Urban and Regional Planning This is the fourth edition of the classic text for students of urban and regional planning. It gives a historical overview of the developments and changes in the theory and prac- tice of planning in the United Kingdom, throughout the entire twentieth century. This revised edition follows the successful format of previous editions: ● It introduces the establishment of planning as part of the public health reforms of the late nineteenth century and goes on to look at the insights of the great figures who influenced the early planning movement, leading up to the creation of the postwar planning machine. ● National and regional planning, and planning for cities and city regions, in the UK from 1945 to 2000, is then considered. Specific reference is made to the most impor- tant British developments in recent times, including the Single Regeneration Budget, English Partnerships, the devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the establishment of the Mayor of London and the dominant urban sustainability paradigm. ● ‘Planning in Western Europe since 1945’ now incorporates new material on EU- wide issues, as well as updated country-specific sections. ● ‘Planning in the United States since 1945’ now discusses the continuing trends of urban dispersal and social polarization, as well as initiatives in land-use planning and transportation policies. ● Finally, the book looks at the nature of the planning process at the end of the twen- tieth century, reflecting briefly on shifts in planning paradigms since the 1960s and going on to discuss the main issues of the 1990s, including sustainability and social exclusion and looking forward to the twenty-first century. Sir Peter Hall is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London and Director of the Institute of Community Studies. He is the author of over thirty books on urban development and planning and was a member of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Urban Task Force. Urban and Regional Planning Fourth edition Peter Hall TL E D U G O E R • • T a p y u lo ro r G & Francis London and New York First edition published in 1975 by David and Charles (Holdings) Ltd Second edition published in 1985 by Unwin Hyman Third edition published in 1992 by Routledge Reprinted 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000 (twice) Fourth edition published in 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1975, 1985, 1992, 2002 Peter Hall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hall, Peter Geoffrey. Urban and regional planning / Peter Hall.–4th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. City planning. 2. Regional planning. 3. City planning–Great Britain. 4. Regional planning–Great Britain. I. Title. HT166 G7 H34 2002 307.1’2–dc21 2002069951 ISBN 0-203-99532-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–415–21776–8 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–21777–6 (pbk) Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Chapter 1 Planning, planners and plans 1 Chapter 2 The origins: urban growth from 1800 to 1940 11 Chapter 3 The seers: pioneer thinkers in urban planning, from 1880 to 1945 27 Chapter 4 Creation of the postwar British planning machine, from 1940 to 1952 55 Chapter 5 National/regional planning from 1945 to 2000 79 Chapter 6 Planning for cities and city regions from 1945 to 2000 99 Chapter 7 Planning in Western Europe since 1945 145 Chapter 8 Planning in the United States since 1945 189 Chapter 9 The planning process 211 Index 231 Preface It is important to stress what this book is and what it is not. It is not a textbook of plan- ning; there are excellent examples of those now available, including especially Barry Cullingworth’s classic Town and Country Planning in Britain (13th edition, with Vincent Nadin; Routledge, 2001). Rather, it is an introduction to planning, written both for the beginning student and for the general reader. I hope that it will be found useful by students of applied geography and of town and country planning; by university and college students concerned to fit modern planning into its historical context; and by a wider audience which may want to know how planning has evolved. Two points must be made about the treatment. First, it is deliberately historical; it traces the evolution of urban and regional problems, and of planning philosophies, tech- niques and legislation, from the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Second, it is necessarily written from a British standpoint for a British readership (though I hope that readers from other Commonwealth countries will find it relevant). Throughout most of the book the exclusive emphasis is on the British experience, though the survey of early planning thought in Chapter 2 is international, and Chapters 7 and 8 deliberately range out to compare the experience of other advanced industrial countries. Even in those chapters the comparison deliberately excludes the developing world; doubtless, another useful book is to be written there, but there is no space in this book to do the subject justice. The book is a by-product of thirty years of lectures on introductory applied geogra- phy and planning at the London School of Economics, the University of Reading, the University of California at Berkeley, and latterly at University College London. I am grateful to successive waves of students who endured these courses and who unfailingly, by their reactions, indicated the places where material was boring or unintelligible. More particularly, I remain indebted to two academic colleagues and friends, both sadly now deceased: to Brian McLoughlin for his characteristically generous and thoughtful comments on a first draft; and to Marion Clawson for bringing his immense experience to bear on the account in Chapter 8. I must add the usual disclaimer: that I am solely responsible for errors and omissions. To two devoted helpers – my secretaries, Monika Wheeler and Rosa Husain, who typed two successive versions of the manuscript meticulously despite unnaturally heavy departmental burdens, and my cartographer, Kathleen King – I offer my best thanks. (I must also reflect, in this fourth edition, that the personal computer is relieving them and their successors from further such burdens.) Lastly, I rededicate this book to my wife Magda for her imperturbable patience in the face of gross provocation. I hope that she will find the result some small recompense for many delayed dinners and obsessed weekends. Acknowledgements The author and publishers would like to thank the following for granting permission to reproduce the following illustrations as listed: California Department of Transportation, Senior photographer Lynn G. Harrison, Plate 8.3; CORUS, Plate 5.1; The Cultural Section of the Embassy of Sweden, Plate 7.3; DATAR, Figures 7.2, 7.3; European Communities, 1995–2002, from the Eurostat website, Figure 7.1d, 7.14; Faber & Faber Ltd, Plate 3.4; Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), Bonn, Figure 7.8; Ford Motor Company, Plate 5.2; The Head of Engineering Services, Manchester City Council, Figure 3.4; The Head of Planning Policy, Stevenage Borough Council, Figure 4.2, Plate 4.3; HMSO, Figures 6.6, 6.16; IAURIF, Figure 7.7b; KLM Aerocarto – Arnhem, Holland, Plate 7.4; The Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and Environment, The Netherlands, Figure 7.13b; Regional Plan Association, Plates 8.1, 8.2, Figure 8.2; Simmons Aerofilms Ltd, Plates 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.5; John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Figure 6.15. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. 1 Planning, planners and plans Planning, the subject matter of this book, is an extremely ambiguous and difficult word to define. Planners of all kinds think that they know what it means; it refers to the work they do. The difficulty is that they do all sorts of different things, and so they mean different things by the word; planning seems to be all things to all people. We need to start by defining what exactly we are discussing. The reference in the dictionary gives one clue to the confusion. Whether you go to the Oxford English Dictionary or the American Webster’s, there you find that the noun ‘plan’ and the verb ‘to plan’ have several distinct meanings. In particular, the noun can either mean ‘a physical representation of something’ – as for instance a drawing or a map; or it can mean ‘a method for doing something’; or ‘an orderly arrangement of parts of an objective’. The first meaning, in particular, is quite different from the others: when we talk about a street ‘plan’ of London or New York, we mean something quite different from when we talk about our ‘plan’ to visit London or New York next year.