ABSTRACT
In Urban and Regional Planning 1 Peter Hall synthesizes histories of urban development and of planning ideas with a summary of planning programmes designed to address the multiplicity of issues created by changes in urban form and demography. Although the book's focus is primarily on Britain, it also contains chapters treating planning in the United States and the European continent. The presentation is mostly historical and descriptive, but underlying its empiricism is an analytic structure that delineates the contradictory aims and emphases that planning must somehow straddle. As will be discussed at greater length later in this chapter, these include the tensions between economic growth and equity and between short — and long-run optimization, especially in regard to sustainability. Furthermore, there are the questions of the appropriate balance between civil society and the state, city and region, process and outcome. The multiple interests and conflicting goals involved in planning limit the utility of quantitative models and require that planners be reflective practitioners rather than engineers applying a set of routinized techniques to address spatial questions. It goes without saying that Peter Hall is precisely such a reflective practitioner — perhaps unique in contributing so significantly to both scholarship and practice, having left his mark on the academic study of planning as well as the actual development of cities and regions.
