The Achievement of Peter Hall

It is almost impossible to summarise the achievement of Peter Hall. Many have only read a small proportion of his vast written output but his importance as an urban designer cannot be doubted, a designer who worked not with images but with words.  This is clear even if you have read no more than three of his books.

Peter Hall fulfilled many important roles such as the President of Town and Country Planning Association  and Professor of Planning at The Bartlett, University College, London.    Yet what was his achievement? He was both theorist and practitioner, authoring   over 50 books on planning and acting as advisor to successive British  governments. 

                          Peter Hall on a TCPA trip to Denmark

Although he was a brilliant, and in many ways original urban designer, he thought it important to attribute a  genealogy of urban design theory. In his book “Cities of Tomorrow”, perhaps the most important work on planning published in five decades or so, he seemed to regard one single source as pre-eminent.

It is invidious, but it needs saying: despite doughty competition, Ebenezer Howard ( 1850-1928) is the most important single character in this entire tale.

The history of the origins, growth and development of British Cities  is too complicated to sketch out here, beginning with its origins in Roman/Medieval times or perhaps even earlier. In the view of  Peter Hall, the discipline of planning evolved as a response to the blind growth of cities which took place in the Nineteenth Century:

Victorian Britain regarded the problems of the inner cities as the “the one great domestic problem which the religion, the humanity, and the statesmanship of England are imperatively summoned to solve.”

No one who has studied the state of Victorian slums could doubt that the Nineteenth century produced cities unfit for human habitation. And unfit in so many ways. As well as poor access to medical services, education and employment a central part of the problem was  poor housing. This has to be understood in many senses including the urban/strategic sense.

                      High density horror: with its inadequate light-wells,
                      this example shows what architecture can be reduced to
                      without the interventions of legislation.



It has been well established that cities which do not encourage people to walk will produce unhealthy people. It has also been established that patients in hospitals can be partly nurtured to recovery by the sight of trees and sunlight. There is a third factor that might be identified. Peter Hall, in his book Cities of Tomorrow,  observed that cities, in the form unfettered growth had allowed them to take, can also be diametrical to health.

There was an interesting reaction to growth and overcrowding in the European capitals: both in London and in Berlin, fears began to develop that the city population was in some way biologically unfit. Around 1900, recruitment for the South African War exposed the fact that out of 11,000 young men in Manchester, 8000 were rejected and only 1,000 were fit for regular service. Later, in World War One, the Verney Commission reasserted that the physique of the urban part of Britain tended to deteriorate and was maintained only by recruitment from the countryside. Similarly, in Berlin, only 42 percent of Berliners were found fit for army service in 1913, against 66 percent of those from rural areas

It is depressing to think that war was  a  major impetus in forcing the holders of political power to rethink their attitudes to urban design but as the above passage makes clear, it does seem to be the case. Necessity is the mother of virtue and whether or not politicians thought better urban design was a matter of national survival is hardly the point. Attitudes to urban design did change.

                         "Homes fit for Heroes" was a key issue in
                         the 1918 election. Perhaps "Homes fit for
                         Workers" might prove a suitable rallying cry today.



This is the point at which Peter Hall’s narrative on planning really kicks off. If cities were not to be ruinous to people’s health, lessons would have to be learnt regarding why people from the countryside were in better health than those from the cities. The lessons learnt were felt to be numerous. It was felt that cities could be allowed to become too big. Agricultural workers were no more involved in manual labour than industrial workers so exercise was not a key factor. Agricultural workers do tend to live in small urban conglomerations i.e. villages. Villages established a strong connection with nature simply by virtue of their size, even if their inhabitants lived in apartments, no need to reinvent the typology of the house with garden here. Villages represented concentrations of built density  within the landscape ( see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City for the anti-thesis to this approach). And so, city size was felt to be not a key component of urban design theory but THE key component.

This had huge implications. The growth of existing large cities was thought to be something that needed to be restrained i.e. the need for green belts was immediately felt. And its implications were widespread i.e. it was felt that  new growth should be directed towards satellite cities.

The influence of Ebenezer Howard runs like thread throughout the work  of Peter Hall, both as  theorist and practitioner. However, although he was  an urban designer who whilst acknowledging a generic source, he always managed to think in very site specific terms. In the 1960’s he embraced the fashionable political anarchism of the era by advocating planning-free zones. In the 1980’s he did almost the same thing by acting as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s government. London’s docklands are basically a testament to this. Yet although he was capable of embracing planning-free zones, largely due to a sense of political realism I suspect, his heart I always thought, was in order not chaos. It is doubtful whether if , in recent decades, there was a single planning problem, from inner-city regeneration to Thames estuary airports, on which he was not consulted. He acted as  part of the team that produced the Urban Task Force report, chaired by Lord Richard Rogers. He probably knew more about planning than anyone else alive.

As I lay these verbal flowers upon his grave, I imagine some of my readers are thinking: why are you telling us things we already know? Why not tell us something original?        
                                    

I was lucky enough to meet him once at a lecture I attended entitled  “Object vs City;” this debate which took place some time ago (2008) when I managed to put questions to both protagonists in the debate, Peter Hall and Will Alsop. The debate took place in a fairly traditional format with both participants making an opening statement followed by questions from the floor. The opening statements took the form largely of two images each participant chose to present. I recall that Will Alsop chose to present a photograph taken on his iphone of a Frank Gehry building in New York. The man chairing the debate, Hank Dittmar, presented some of his own images and these staked out a position quite similar to that advocated by Peter  Hall. They spoke of the ideals of Ebenezer Howard and the sort of places I have illustrated in my own photographs such as Hampstead Garden Suburb.

The lecture covered fairly familiar ground, complete  with a reference to Howard’s three magnets diagram without which, it seemed, no Peter Hall lecture was complete.  Since the main subject was the possible synthesis between architecture and planning, Peter Hall turned his attention to his recollections of his time as a guest critic of student projects at the architecture department in The Bartlett. His reminisces proved quite a criticism of the state of architectural education:  

We look at the architectural students proposals which we don’t understand. They don’t understand our ideas either.

                                      Projects by Will Alsop



Will Alsop spoke about therapeutic drawing projects he had developed with mentally handicapped people. The most interesting part of the discussion was when the discussion was opened up to questions from the floor. I asked the following question which I quote from memory:

The most basic spatial unit  of urban design seems to be the neighbourhood which can be added to culminating in a polycentric city. Ebenezer Howard’s most basic idea was that the growth of cities, the accumulation of further neighbourhoods, must at some point be arrested. A green belt  must be laid down and further growth directed to satellite towns. Could the government’s Eco-Town initiative be seen as a contemporary expression of this?

Peter Hall started his reply by stating that:

I could talk about this for a couple of hours.

It was, I admit, something of a rhetorical question since I had imagined Peter Hall would be in his element answering this. The venue was filled, it seemed, largely with architectural students who seemed to understand little about the subject so perhaps a rhetorical question was needed; Peter Hall managed to sketch out, within the space of a few minutes, many of the ideas that had been derived from Ebenezer Howard. Planning theory had indeed developed since this period. Ideas such as satellite towns now seemed somewhat dated, they were now viewed as mixed-use nodes, indeed the ideas of Ebenezer Howard could be seen as the basis of regional planning with only a few exceptions ( See Patrick Geddes).  Peter Hall was broadly supportive of the eco-town initiative, indeed it seemed it the fulfilment of many of the ideas he had long been arguing for. Of course, this was only one of the approaches to planning advocated. I remember talking to him about Woking and how it been expanded. Peter Hall practiced what he preached. He never argued that satellite garden cities were the solution to all urban design problems. Whilst some planning lecturers at The Bartlett chose to commute in every day from Milton Keynes, he chose to live in London. 

Peter Hall viewed the future of planning, at any rate in Britain, with a degree of pessimism. One of his last essays was entitled “The Strange Death of Planning.” He viewed planners not as purveyors of  some sort of aesthetic frippery but as essential problem solvers. In Britain they were, however, “prophets without honour,” i.e. their contributions were simply ignored by those in power. They had vital insights to offer; they knew that badly designed sprawl would result in vast consumption of non-renewable resources. They knew that excessively built up areas could lead to bad health.  Only intelligent planning could resolve the seemingly antithetical demands of city dwellers. Other  countries were well positioned to take advantage of the post-oil economies we would soon be embracing whereas Britain would not. Other countries might have happy, healthy workforces whereas we might not.  In short, Peter Hall, realised that  good urban design was not something superficial but perhaps even a matter of national survival. 

When he died, his colleague on the Urban Task Force, Lord Richard Rogers paid tribute to him with the following generous words:

Peter Hall was a great humanist and the most important planner in post-war Britain with a wide knowledge of the nature of cities around the world.

 I had lunch with him only a few of weeks ago where we discussed the best examples of cities in Europe, a subject brilliantly covered by his last book ‘Good Cities, Better Lives’.

 I got to  know him well when I chaired the Urban Task Force where his advice was indispensable.  There was only one area where we had a disagreement - his argument for garden cities and my belief in the compact city as the only sustainable way to accommodate growth - but he was as civilised in disagreement as he was in agreement.  His continuing commitment to the garden cities movement was reflected in his writings on the legacy of Ebenezer Howard, and in his presidency of the Town and Country Planning Association, but his interests and scholarship ranged far wider.  

He was an inspiring colleague, a good friend and is truly a great loss to the profession.

               Basingstoke, though often mistaken for a "New Town" is
               actually a greatly expanded existing town. These "Urban
               Renaissance" high-density housing units have fundamentally
               changed the fabric of Basingstoke, probably for the better.



I re-established contact with Peter Hall at the time of the Wolfson Prize on Economics for garden Cities. I had plenty of ideas of my own on the subject of garden cities but felt I did not understand enough about the economics of the subject. It was widely agreed that the rise in land values had to be captured for the benefit of the community but, over and beyond that, I felt a more nuanced approach was necessary. I asked him for advice on a reading list on the subject but his advice was less than forthcoming since he told me that he was planning to enter the same competition himself.

Still, there was a remarkable convergence of ideas in the Wolfson Prize, a convergence which was achieved without conferring. Nearly all the prize-winning entries (and mine) had one idea in common; whilst the “Urban Renaissance” had achieved many things, density in places like London had been taken as far as it could go. Building on the Green Belt was not the answer. Neither was it necessary to consider a series of New Towns, similar to that achieved in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The answer might lie in expanding small to medium existing towns. This could be achieved in many ways. It might not even be necessary to consider enlarging the footprint of existing cities i.e. I suggested converting Oxford’s business park into a mixed-use neighbourhood complete with a tram linking it to the centre.

Some of Peter Hall’s predictions and warnings  have arguably been vindicated. The Independent newspaper published a piece entitled “Victorian Diseases: Back from the dead” which tended to confirm his views on the likely health consequences of over-crowding in the inner cities. Peter Hall was opposed to sprawl and felt that only public transport could structure cities. Since British governments have declined to take much of a role in public transport, only private initiatives could provide public transport infrastructure ( see again The Independent) in the form of developments such as the new Reading station and HS2. It remains to be seen whether these will suffice to make  the necessarily vital contribution that mass-transit makes to urban design.

Peter Hall occupied an absolutely key role in the British  debate on planning  Moreover, he was that rarest of things, a planner who did not hide behind obscure jargon but who made the effort to communicate with the public, writing in clear English. Now that he’s gone, of course,  the torch has been passed to new generation.

(Thanks to  Wiley for  quotations from “Cities of Tomorrow” © 1988, 1996, 2002 by Peter Hall. Also thanks to Thanks to TCPA for photo of Peter Hall, ALL-Design for Will Alsop images, RSH for Rogers quotation. All other images  are either by author,have had copyright ownership traced as far as possible or believed to be in public domain)

What would Harold Say?

 Amid the controversy surrounding the National Planning Policy Framework as way of finding our bearings perhaps it would be worth while casting our minds back to the planning policies of previous Conservative governments. As I have already indicated here, I believe that the planning-free-zone of the 1980s often  led to urban design of a very poor quality. Perhaps if we extend the time frame further, as far back as the 1950s, then we can see examples of urban design which seem relevant today. The fact that the Conservatives won an election in  1951 and the subsequent popularity of that Government has often been attributed to  Harold Macmillan’s grasp of this issue. His willingness to campaign on this issue prior to the  election and the success of his tenure as Minister for Housing from 1951 -1954 where he famously met his target of 300,000 new homes a year, surely holds lessons for our current government. The failure of  the current Conservative Party to appreciate this lesson might explain their failure to secure an outright majority at the last election.

 Reviewing planning policies as they currently stand, the approach to planning of the  last 10-15 years i.e. the Blair years were generally determined by John Prescott. John Prescott’s approach to planning and urban design was basically guided by the report “Towards an Urban Renaissance”,  probably the most influential planning document  during this period. “Towards an Urban Renaissance”  was produced by the Urban Task Force chaired by Richard Rogers so it really was his brainchild. Rogers argues for the polycentric city, that a city should not be seen as a single entity but as a series of villages or neighbourhoods.

 
Much of Roger’s argument revolves around density. This is measured by the acronym DPH  (dwellings per hectare.)  Only when this reaches a critical level is it possible to create a catchment area that can justify local services such as a doctor, bus stop, shops, school etc. This is the way in which a series of mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled  neighbourhoods are created. The walkable neighbourhoods thus generated are more sustainable than a neighbourhood which is wholly residential where people have to drive to an out-of-town shopping centre. A walkable neighbourhood also has social benefits were people will meet each other unlike a neighbourhood where the connections are all made with cars.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is probably the most interesting and valid initial approach to urban design. It needs to be mixed use and walkable scale. One of the reasons that the out-of-town shopping centres  became so popular, an  approach which became widespread in the 1980s , was simply that they had large, horizontal  car parks. However, in architectural and urban design terms the overall quality of these developments was often very poor. Car parks constitute nothing more than an urban wasteland. And one of the overall effects of out-of-town shopping centres was that many town centre shop closed; this led to what planners refer to as the doughnut syndrome – towns with holes at the centre. So a third quality is added to the requirements of a neighbourhood. A good public transport system obviating the need to always travel by car.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is valid, with it’s 3 qualities, as I have outlined above, and  can be achieved with a majority of the dwellings consisting of houses with gardens. This has been proven to work, for instance, by the British  Garden City Movement. I recently gave an example, namely Hampstead Garden Suburb. This has the  quality of a village with a railway station at the centre.
 
It could be argued that the present Government needs a specifically conservative approach to this, in the sense that it is  something generated by private money rather than public money. To achieve this I would say firstly, that ideally an important step would be getting developers interested in the vitally important principle of mixed –use. Rather than building mono-functional zones such as out-of-town shopping centres and business parks, they should be encouraged to embrace mixed-use, both as buildings and neighbourhoods. This can be profitable as well as attractive. Instead of the approach of the single-story shopping shed surrounded by a car park you can have a multi-story building with shops on the ground floor and flats or offices above. This obviates the need for a enormous car park and if it is integrated into it’s neighbourhood, means that there will be houses with gardens within walking distance. All these activities can feed off each other, generating profits , with beautiful squares and landscaped streets instead of over-scaled vehicle parking.
 
As well as persuading developers of the benefits of mixed-use, we need to rethink attitudes to transport. David Cameron has said that he wants the present government to be the greenest ever. The initiative of the feed-in tariff was a good policy. It means that people can install photo-voltaic panels on their roof and sell the surplus electricity back to grid, meaning that the initial investment can be paid for in a much shorter period of time. However, finding a sustainable approach to transport is going to be much, much more difficult. Although we live in an age of diminishing oil resources, I personally doubt whether the electric car, which some people put their faith in, really is the answer. At present, they take 5 hours to recharge and have a range of 100 miles. I also doubt if the car powered on bio-fuels in the answer since their production depends on turning valuable farming land away from food production. What is necessary is to re-invent the notion of public transport. You may argue that this is socialist, because collective, rather than individual and conservative, but I am not sure I would agree. We already pay for roads collectively through our taxes so perhaps a proportion of this money should be  spent every year on public transport. All the roads we have paid for and built will arguably be empty in a few years time so perhaps we need to start modifying them for new types of transport i.e. trams can be retrofitted to existing road infrastructure. All this can be payed for by tax contributions and private developers through thinks like Section 106 agreements ( unfortunately these will be abolished under the NPPF). It is obviously easier to link up a tram to a constant power source than a car i.e. an overhead cable rather than a battery which goes flat every five  hours. The electricity can come from renewables i.e. solar, wind, ground source heat pump, CHP, biomass even nuclear. This entire approach will entirely change the look and feel of our towns and cities, reducing sprawl (which is often caused by cars) and leading to mixed-use neighbourhoods. This approach need not be excessively dense, as the example of the garden city movement shows.
 

Coming back to Harold Macmillan, we should really reflect on what planning policies he implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. He did  not simply advocate the relaxation of planning in favour of a developer’s free-for-all. The housing targets he set and met  were placed within the context of the planning policies of the day, policies evolved by figures such as Patrick Abercrombie and Frederic Osborne, both of whom were among the most gifted planners this country has ever produced. They were responsible for policies which included the New Towns, Green Belts and inner-city renewal. Looking back on this now, with over 50 years of reflection to draw on, it is clear that not all of these policies were unqualified successes.  Inner-city renewal often took the form of demolishing housing considered unsalvageable because  of sub-standard quality or because of war damage, and replacing it with concrete high-rises. Not all this housing is as bad as is now often supposed. Some of it was actually quite good. The high-rises, from the gleaming white concrete of early modernism to the grey concrete of the Brutalist era, were a mixed blessing, ranging in quality from good to awful. Some have called for them to be demolished and sometimes this approach has been adopted. However, it is noticeable that no one has called for the New Towns to be demolished and examples of this genre, such as  Harlow and Bracknell, are still viewed as attractive places to live. No one as far as I can see, wants to see the Green Belts built on. Hence we can still look back on the Macmillan era as a time when planning was approached responsibly and from which we can still draw relevant lessons today.

A responsible approach to urban design needs to be aware of the two scales at which towns and cities are experienced. I have already discussed the first scale, that of the neighbourhood. The next scale is that of the overall city i.e. a polycentric cluster of neighbourhoods. Urban life can, of course, be exciting, with all the facilities we associate with city life. Its drawback can be that it is actually too stimulating. People feel permanently exhausted, trapped as they are in built-up environment, cut off from nature. This can be mediated by building city neighbourhoods with a high proportion of the dwellings composed of houses with gardens. Another form of mediation is to deliberately limit a city’s size. This can be done by creating satellite towns. This was the idea behind the New Towns of  Macmillan’s time and indeed the Eco Towns policy, proposed in the last days of the Labour Government.

Many have voiced fears of a planning free-for-all and indeed it seems that under the draft National Planning Policy Framework, local authorities who do not have a core strategy in place by April 1^st 2012 will be able to exercise no control over development in their area. It often seems that all planning policy in this country is directed by developers, nimbys, the heritage lobby and organisations such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England. All these groups sometimes pursue irreconcilable goals; this state of affairs will only get worse if there is not a proper planning policy to reconcile the wishes of all the various groups. Rarely is there a planning policy aimed at meeting the needs of all the British People. Many fear that the  effect of the NPPF, if it goes through, will produce very poor quality development which will not meet their housing needs or other building needs.

London's Docklands continued.........

For another example of poor urban design in Docklands/ East London I would take this site from the south side of the Thames, on the Greenwich Peninsula. By the Blackwall Approach Road a large commercial  development has been designed and built in the form of a series of large retail sheds.

The public space in front of it is dismal, simply a large car park.

The space behind is worse, simply an access road. The retail buildings do not have any active frontage on this side. There is no public realm here, simply a pavement which is not enlivened by views into the shops or indeed any access to the shops.

But this is the side which faces onto the Millennium  Village, itself only the first of a whole series of housing developments planned for Greenwich Peninsula. Effectively, these shops, which include a well known Sainsburys designed by Chetwood Associates, are surely destined to be Greenwich Peninsula High Street. But there is no quality of public space linking these sites; the retail developments are orientated the wrong way. In urbanistic terms,  the result is a disjointed mess. 

Here is the view looking from the Millennium  Village back towards the retail development.

A photo from Google should help orientate the reader. The Millennium Village is top-left and the retail development bottom-right.

Why do planning disasters like this happen? It is my belief that poor quality urban design like this happens because of a failure to understand how cities grow. Surely Greenwich Peninsula should have been identified as an important brown-field site. The Jubilee Line was proposed in the early 1990’s with a tube station on the tip of Greenwich Peninsula. Doubtlessly it must have been obvious that this large brown-field site would now be re-developed? I am sure some sort of strategy was drawn up for Greenwich Peninsula.

 

New development should be  designed with a long-term strategy. The strategy must culminate in buildings accumulating to form a sense of fabric, defining quality public spaces. Perhaps it necessary to from a hierarchy of external spaces; high-quality spaces for pedestrian and secondary spaces for cars and deliveries.

Here I show  a sketch proposal indicating a better approach that could have been taken to the design of these retail units. Some sort of double-façade approach should have been taken, with active frontage both to the car park and also the space facing towards the Millennium Village. The more people-orientated space is actually the more important space.

Strategies are, of course, filled in very slowly. A density diagram alone  is inadequate as a strategy. The failure of the shopping centre to relate to the Millennium Village is a clear example of this. The sort of diagrams that need to be produced must indicate qualities such as active frontage and the relationship of built fabric to public space. Once such a diagram has been drawn up then each building can be filled in. It may be a slow process but ensures that messes like this don’t happen, inevitable when you pursue a planning free-for-all.

( Thanks to Google for aerial photo)

London’s Docklands: the biggest planning disaster in Europe?

London’s Docklands is possibly the biggest planning disaster in Europe. Take the following example: Consider the following series of photos, illustrating the experience of walking from Poplar into Canary Wharf. The sequence of spaces begins here, on Poplar High Street.

Attempting to walk into Canary Wharf, you use a pedestrian bridge, beginning your ascent here.

You use a pedestrian bridge to cross what is basically an arterial road.

This is what greets you on the other side;  not Canary Wharf but a wasteland.

A knowledgeable pedestrian may realise that there are high quality public spaces on the far side of these building but there is no implied route to get there. If you are prepared to wander through the wasteland, you may eventually find your way into Canary Wharf.

Why are these two public realms so disjointed? Part of the answer lies with  the very  busy road separating them, the A1261. Dealing with heavily used transport infrastructure is a problem which occurs again and again in urban design. However, I feel that there is a deliberate strategy here to separate the two areas, keeping the rich and the poor apart. New developments like Canary Wharf, it was argued, were part a regeneration strategy for East London, replacing the defunct docks. Actually it offers little for the indigenous inhabitants of East London. All  urban designers  view the creation of a street as the creation of a place. Is it possible to give the A1261 a sense of place?

Perhaps it would be illuminating to compare this new part of Docklands/East London  with another part of London. On Silvertown Way, near Canning Town Station, several new apartment buildings have been constructed. The building illustrated here, just visible at far right, is probably  not a master-piece of modern architecture. But between this building and Canning Town Station there are a series of fine-grained, walkable public spaces.

 Perhaps the successful urbanistic quality of these this building, as opposed to the previous example,  the spaces between Poplar and Canary Wharf, can be summed up in the following diagram.

Here we have ultimately the reason why so much of London’s Docklands is a failure. There is no attempt to integrate new development i.e. what is usually conceived of as part of Docklands with East London. In fact, I cannot  help feeling there is a deliberate strategy to keep them apart. East London contains some of London’s poorest boroughs. The new docklands developments were intended for the well-off. The strategy seems to be islands of prosperity separated by wastelands from the deprived parts of East London. A pedestrian-hostile city where quality  of life is only available for those who can afford it.

 How can buildings accumulate to form a sense of urban fabric, defining public space instead of the disjointed mess we see here?  The building in Canning Town gives us a small clue. How do you make a place of a street which contains a high volume of fast traffic such as the A1261? There are many strategies which could be adopted. I suggest two examples.

                  The parkway    

        

                 The green bridge