Cliff Hague

Cliff is a freelance consultant, researcher, author and trainer. He was the Chair of the Cockburn Association 2016 – 2023.

He is Professor Emeritus of Planning and Spatial Development at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

He is a Past President of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and of the Commonwealth Association of Planners.

He is a past Chair of Built Environment Forum Scotland.

He was awarded the O.B.E. in the 2016 Birthday Honours.

Books

Some articles fromall categories:

Can innovation save town centres?

Town centres are dying. The economic crisis has highlighted the malaise. There are empty shops, as people head to the edge of town supermarket. Internet shopping replaces the trip to the store downtown. Prominent buildings once used for public functions such as town halls, post offices or churches stand empty too, as services have been…

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Covid 19 in rapidly urbanising countries

UN Habitat has published its response to the serious problems posed by the pandemic in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Arabic countries. Over 95% of Covid 19 cases are in urban areas. There are 1 billion people living in informal settlements, and 2.4 billion people lack adequate access to safe water and sanitation.…

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Addressing transport challenges in urban areas

This blog by Cliff Hague was first posted on 28 October 2013 on the Planning Resource website. As ever more trips are made it becomes harder and harder to move around cities, even when money is invested in transport infrastructure. Across the globe, but especially in the rapidly urbanising mega cities of the global south,…

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Urban post-2015 UN sustainable development goal update

Posted September 26, 2014 by cliffhague The ‘urban’ goal remains in the list that the UN general assembly is considering this week. As long as it gets through, then adoption next year should be a formality, unless some country really wants to make an issue about it. As not much information is available about this, and it is an issue…

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Should gentrification be a concern for planning?

Gentrification is an issue in cities across the world, but urban planning systems are ill-equipped to deal with it. This blog was first posted in October 2016. When modern planning systems were first constructed, the word “gentrification “ did not exist. It was coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/news/ruth-glass-seminar). She explained how…

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Denmark’s new Architecture Policy

Posted May 26, 2014 by cliffhague  “Architecture is for people”. This is how the new Danish Architecture Policy begins. The Danish government sees architecture as defining the country at home and internationally. It is about competitiveness, moving towards sustainability and social cohesion. The new policy depicts architecture as contributing to “the development of the welfare state”, and says that local…

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EU and US Congress members plead Israel to stop demolition

The Foreign Ministers of the 28 European Union countries have called on Israel “to halt plans for forced transfer of population and demolition of Palestinian housing and infrastructure” in the village of Susiya in the West Bank. Eleven members of the US Congress have also written to Secretary of State John Kerry about the plight…

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Craft-led small town regeneration

Probably the outstanding example of small town regeneration in Scotland is West Kilbride. It is a coastal town about 45 kilometers from Glasgow. It has a population of just under 5,000 inhabitants. Although it has quite an affluent population, decline had set in by the mid-1990s, when about half of the retail properties on the town’s…

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Warsaw: Place Identities and the European Dream

This blog was first posted on the Planning Resource website on 21 May 2012. Warsaw is sprucing itself up for the European football championships that it will host next month. This is the latest stage in its transition from the planned socialist city to the city of 21st century consumerism. At times, these two faces…

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