Peter Hall

Born in London in 1932 and dead in 2014, Hall was professor of planning at University College London and at Berkeley, president of the Town and Country Planning Association and an adviser to Conservative and Labour governments. The World Cities (1966) anticipated global city theory by a quarter of a century, and in the 1970s he proposed the urban free zones that Margaret Thatcher turned into enterprise zones, an idea he later distanced himself from.

Cities of Tomorrow (1988) is the history of twentieth-century urban planning every student reads: from Howard and the garden cities to Le Corbusier, from housing estates to the city of the automobile, told with an irony that spares no prophet. Cities in Civilization (1998), more than a thousand pages long, asked why creativity flourishes in certain cities at certain moments, from Athens to Los Angeles.

He was also a project planner: he advised the Thames Gateway, championed British high-speed rail and wrote with Colin Ward Sociable Cities (1998), which revisited Howard a hundred years on. Good Cities, Better Lives (2014), his last book, toured the European cities that get things right. He received the Royal Town Planning Institute's gold medal and a knighthood; few figures have joined the academy and the practice of planning so closely.