Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 7

A good number of friends and colleagues have been implicated in yet another of my book-writing enterprises and this preface can only touch on some of them.

I must say at the outset that I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir of Polity Press. I thank Karina for keeping me on the straight and narrow and Jonathan for the invitation to write this book and for his insightful comments and persistence with my attempts to put together a cohesive framework for it. I thank Fiona Sewell for her cleaning up of my manuscript text. I am greatly indebted to readers of the original book proposal and reviewers of the first draft manuscript for their constructive comments. I have not been able to respond to all their suggestions, but I hope they see something of themselves in this book. Mark Tewdwr-Jones was a source of both enthusiasm and ideas at the early stages of writing and several of the chapters bear the marks of his thoughts. I thank Miles Irving for preparing the figures contained in the book.

Many of the ideas in this book were developed while I taught the subject of International Planning (which then became the two subjects, Critical Debates in International Planning and Comparative Planning Systems and Cultures) over the course of eleven years at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. These subjects formed a core part of the MSc in International Planning offered there and I am grateful to Claire Colomb, Nick Gallent, Nikos Karadamitriou, Claudio De Magalhaes and Susan Moore among others for their comradeship, and to the postgraduate students who passed through the programme for their participation and enthusiasm.

The book also contains more than a hint of Australia and Australian urban conditions in it. Some of the ideas were tested out on first-year Bachelor of Design students at the University of Melbourne without any apparent side effects. I thank senior tutor Dejan Malenic for his sterling efforts in helping with the day-to-day running of the subject. I am also grateful to academic colleagues at the University of Melbourne: Michele Acuto, Judy Bush, Stephanie Butcher, Patrick Cobbinah, Brendan Gleeson, Anna Hurlimann, Crystal Legacy, Alan March, David Nichols and John Stone among others for their unsuspectingly steering me in the direction of several new sources of planning inspiration. Elsewhere in Australia, Robert Freestone at the University of New South Wales and Paul Maginn at the University of Western Australia have been valuable sounding boards for my evolving urban planning research ideas. Jago Dodson at RMIT has helped join up a few of many Australian dots for me.

Further afield, Roger Keil at York University, Canada, and Fulong Wu at University College London continue to be sources of sound advice, and Dave Valler at Oxford Brookes University a great friend, co-researcher and co-author on urban planning matters. As visiting scholars to the University of Melbourne, Martin Arias (Universidad Catolica del Norte), Ben Clifford (University College London) and Andy Wood (University of Kentucky, Lexington) helped more than they will have realized.

The most important person helped just by being twice her amazing self.

Nicholas A. Phelps

Melbourne

Australia