Sir Peter Hall: A Humane, Urban Polymath

摘要

This paper documents, through the eyes of one of his former students, how Sir Peter Hall bu,ilt up an influential department of human geography at Reading University during the 1970s in less than ideal conditions. It then highlights some of his planning ideas along with a few of the author's more esoteric areas of enquiry that he always supported - computerized time trajectories, limitations to social science, personal rapid transit, plan prediction, face charts and Internet-based telepathy. It is argued that even if all of these ideas simply fade away, they will have still served their purpose because an ongoing genesis of diverse new insights is crucial for the continued dynamism and viability of the built environment professions. So, although Peter's legacy is mainly his colossal research output and his tolerant, methodological pluralism, it also includes those ideas that he planted within subsequent generations of researchers by being unusually open minded.