Hall, Peter

Sir Peter G. Hall (1932–) is the author and editor of 40 books on the influence of technological and economic change on metropolitan development, the cultural and planning history of cities, and the urban structure and planning systems of the United Kingdom and the United States. He has been professor of planning at the Bartlett School, University College London, since 1992, after being chair in city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley (1980–1992).

In the 1950s, Hall focused on the economic geography of London before broadening his inquiry to the development problems of world metropolitan areas in The World Cities (1966). Hall then focused on planning systems: In The Containment of Urban England (1973), he analyzed the postwar British town and country planning system in terms of urban sprawl, arguing that it led to suburbanization, the growing separation of home and work, and shortages in the supply of building land. Planning and Urban Growth (1975), a follow-up to Containment, compared English and U.S. planning systems.

Throughout the 1970s, Hall became increasingly frustrated with the rejection of the social– scientific comprehensive planning of the 1960s with which he was associated, as well as with the structuralist Marxism that came to dominate urban and regional planning studies. Although Hall recognized the causal link between social evolution, economic development, and technical change; he believed in the creative power of capitalist enterprise to generate growth and well-being, albeit in alternative forms mediated by historical, geographical, and political circumstances.

In 1980, Hall moved to the University of California at Berkeley. His fascination with nearby Silicon Valley led him to focus on the nature of innovation in successful metropolitan regions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Four books resulted: Silicon Landscapes (1985), High-Tech America (1986), Western Sunrise (1987), and The Carrier Wave (1988). Hall then worked with Manuel Castells on a study of the Technopoles of the World (1994), which investigated innovation in planned science parks and cities. In parallel, Hall prepared a major study of urban planning ideas in the twentieth century: Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (1988). In that book, he critiqued the influence of Le Corbusier on planning; in Sociable Cities (1988), he highlighted the value and legacy of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities.

By the early 1990s, Hall had returned to London and published his most important book, synthesizing a decade of research on innovation and planning: Cities in Civilization: Culture, Technology, and Urban Order (1998). This comparative cultural history explores the nature and geography of cultural creativity in the world's great cities, from ancient Athens to late twentieth-century London. Hall analyzes the emergence of urban creative milieus leading to industrial innovation, artistic creativity, and urban planning innovation, and he investigates how cities like London, Paris, and New York have successfully renewed themselves over time. In the last decade, he has worked col-laboratively on London's economic competitiveness and on the development of polycentric mega-city regions in northwest Europe (The Polycentric Metropolis, 2006).

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