Sir Peter Hall (1932-2014), Urbanist Extraordinaire

This month should not close with Sir Peter Hall’s passing having gone unnoted.

Hall died July 30 in London at 82.  He was perhaps the greatest urban planner of his time, a prolific writer of 50 books and more than 2000 articles, the author of the 1998 historical masterwork “Cities in Civilization”, and a bold proponent of new thinking about urban development whose ideas often came into their own long after he put them forward.

Sir Peter Hall

Hall was a man of the left, was often criticized as a Utopian, but never lost sight of the practicalities of economic growth and opportunity, dynamic social mobility, and hard trade-offs of building urban environments.

He made common cause with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in promoting the idea of the enterprise zone — beloved of politicians of both right and left — to revitalize targeted centers of urban decay with incentives and tax breaks.  Jack Kemp’s singular brand of conservatism owes Hall an enormous debt.

Urban planning fell into disrepute in the 1960s and 70s largely in reaction to the massive works of development after World War II that tore up neighborhoods and imposed Corbusian sterility on a dehumanizing scale.  Hall, while coming out of that tradition and unafraid to think big, nevertheless kept a feel for the street-level excitement of city life that has been instrumental to the urban revival of the past quarter-century.

Hall vigorously advocated for ambitious rail-transit projects; London’s new 60 mile Crossrail line, Europe’s largest public works project, is largely his brainchild.  He strongly believed in cycling as an essential ingredient of the urban transport mix.

Thanks, Sir Peter, for making it easier to get across London

Significantly, Hall valued not just the vibrant city center, but also the periphery; understanding that the city is the heart, but just that part, of its greater region.  He called for the development of “garden cities,” not suburbs, but small urban centers often developed around transit links.  Here in the northeastern US, where many small cities are mired in post-industrial decline and impoverishment, Hall’s vision suggests enticing possibilities of regeneration.

As the NIMBY-ism of the late 20th Century gave way to more of a “let’s get building again” sensibility, the role of the planner in guiding development has regained some of its former legitimacy.  Build, certainly; but, in a time when the costs and consequences of unbridled growth are increasingly cause for alarm, there is new appreciation of the need to build smart.

Peter Hall thought society should build more, but he thought it would turn out much better if it were well planned.
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Note: This entry of Lancaster Notebook is reprinted from the public affairs blog AutoKthonous.