British academic wins €648,000 for urban planning work

A British academic has won a prestigious international prize worth €648,000, it was announced in Rome tonight.

Sir Peter Hall, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London, won a Balzan prize in the category “the social and cultural history of cities since the beginning of the 16th century”.

The International Balzan Foundation, which administers the prizes, honoured Hall for his “unique contribution to the history of ideas about urban planning”.

The foundation was established by the family of Italian journalist Eugenio Balzan, who fled his homeland to Switzerland in the 1930s to oppose Fascist pressure on the media.

The annual prize-winners are decided by about 20 European scientists and academics and the categories rotate each year to highlight new or overlooked fields of study.

Each prize is worth one million Swiss francs (€648,000) and will be handed out in Berne, Switzerland on November 11.

According to the foundation’s rules, half of the award must be allocated by the winner to fund research projects carried out by young scholars or scientists.

Experts in Asian art, minerals and Galapagos finches were among the other prize-winners.

The History of Asian Art award went to Lothar Ledderose, of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Heidelberg, Germany.

The foundation said his “outstanding” work on the history of Chinese and Japanese art had contributed to a new interpretation of art of those countries and its role in the modern world.

The foundation awarded its Population Biology award to Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University, USA, for their long-term studies on the evolution of Galapagos finches.

”They have demonstrated how very rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply are driven by natural selection,” the foundation said, calling their work the most significant study of evolutionary change in the field in the past 30 years.

The team of Russell Hemley and Ho-Kwang Mao won the Mineral Physics award. The pair, from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, won for their work submitting minerals to extreme physical conditions.

Balzan award-winners in past years have included Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Pope John XXIII.