The Planning Imagination
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Perhaps it’s best to start with an admission, much in the way the editors have! Peter Hall was one of my Doctoral supervisors. He tested every limit of my thinking and ability to research and there’s not a day I don’t use some of his wisdom! His way of working was inspiring to say the least and there are a few stories I’ve gathered over the years, much like the episodes related here but since this is a review of a text, not a person, it’s best to focus where possible!
It’s important in any field to get tyros to appreciate the work of the key writers. I happens too rarely. When it does happen, it is often in terms of a critique so focussed that it requires detailed study to unravel the analysis. This work differs in many respects. It focusses on the person as much as the topic, noting, quite rightly, that it is the individual’s contributions that have made the subject what it is. It looks at the key texts and pulls out, from a formidable oeuvre those that highlight changing ideas. Finally, it is something that can be read by a wide audience because it looks at the meld between theory and writer and that is subject-agnostic.
The contributors all have some connection with Peter Hall and the list reads like a roll call of the best in contemporary geography. Each of the five key sections (with a reply by Hall as the sixth) focusses on one aspect of his key writings. We start with the historical aspects of the writing, notably Urban and Regional Planning, Great Planning Disasters, Cities of Tomorrow and Cities in Civilisation. The obvious focus is urban, essentially city, history and the development of some form of control. There has always been the fascination in history and it would have been a viable path but planning seemed to fit the interest better. It’s a grand sweep with all the major places being mentioned. The value lies in the connections between places and periods. The argument seems to be that to understand the topic you need to appreciate the history of its development. This is a key issue: too many subjects (and ecology is just one) proceed from idea to idea without explicitly linking the trajectories of thought. This is fine if, like Peter Hall, your work extends over 60 years, but for those coming new into the field, some guidance is necessary and its lack is felt (to take an environmental detour, just consider current arguments over energy which seem to ignore the same debates over 20 years ago!). We know where we are going when we know from which direction we have come! It’s not that all of Hall’s historical work is polemic. The Great Planning Disasters, text showed what could happen when it goes wrong (although, from a local viewpoint, putting the Sydney Opera House as a disaster might need some more justification!).
Part two focusses on Peter Hall’s recurrent work with London. More than a home or a place of employment (although it has been both to Hall), it is a symbol of the current economic system. London stands as one of the world’s great modern cities but, as it made abundantly clear, its roots go far back into its earliest forms of settlement. The texts used here: Industries of London, London 2000 and Working Capital: Life and Labour in contemporary London, show the development, not just of the city, but of its spatial arrangement. It is here that we also see the normative side of his work. If Industries shows the changing structural economies of the city, then London 2000 (London 2001 later on) argued how the place should be designed. It’s the mix of historical research and the desire to see a better future that has driven his work. Industries and working Capital are at the ends of the research spectrum whereby the massive changes noted in the former are replaced by equally large changes in the latter, although the former looks at losses on jobs in structural change and the latter at job gains (albeit in knowledge as distinct from manufacturing, industries).
Part three strikes a personal note with its central text The Containment of Urban England being required reading! It’s part of his work on the theme of spatial planning. This appears as a key element in his work because here he describes but also lays down some key principles behind the concept. One of the more obvious points is the lack of a real “theory” behind the subject. The idea seems sensible on the surface – regional planning helps accomplish, in a broad context, what city planning does in a limited one – but the lack of a justifiable case continues to create issues. The paradoxes this creates are shown in his major work Containment which argues for a policy of regulated urban development whilst at the same time noting that its effects are felt unequally. This dichotomy, between the need for planning and the need for people (or, as the book put it, for Sociable Cities), is a continuous theme for Hall whose interest always seems to be in the people as much as the place. This connection is so strong that one of his later works argued for “non-planning” – since conventional planning had let the people down, perhaps no planning at all could hardly be worse. It’s a bold move but having seen the issues with his planning thesis, its antithesis could hardly be worse (unless we are aiming for a true Marxian synthesis later on!).
A slender part four considers his contribution to transport planning and mobility. Looking decidedly forward, these texts grasp the changes in economics and try to find ways in which they could be harnessed. In much the same way, Hall’s work on global cities (part 5) focusses on the ways in which the old national centres have become international ones linked more to themselves than the regions they originally served (although this seems to be reversing with the emergence of the city-region). To this extent, as contributors note, the detachment of the city from its origins goes away from much of more recent urban geography and creates controversies. This must now be pushed further with the work on polycentric metropolises – the idea that to compete globally, the city must also be linked inextricably with its regional towns and cities. It has taken Hall’s work away from the carefully constructed histories of urban development towards ideas of the future. A final section allows Peter Hall a comment on the preceding chapters and a chance to explore their thinking.
This is a delightful read on many levels. It puts one of the leading thinker’s ideas in the context of an entire developing field – something few others would be able to do, so successfully has Hall dominated his field. It allows the reader to see how the seemingly disparate threads of a life’s work can be drawn into themes to which he returns at intervals (the text is by no means a chronology). It shows what drives people and ideas. More than anything it allows people coming new to a field (because this applies as much to any subject as it does planning) some indication of how to read and gather ideas to create themes which can then be used to sharpen our ideas. No doubt this will become required reading in planning courses but it wouln’t hurt to gain a wider audience because its message of the development of ideas resonates widely.
