CASA is all about getting the best and providing opportunities
to excel in our chosen area. I hope it acts a conduit to
an intellectually rich life for all who research there and
our aim is to place our PhDs in places where they too can
carry on this quest.
I was born and brought up in Liverpool and in 1950s socialist
Britain, had the opportunity of going to a great grammar
school, the so-called 'Eton of the Labour Party'. This was
then a living embodiment of taking kids from lowly backgrounds
and propelling them onwards to realise their potential.
Here is a picture of me in May 1957 from our school photograph,
but if you click on the image, then this will take you to
the bigger picture. Lots of famous people are there in their
school-boy days. Look at the seventh boy from the left, three rows down .......
I was good at art and drawing at school and was advised
- told actually - to study architecture and town planning
which seemed to combine enough intellectual clout like physics
with the ability to wield a pencil. Hence at the early age
of 17, I went to the University
of Manchester in 1962 and there I joined the long
term mission to make planning rational and the study of
cities scientific.
It has taken more than 50 years for us to even begin to
approach this goal but I am more confident than ever that
what is happening now in economics and physics will eventually
lead to what Hari Seldon in Isaac
Asimov's Foundation trilogy called the 'science
of psychohistory', what Herbert
Simon called 'The Sciences of the Artificial', and
what Jane
Jacobs refers to as the organised complexity of
cities. It will take another 50 years, for sure, to make
significant progress but much of what we do in CASA is supportive
of this wider quest.
I spent seven years in Manchester - golden years - the 1960s.
It was George Chadwick and Brian McLoughlin, my Manchester
mentors, who were pioneering systems approaches to planning
that convinced me that the social science in general, cities
and planning in particular, were domains that required systematic
thinking. This led me to large scale urban models which
saw me move to the University
of Reading in 1969 to join the Urban Systems Research
Unit where Peter Hall had just been appointed to the Chair
of Geography. Ten Years in Reading ending as a Reader with
a one year sojourn in civil engineering in southern Ontario
at Waterloo
led me to Cardiff - to UWIST
- where I cut my teeth as a Professor and had all kinds
of mindless administrative tasks like HOD and Dean. 'Enough'
I said and off to America I went where I was Director of
the NCGIA
for 5 years in SUNY-Buffalo.
And then back in 1995 to UCL
to start CASA with all the trials and tribulations of starting
a new unit in a place where nothing has changed for a 100
years. I'm still here. It's a good place as long as you
like anarchy. As they say, the rest is history.
I have various 'Gongs' for what I consider to be not only
mine but others' work. I was elected a Fellow of the British
Academy in 2001 and was awarded a CBE for 'services to geography'
in 2004. In 2009, I was elected, much to my surprise, a Fellow of the Royal Society.
For those who want my CV, here it is.
1-Page
Bio as a PDF
Full CV as a PDF
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