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Late planning guru, geographer and urbanist Sir Peter Hall.
Late planning guru and geographer Sir Peter Hall. Photograph: Graham Turner
Late planning guru and geographer Sir Peter Hall. Photograph: Graham Turner

Sir Peter Hall: reflections on a lifetime of town planning

This article is more than 9 years old

In the last article before his death, Hall looked back on the boom times of the 60s and the subsequent marginalisation of planning – and considered what could be done to rebuild the system

At the beginning of the first world war, town planning was very much in its infancy. Indeed, one hundred years on, it is hard to appreciate how modest were the beginnings of planning as a profession, and as a subject for university education. Very few local authorities had the resources to secure the services of a professional, even had they desired to do so.

Later, during the government’s post-war reconstruction, when priority was given to the preparation of local authority housing schemes to meet a national need for some 40,000 additional homes, planning was left behind again. It was only in the 1960s, when the relationship between the sciences and architecture was realised, that academic research became at all significant in the field of planning.

The late ’60s saw a planning boom. There was a national plan, and a second wave of new towns including Milton Keynes, Northampton and Peterborough came into being. Every region had a Regional Economic Planning Council; the south-east strategy proposed to link London to these new towns, and to other major developments at the edge of the region, by discontinuous growth corridors along main railway lines and the motorway network, then in mid-construction. In 1967, the peak year for housing completions in the UK, local planning departments were being reorganised to take on the challenges, staffed by multiskilled young planners who were emerging from fast-expanding planning schools – including new and unconventional ones – with radical new curriculums.

In retrospect, this was the high watermark of a belief in a total, centralised, top-down, expertly based – but also benign – planning system. The tide soon retreated with the dying days of the Wilson government – the collapse of the National Plan in 1967 and the weakening and then disappearance of the Department of Economic Affairs – and the vision thus imploded because the implementation mechanisms were lacking.

The entrance to the village of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire in 1968, just prior to its development into a new town. Photograph: Hulton Archive

Planning fell into a long downward spiral, and even at the time was criticised for being too prescriptive and too restrictive. A study in 1973 concluded that the historic 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was too radical, based on the assumption that the planners would take the initiative, and that private developers – remarkably seen as totally residual in a world that would be dominated by public housing – would simply respond to what the planners had told them. That rather amazing assumption collapsed soon after the return of a Conservative government in 1951, elected on the promise to build 300,000 new homes a year, half of them by private developers. The contradiction remained over the succeeding 60 years.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, as deindustrialisation decimated the economies of the cities, attention shifted into urban regeneration, but the overall job of planning town and country development remained. The Blair era saw a brief return to strategic planning: John Prescott’s Sustainable Communities Strategy of 2003, with its proposal for three major development corridors radiating from London, had strange shades of the almost-forgotten 1967 Strategy. But in 2004 voters in the north-east rejected the proposal for a democratically elected regional assembly; a tragic failure, comparable to the abandonment of city regional government in 1974. Lacking democratic legitimacy for the regional planning process, it was all too easy for the coalition to abandon the entire regional structure, bringing us back to the 1980s – or maybe full circle, to the early 1920s.

Plans for the development of Milton Keynes
Plans for the development of Milton Keynes

Yet, because in 2014 the underlying economic and demographic pressures have continued more strongly than ever, the resulting tensions still loom large. We are experiencing massive regional imbalance, whereby London and its surrounding region is detaching itself from the rest of the UK economy. We are building fewer new homes than in any peacetime year since the 1920s: just two in five of the new homes we need. And the physical result is too often dismal, inspiring nimby reactions to new development proposals. Planning has become the villain, held responsible for an accelerating housing shortage, powerless to stop bad development. It appears to have lost the capacity to plan good urban places, and is supine in the face of proposals for low-grade development backed by repeated appeals. Planning and planners have thus steadily become residualised, returning to their marginal status in 1914: we have been borne back ceaselessly into the past.

How then to start rebuilding the system from the ground up? We need not less planning, but more – positive planning by well-equipped multiskilled teams, sharing a common base of understanding and working effectively to create master plans. We did it once, not so long ago: in Milton Keynes, where the Development Corporation produced plans that developers wanted to build because they found that quality meant profits. We can surely do it again.

Emulating these achievements means revisiting planning education. While planning education was restructured in the 1960s with a strong foundation in the social sciences, especially geography, sociology and economics – no such change occurred in architectural education. The education system continued to be based firmly on the atelier or studio tradition, in which students learned in small groups around an individual master: an artistic-creative, not a research-scientific tradition. And, perversely, the architectural content of planning, the urban design tradition, was steadily reduced to an absolute minimum. By the 1990s it was possible to become a qualified planner without any architectural knowledge or sensibility at all.

Milton Keynes in 1976: ‘The Development Corporation produced plans that developers wanted to build because they found that quality meant profits’

The lesson for the education system is that we can no longer – if indeed we ever could - inculcate all the manifold skills a planner needs. They go far beyond planning and architecture into a score of specialisms, ranging from land economics to sustainable development. What is needed, in education for the built environment, is to expose students to the ways of cooperative working to achieve common and productive outcomes.

So the current state of planning presents a special version of that dilemma that George Orwell famously spelt out in his essay on Charles Dickens: how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? And what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? The fact is that we will need to do both in parallel. We will need to rebuild a better system, and to educate planners and their co-professionals to operate effectively to make it deliver a better world. That should be the starting message for the next century.

The original version of this viewpoint appeared in Town Planning Review 85.5 (2014), published by Liverpool University Press.

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