Sir Peter Hall, president of the Town and Country Planning Association, has died.
Hall passed away on 30 July.
He leaves behind his wife Magda, his brother John and his family.
After receiving his Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge, Hall began his academic career at Birkbeck in 1957 as a lecturer in geography. He taught at the London School of Economics before joining the University of Reading, where he became dean of the faculty of urban and regional studies, latterly also becoming professor emeritus of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He took up the chair of planning at The Bartlett in 1989.
A member of The Bartlett for over 25 years, Hall was knighted in 1998 for his services to the TCPA and was named as a Pioneer in the Life of the Nation by the Queen in 2003. In the past 15 years, he also received a number of awards, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and in 2005 was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to urban regeneration and planning by the then deputy prime minister John Prescott.
TCPA chief executive Kate Henderson said: “Sir Peter Hall was a man of acute intelligence and enormous generosity. He not only sustained the TCPA, but more than any other post-war figure kept the cause of planning alive through difficult times. His historic grasp of the relevance of town planning and the high social ideals of the garden city movement had latterly inspired renewed interest in place-making and gave hope to a new generation of practitioners and campaigners.
“Part of Peter’s brilliance was his passion to draw international learning on cities and communities and make it accessible to a global audience of students and planners. Though horrified by the growing inequality of cities like London, he was, above all, a man full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of better places and how they could be achieved.
“To say he was the leading international planner and geographer of his generation only tells half the story; he was a fine writer, author of countless books including the seminal Cities in Civilisation.”
Annabel.Dixon@estatesgazette.com
