ancient cities

340 Hall, Peter
groups in the planning process facilitates the
acceptance of halfway houses.
Greta Goldberg
See also Homelessness; Housing Policy; Neighborhood
Revitalization
Further Readings
Keller, O. J. and B. S. Alper. 1970. Halfway Houses:
Community-centered Correction and Treatment.
Lexington, MA: Heath Lexington Books.
Rausch, H. L. with C. L. Rausch. 1968. The Halfway
House Movement: A Search for Sanity. New York:
Appleton Century Crofts.
Ha l l, Pe t e r
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 collaboratively
on London’s economic competitiveness
and on the development of polycentric
mega-city regions in northwest Europe (The
Polycentric Metropolis, 2006).
Since the 1960s, Hall has been an influential policy
adviser to U.K. governments. He has often been
credited with being the father of the concept of enterprise
zones—designated areas in which planning and
tax constraints are relaxed to encourage inward
investment—introduced in 1980 in the United
Kingdom by the Margaret Thatcher government.