The University is saddened to learn of the death of Emeritus Professor Gerald Dix, former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University and Lever Professor of Civic Design, who died at the age of 94 on 31st May 2020.
The following obituary has been prepared by Emeritus Professor Peter Batey, Lever Professor of Town and Regional Planning 1989-2015:
Born in Salford in 1926, Gerald Dix received his architectural and planning education at Manchester University, before studying for a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship. His first important professional post (1954-1956) was as chief architect planner in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There he acted as chief assistant to Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Britain’s leading planner at the time, in the preparation of a master plan for the city region. Given that Abercrombie was reaching the end of his illustrious career, and therefore less able to be fully involved, this placed a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of the young and relatively inexperienced Dix. However, by all accounts, he did himself great credit. Largely left to his own devices in Addis Ababa, Gerald Dix rapidly acquired a taste for the difficult challenges of the developing world, a strong motivation that would remain with him throughout his professional career. Though they worked together only briefly, Dix and Abercrombie developed a mutual respect which ultimately led Dix to write about Abercrombie’s life and work, although sadly never the biography that many fellow planners were expecting.
From then on, Gerald Dix worked extensively in the developing world. This included posts in Singapore (1957-59), in Ghana (1959-63) as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi and as a planner with the United Nations Physical Planning Mission to that country. From 1963-65 Gerald Dix was working in the UK Building Research Station as Planning Advisor to the Ministry of Overseas Development, advising governments in the West Indies and a number of African countries.
In the mid-1960s, Gerald Dix joined the University of Nottingham and played a leading role in setting up the Institute of Planning Studies there. Promoted to a new chair in planning in 1970, his major contribution was in developing a postgraduate course in environmental planning which gave students drawn from a range of first degree backgrounds an opportunity to specialise in a particular aspect of planning. Gerald Dix had strong views about planning education and his Nottingham course went against the trend at the time to train generalist planners at the undergraduate level. Gerald Dix, however, stuck to his guns and his postgraduate course was a great success. His championing of postgraduate planning education made him an obvious choice for the Lever Chair at Liverpool which some years earlier had introduced the pioneering Master of Civic Design (MCD), along similar lines to Gerald Dix’s Nottingham master’s degree.
Gerald Dix was appointed as the sixth Lever Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool in 1975. The Lever Chair had been endowed by the first Lord Leverhulme in 1912 and is the oldest chair in planning in the world, as well as being one of the most prestigious. He followed an array of prominent architect planners, among them Lord Holford, Gordon Stephenson and the aforementioned Sir Patrick Abercrombie. In their different ways, all played an important role in advancing what was still a new field of professional practice. With his extensive experience in the developing world, Gerald Dix was certainly no exception. Interestingly, two years earlier, Gerald Dix’s former Nottingham colleague John Tarn had been appointed to the Roscoe Chair in Architecture at Liverpool. They shared a strong interest in architectural conservation and collaborated on several projects during their time at Liverpool.
Like his predecessors in the Chair, Gerald Dix had a close association with the Town Planning Review, the international journal edited at Liverpool and published by the Liverpool University Press. He published a number of articles in the Review and, most notably, worked with John Tarn on a special issue on Design and Conservation in the City which marked the Review’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1985.
However, as far as journals are concerned, Gerald Dix’s biggest achievement was in founding the Third World Planning Review, in 1978. This was to be a sister journal to the Town Planning Review. Dix served as editor throughout the next twelve years, raising the profile of Third World planning and gave the subject academic respectability. He assembled a strong editorial team, drawing on his extensive international network of contacts. The solid foundations he laid for the journal have paid off handsomely and, what is now known as the International Development Planning Review, continues to go from strength to strength under different editors.
Gerald Dix’s international interests led him to develop a deep interest in ekistics, the so-called science of human settlements that draws on the research and experience of professionals in a number of fields including architecture, engineering, urban planning and sociology. Founded by Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis in the early 1960s, the World Society of Ekistics published a journal, Ekistics, and held an annual event – the Delos Symposion (sic) – on board a ship in the Aegean Sea, in which the focus was on design for developing countries and the need to share international experience. Attendance was by invitation only and included an impressive cast list of architects, planners, academicians and government officials, culminating in the Delos Declaration, a series of recommendations the emerged from the Symposion. Gerald Dix was actively involved in the Symposion, served as President of the World Society of Ekistics and, when Doxiadis died suddenly in 1975, took on the task of editing the manuscript of his last book, Ecology and Ekistics, a bold statement of the evolving relationship between these two fields of study and practice.
Gerald Dix served as a Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1984 to 1987, bringing to that role his vast experience of managing change in complex organisations. As a member of the University’s Senior Management Team and drawing on his many personal contacts, he performed the role of an overseas ambassador. More than thirty years on, the University continues to benefit from his diplomatic efforts in developing closer links with several parts of the world, particularly China and the wider Far East. Within the University itself, Gerald Dix brought a breadth of vision to his role, able to think strategically while at the same time having a good command of detail. He was never one to tolerate sloppy practices and would make sure that those involved quickly mended their ways.
Throughout his time at Liverpool, Gerald Dix continued his involvement in planning for developing countries. From 1980 onwards he spent a number of years as joint director of a team preparing a master plan for the city of Alexandria on behalf of the Egyptian government. This connection with Alexandria had other benefits including a PhD programme at Liverpool that provided research training for several young Egyptian planning academics. Later, after retirement in 1988, he was heavily involved in the conservation of China’s ancient capital city of Chengdu, in the capacity of Honorary Council Member of the Association for the Protection of the Mountain Summer Resort and the Eight Outer Temples.
Gerald Dix’s time at Liverpool coincided with a period of transition in the planning profession. His own professional training was in physical planning and emphasised the role of design and had a close affinity with architecture. By the mid-1970s, planning had changed. There was now a much stronger connection with the social sciences, particularly geography, economics and sociology and planning itself was now developing its own identity as an applied social science. Gerald Dix’s conviction that planning education should be exclusively a postgraduate activity was harder to sustain as planning schools, including Liverpool, moved to offer both undergraduate and postgraduate professionally accredited degree courses. Notwithstanding these changes, Gerald Dix proved to be a highly effective Head of the Department of Civic Design who enabled the careers of his colleagues to flourish. As one former university colleague put it, Civic Design was a ‘civilised’ department that promoted a positive and supportive ethos, much appreciated by staff, students and the wider planning profession. We have Gerald Dix to thank for that.