Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall (19 March 1932 – 30 July 2014) was an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He was the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and president of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association. Hall was one of the most prolific and influential urbanists of the twentieth century.
He was known internationally for his studies and writings on the economic, demographic, cultural and management issues that face cities around the globe. Hall was for many years a planning and regeneration adviser to successive UK governments. He was Special Adviser on Strategic Planning to the British government (1991–94) and a member of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's Urban Task Force (1998–1999). Hall is considered by many to be the father of the industrial enterprise zone concept, adopted by countries worldwide to develop industry in disadvantaged areas.
Hall was born in Hampstead, north London, England. In 1940, his family moved to Blackpool, when his father, a clerical officer in the pensions service, was relocated. Hall attended Blackpool Grammar School and then graduated from St Catharine's College, Cambridge, with a master's degree and Doctorate in Geography before starting his academic career in 1957 as lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Hall was married to Carla Wartenberg from 1962 to 1966, and Magdalena Mróz from 1967 until his death. He died in London on 30 July 2014 at the age of 82 and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery. There are many obituaries to his career and impact.
In a 1977 address to the Royal Town Planning Institute, Hall put forth the idea of a "Freeport" within a city, a concept that would come to be known as an Enterprise Zone. Enterprise Zones were to be open to immigration of capital and people, without taxes or bureaucracy, modeled after Hong Kong in the 1950s. In practice, Enterprise Zones became areas where taxes were waived and development highly subsidized.
In his final years, Hall strongly perceived that British planners had fallen behind their European counterparts. His last book Good Cities: Better Lives and last book chapter "The Strange Death of British Planning: And How to Bring About a Miraculous Revival", both published in 2014, stress this point and seek to direct attention to planning examples from mainland Europe. His vision of clusters of existing towns and new garden cities to form new dynamic city regions in the north-west, the Midlands and the south-east of England won his team a commendation in the Wolfson Economics Prize competition in May 2014.
Hall was knighted in 1998 for services to the Town and Country Planning Association. He was awarded the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize in 2001; the Royal Town Planning Institute Gold Medal and the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for distinction in research in 2003; and the Balzan Prize for the Social and Cultural History of Cities since the Beginning of the 16th Century in 2005. He won the last award "for his unique contribution to the history of ideas about urban planning, his acute analysis of the physical, social and economic problems of modern cities and his powerful historical investigations into the cultural creativity of city life." He also won the Regional Studies Prize for Overall Contribution to the Field of Regional Studies in 2008.
Hall also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2002.
On 30 April 2015, Transport for London dedicated a train in recognition of his contribution to London's transport infrastructure. The train, Number 378 204, is a five-carriage London Overground Class 378 train.
Peter Hall (2013) Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1134545742
Peter Hall (2007) London Voices, London Lives: Tales from a Working Capital. Bristol: Policy Press. ISBN 978-1861349835
Nick Buck, Ian Gordon, Peter Hall, Michael Harloe, and Mark Kleinman (2002) Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415279321
Peter Hall, Ulrich Pfeiffer (2000) Urban Future 21: a Global Agenda for Twenty-First Century Cities. London: Routledge. (updated 2013). ISBN 978-0415240758
Peter Hall, Colin Ward (1998) Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0471985051
Peter Hall (1998) Cities in Civilization: Culture, Technology, and Urban Order. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0394587325
Peter Hall, Manuel Castells (1994) Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st-Century Industrial Complexes. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0394587325
Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick (1991) The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195066487
Peter Hall (1989) London 2001 London: Unwin Hyman. ISBN 978-0044451617