael Heseltine, Wulf Daseking, who similarly saw the big picture and – as he put it when thanking the Royal Town Planning Institute for their Gold Medal in 2003 – could walk the walk as well as talking the talk. He liked academics unafraid to engage with real-world challenges who could multi-task, dictating their correspondence and writing their books on the hoof – Maynard Keynes, Dudley Stamp, Richard Llewellyn-Davies. He enjoyed collaborations with salty characters with iconoclastic streaks – John Vaizey, Reyner Banham, Michael Young, Manuel Castells, Colin Ward. He sniffed out pseudo-intellectualism and had no time for cultural affectations: it explains a certain estrangement from his parent discipline of geography, a sore topic for the 1992 inaugural, though less with the passage of years.
There’s a sense of organic unity in Peter Hall’s own telling of his career. The strands lead connectedly from childhood experiments in drawing Harry Beck’s London Underground map with coloured crayons, through Blackpool Grammar School and St Catharine’s Cambridge, to those first superb books of his early career, the historical Industries of London and the prophetic London 2000. Having succinctly captured the complexities of London’s metropolitan geography he went on to do it for seven other capitals in the book World Cities. His analyses of outer metropolitan land use and travel patterns developed into the monumental Containment of Urban England, which in turn included a narrative of planning history that came to fruit in his texts Urban & Regional Planning and Cities of Tomorrow. That original intensive study of agglomeration and innovation in London’s industrial structure re-emerged in his seminal American studies of sunbelt and gunbelt industry, silicon landscapes and technopolises, and lastly and most ambitiously in the thousand-page Cities in Civilization, which is as much a work of comparative economic geography as it is a homage to Lewis Mumford. His final cluster of projects on railway networks and sustainable, polycentric settlement patterns connected right back to Frank Pick, Harry Beck and those coloured crayons. So in his life as well as in his work Peter did meet the precept of his undergraduate tutor Augustus Caesar: begin at the beginning and follow inexorably through logical argument to your final conclusions.
After Peter’s death the obituaries had a different logic. There were some common elements – tribute to his encyclopaedic intelligence, personal charm, exceptional productivity – but beyond that, each emphasized a difference. Some highlighted his advocacy of free enterprise, others his championship of planning. He was remembered as the heir to Ebenezer Howard and the reviver of the decentralist garden cities movement, but also ‘the most urbane of urbanists’ (in the words of the Financial Times) and leading light of the big-city network Global Urban Development. His legacies were detected at the wide scale of regional structure or in the detail of transport networks. Historians hailed his genius in making sense of the past, technophiles his flair for futurology. He was remembered for big data-crunching projects and for pioneering the UK application of numerical modelling of land-use and transport systems, but also for commonsensical weekly journalism and the sort of readable scholarship embodied in this very journal, which he edited for 36 years. From one perspective he was the essential globalist, travelling astonishing numbers of miles each year and always comparing what he saw; but he was also deeply rooted and an effective local champion in his home territories of London, Blackpool and Manchester.
This commemorative issue of Built Environment continues the multiplication of narratives around Peter Hall’s work and influence. Written by students and colleagues, its theme is a truly surprising diversity: it seems we all knew the same individual yet each knew a different man. The fourteen contributors cover the entire span of his career from the moment he joined LSE in 1965 through to the intense research activity of his last summer months in 2014. It’s extraordinary to be reminded of the scope of his life-work, the variety of roles he modelled for successive generations of students and colleagues, and the ramifications of his legacy. If the ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ reveals Peter’s own moral compass, this collection shows the many different points to which it led him – and us.
The issue’s starting point is 1965 when Peter Hall arrived at the London School of Economics and John Goddard became one of his first PhD students, working on the London office boom and the efforts of government to regulate it. The topic combined methodological innovation in the latest techniques of quantitative geography with intense policy relevance, and the paper shows the brilliance with which Peter fostered both sets of connections. My own experience began four years later, in 1969. Newly graduated with a history degree (specialism: Later Roman Empire) I had visited Reyner Banham at UCL in search of advice on how to become a journalist specializing in urban issues. He sensibly directed me to the University of Reading where the newly installed Professor of Geography was a superb exponent of the craft – not that I acquired it, though I learned so much else, ending up 40 years later as a Bartlett colleague. My Reading fellow-students are represented in this issue by Peter Williams and Ray Wyatt, both of whom joined in 1972. The former’s investigation of gentrification in Islington launched a distinguished academic and professional career as one of the UK’s top housing experts, the latter was drawn from Australia by Reading’s reputation as a hot spot for urban modelling, and his paper offers a quizzical account of the ups and downs of the field internationally, and Peter’s lasting role as translator of computer output into policy input.
Next came California. Amy Glasmeier first met Peter Hall in London in the spring of 1978 when she was still a Berkeley undergraduate. Two years later she watched, and here most vividly describes, his induction to the University of California and the origins of the collaboration with Ann Markusen that launched what was, even by his standards of productivity, an outstandingly creative decade of work on the changing economic geography of the US. His collaborations involved a brilliant constellation of students and researchers whose work is explored here in joint-authored contributions from Sabina Deitrich with Scott Campbell, and Erica Schoenberger with Marc Weiss. Our Berkeley profiles are completed by Yuko Aoyama. She met Peter in 1990 when working for OECD Urban Affairs in Paris, and went to join his final Californian PhD cohort. Her paper’s unexpected excursions into the social histories of blues and flamenco remind us how wide he could range.
Nick Green opens the final sequence as one of the first PhD students of the Bartlett years, working on a cultural-spatial analysis of artists’ studios in the East End of London. As with many other contributors, the doctoral project led into an extended research collaboration, contributing to the POLYNET project on European Spatial Structure from posts within the two non-profit organizations that became Peter’s principal policy vehicles after the turn of the century, Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies and the Town and Country Planning Association. Basak Demires joined the team as a doctoral student funded by the wondrous windfall from the Swiss Balzan Foundation, which named Peter as one of its 2005 prize-winners for his contributions to the history of the modern European city. Her task was to analyse the role of telecommunications in Europe’s polycentric urban system, and her paper tells this story within a wider tribute to his contributions to location theory, in particular via translation, interpretation and application of Von Thünen’s classic Isolated State.
Chia-Lin Chen commenced her PhD under Peter’s supervision in 2008, working on the regional economic impacts of High Speed Rail (HSR). By a stroke of genius he encouraged her to study British Rail’s introduction of Intercity 125 diesel sets in 1976 as a prototype HSR experiment, allowing longitudinal analysis and all but connecting the work of his final PhD student to John Goddard’s investigations of London office decentralisation and relocation forty years earlier. The thesis led to early publications, had immediate policy impact in the debate over the extension of the HSR network north of London, and once again led straight into post-doctoral research collaboration. Chia-Lin Chen’s paper offers a vivid and poignant account of the projects on which she, Peter and their team worked flat out until the moment of his death.
The last word of this special issue belongs to someone who knew Peter better than any of us – Ann Rudkin, Publisher of Built Environment, publisher and editor of many of his books. She joined the journal when it was relaunched under Peter’s direction in 1978, and has run it ever since. The journal’s impressive run of back issues has perfectly realized his vision of a quarterly ‘mag’ in readable pocket format, each issue addressing a salient topic, well laid out and illustrated with photographs and (ideally) a cartoon from Louis Hellman. Ann’s paper offers glimpses into Peter at work in editorial meetings, over lunch, in email correspondence, writing in manuscript margins. It leaves us with a picture of a role model who modelled many roles, but whose versatility was always shaped by a clear sense of purpose: easy to love, hard to emulate, impossible to forget.
Meet the editor
About this issue
Summary
Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning at the Bartlett School, University College London, Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, and Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge journal Planning Perspectives.
