Alice Coleman

Alice Mary Coleman (8 June 1923 – 2 May 2023) was a British geographer. A professor at

Background

Coleman was born in London and grew up in

Coleman lived in Dulwich, London. She died on 2 May 2023, at the age of 99.^[1]

Academic career

After working as a secondary school teacher, Coleman became a lecturer at the geography department of King's College London, eventually becoming professor in 1987 after other posts in Canada and Japan. She retired from full-time teaching in the 1990s.^[1]

Land Use Survey

In the 1960s Coleman took on the role of director of the Second Land Use Survey of Britain. This was the first comprehensive attempt to map the use of land since

Coleman's findings on the Land Use Survey led to an attack on the effectiveness of the planning system within the UK, which she considered responsible for much degraded land in the rural/urban fringe.[1]

Urban design

As head of the Land Use Research Unit at King's in the 1980s, Coleman built on the work of architect Oscar Newman on the concept of defensible space. The unit studied indications of 'social malaise' (litter, vandalism, graffiti etc.) on post-war social housing developments in the inner London boroughs of Southwark and Tower Hamlets (visiting all 4,050 multi-storey blocks in these boroughs^[3]), and the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford.^[4] These measures were correlated with various design features such as number of storeys, number of flats in a block etc.

The findings published as Utopia on trial (Coleman 1985) were controversial, with Newman suggesting that insufficient attention was paid to social factors interacting with the physical.

With William Balchin Coleman coined the term graphicacy as a characterisation of cartographic and other visuo-spatial abilities, extending across the whole field of graphical communications: ‘the intellectual skill necessary for the communication of relationships which cannot be successfully communicated by words or mathematical notation alone’.^[7]

Graphology

Coleman's interest in graphology included editing and contributing to Graphology magazine and writing a graphological thesaurus.^{[citation needed]}

Literacy

In 2007, Coleman co-authored The Great Reading Disaster with Mona McNee.

• Coleman, A. (1961). "The second land-use survey: Progress and prospect". Geographical Journal. 127 (2): 68–186.
  JSTOR 1792894
  .
• Coleman, A & Maggs, K.R.A (1965), Land Use Survey Handbook, fourth (Scottish) Edition, Isle of Thanet Geographical Association
• Coleman, A.M & Lukehurst, C.T. (1967), British landscapes through maps, 10: East Kent: a description of the Ordnance Survey Seventh Edition One-Inch sheet 173. Geographical Association,
  ISBN 0-900395-22-2
  (paperback ed)
• Coleman, A.M & Lukehurst, C.T. (1974), Field Studies for Schools, Rivingtons,
  ISBN 0-280-22910-0
  .
• Coleman, A. (1976). "Is Planning really necessary?". Geographical Journal. 142 (3): 411–430.
  JSTOR 1795294
  .
• Coleman, A.M & Shaw, J.E. (1980), Field Mapping Manual, London: King's College, ISBN
• Coleman, A.M. (1985), Utopia on trial: Vision and reality in planned housing. London: Hilary Shipman
• Coleman, A, The Social consequences of Housing Design, ch. 7 of Robson, B (Ed), Managing the city: The Aims and Impacts of Urban Policy, Rowman & Littlefield,
  ISBN 0-389-20731-4
• Coleman, A., Coleman, D., Beresford, P. Melville-Ross, T. et al. (1988), Altered estates. London: Adam Smith Institute, 1988.
• Coleman, A. (1992a), 'The Dice Project', in 'High rise housing', special issue of Housing and Town Planning Review, London: National Housing and Town Planning Council
• Coleman, A., England, E., Latymer, Y. and Shaw, J.E. (1992), Scapes and Fringes 1:400,000 Environmental Territories of England and Wales, London: Second Land Utilisation Survey (2 maps and booklet)
• Coleman, Alice & McKnee, Mona (2007), The Great Reading Disaster: Reclaiming Our Educational Birthright, Exeter and Charlottesville VA: Imprint Academic,
  ISBN 978-1-84540-097-2

The Royal Geographical Society presented Coleman with the Gill Memorial Award (1963) and Busk Award (1987).

References