Obituary-Peter Hall 1932-2014

摘要

He was and will continue to be one of the intellectual giants of our field. Peter Hall published over fifty books and 2000 articles of various kinds from learned papers to newspaper columns in a life filled with contributions to many different aspects of urban and regional planning. His professional life was clearly premised on a central commitment to generate a deeper understanding of how cities function and how urban planning in particular would make the lives of those who lived in cities richer and happier. As a young man, he burst onto the scene in the early 1960s, writing two wonderful and accessible books about cities: London 2000 (1963) which was a portrayal of how the city he loved would be at the millennium, and The World Cities (1966) which revealed his long-time fascination with the diversity of mankind's largest creative efforts. Although he did not coin the term world cities and it is never clear who did, his book projected the idea that cities had reached a size where their influence was beyond the nation-state, and he was one of the first to articulate how this notion of globalisation was to direct the growth of cities and urbanisation henceforth. In all of this, he was the true heir to Lewis Mumford and when Mumford died in 1990, he had already assumed the role as the most influential commentator on cities and their planning in the late 20th and early 21st century. Indeed this mantle was confirmed by the publication of his book, some would say his magnum opus Cities and Civilization in 1998, a remarkable sequel to Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961) which were earlier milestones in our understanding of how cities are formed and created.