Colin Buchanan (town planner)
Sir Colin Douglas Buchanan CBE (22 August 1907 – 6 December 2001) was a Scottish town planner. He became Britain's most famous transport planner following the publication of Traffic in Towns in 1963, which presented a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding the growth of personal car ownership and urban traffic in the UK.
Life
Buchanan was born in 1907 in
After serving in the
In 1960 the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, appointed Buchanan to head a working group in the Ministry of Transport. In 1963 the group produced the influential Buchanan Report, which proposed how British towns could be redesigned to accommodate growing motor car use,[3] as car numbers in the UK were expected to quadruple over the coming decades. It gave planners a set of policy blueprints to deal with its effects on the urban environment, including traffic containment and segregation, which could be balanced against urban redevelopment, new corridor and distribution roads and precincts.[4][1] These policies shaped the development of the urban landscape in the UK and some other countries for two or three decades. In 1964 Penguin Books published Traffic in Towns, which was a concise version of the 1963 Buchanan Report.
Buchanan retired from the Ministry in 1963, and held the new Chair of Transport at Imperial College London,[1] and formed a successful consultancy, Colin Buchanan and Partners, that developed into a limited company employing around 300 staff and was subsequently chaired by his son, Malcolm Buchanan. From 2011 it became SKM Colin Buchanan.[5]
Between 1973 and 1975 Colin Buchanan was head of the newly established School of Advanced Urban Studies at
In 1968-70 he was a member of the Commission for the Third London Airport (the "Roskill Commission") with a brief "to enquire into the timing of the need for a four-runway airport to cater for the growth of traffic at existing airports serving the London area, to consider the various alternative sites, and to recommend which site should be selected."[6][7]
The commission's 1971 report recommended that a site at
An
Between 1980 and 1985 Buchanan was the President of the
Buchanan died at his home in Oxford on 6 December 2001[1] of bronchopneumonia.[9]
Publications
- Mixed Blessing: The Motor in Britain. London: Leonard Hill. 1958. ISBN 0-249-38901-0.
- Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas - Reports of the Steering Group and Working Group appointed by the Minister of Transport. London: HMSO. 1963.
- Traffic in Towns The specially shortened edition of the 1963 Buchanan Report. Vol. S228. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1964.
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Professor Sir Colin Buchanan". Sinclair Knight Merz. Archived from the original on 25 April 2012. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
- ^ ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
- ^ Bulmer, Charles, ed. (21 August 1971). "Motoweek". Motor: 51.
- ^ Traffic in Towns
- ^ SKM Colin Buchanan
- ^ Roskill (1971). Report, Commission on the Third London Airport. London: HMSO.
- ^ "Aviation: proposals for an airport in the Thames estuary, 1945–2012" (PDF). House of Commons 2012.
- ^ "Maplin Development Act 1973". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).
- ^ a b Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press. 2007. p. not cited.
References
- "Obituary of Professor Sir Colin Buchanan". The Daily Telegraph. 10 December 2001.
- "Professor Sir Colin Buchanan; Obituary". The Times. 10 December 2001.
External links
- SKM Colin Buchanan — formerly Colin Buchanan and Partners, now part of Sinclair Knight Merz
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