Richard L. Meier

Richard Louis Meier, (1920 - Feb 7, 2007) is an American regional planner, systems theorist, scientist, urban scholar, and futurist, who was Professor in the College of Environmental Design at University of California at Berkeley. He was an early thinker on sustainability in planning, and recognized as a leading figure in city planning and development. He is not related to the New York-based architect Richard Meier, with whom he was often confused. [http://andrea.testname.googlepages.com/obituary%3Arichardl.meier%2C%22super-planner%2C%22 "Obituary: Richard L. Meier, "Super-Planner"] . Compiled by Karen Meier Reeds. 4/8/2007. Retrieved 17 June 2008.]

Biography

Born in 1920 in Kendallville, Indiana, Meier grew up the oldest of five children in a family of modest means. His father was a German-American Lutheran schoolteacher, choirmaster, and organist. His mother became seriously ill shortly after the birth of her youngest child, and much of the running of the household fell to young Meier. Kathleen Maclay (2007) [http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/richardmeier.html IN MEMORIAM Richard Meier 1920-2007] . Office of Public Affairs, University of California.] He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1940, and a master’s and a doctorate in organic chemistry from UCLA. "Richard Louis Meier, 86; expert on sustainable planning". Los Angeles Times April 6, 2007.] Meier earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1944.

During World War II, Meier worked as a Standard Oil research chemist in Richmond, California. Even before taking his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at University of California at Los Angeles in 1944, Meier made his mark as a generalist and futurist, persuading the newly established department to teach leading-edge developments in nuclear chemistry and physics. Meier began talking with Berkeley scientists about the post-war implications of atomic energy and weapons. He founded along with his colleagues, what is now called, the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit organization focused on consolidating scientific knowledge to aid national interests. "Professor Emeritus, an Authority on Sustainability, Dies at 86". By Vincent Quan. The Daily Californian. Monday, April 9, 2007.]

During a Fulbright Fellowship in Manchester, England, in 1949-50, Meier shifted his attention to technological solutions for the problems of the world's biggest and poorest cities. As early as 1951, he convinced a University of Chicago colleague, the New Deal “brain-truster” Rexford Tugwell, of the inevitability of Meier's forecasts. These included a long list of developments, among them the radical improvement of communications using ultra fax and television devices, more effective antibiotics, and “advances toward technological oneness in the world ... followed by tighter organization and by holistic planning devices,” Tugwell said.

Between 1950 and 1956, he taught in the University of Chicago's influential Program of Education and Research in Planning. Between 1957 and 1967, he first was a research social scientist in the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, focusing on systems theory, and then a professor in Michigan’s department of natural resources, School of Conservation. Meier began his career at UC Berkeley in 1967, and helped establish the new doctoral program in the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP). For more than 35 years, he was a faculty member in the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City and Regional Planning in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

In retirement, Meier continued teaching, writing, and generating new ideas, despite increasing disabilities. His final book, Ecological Planning, Management and Design, published online in 2003 (www-dcrp.ced.berkeley.edu/faculty/meier), laid out many of his strategies for creating sustainable communities, particularly for the urban poor in developing countries. It reflected his unquenchable optimism about the future and his belief that good planning and social justice are inseparable.

Work

Richard Meier was an pioneer and expert in the study of on sustainable planning for cities, who wrote about Science and Economic Development. Meier also made huge contributions to the fields of resources and third world development and was one of the leading consultants on world development. “He popularized at least two concepts—one which is the city as an engine for growth,” said his son Alan Meier. “A second is that he was one of the earliest recognizers of the concept of sustainability and wrote about it long before it became popular.”

Federation of American Scientists

During World War II, Meier worked as a chemist in Richmond and founded along with his colleagues what is now called the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit organization focused on consolidating scientific knowledge to aid national interests. “The really interesting thing about Dick was that he was very politically active,” said Deborah Poskanzer, Meier’s daughter-in-law. “He was very concerned with weapons control in the early areas right after World War II and about the arms race.”

As the federation's executive secretary from 1947 to 1949, Meier helped explain to the public why American atomic research should be kept out of military control and why international nuclear proliferation should be contained. He took part in a 1947 Princeton, New Jersey, conference of scientists, social scientists, and diplomats, chaired by Albert Einstein, that sought support for the Marshall Plan and other responses to the development of weapons of mass destruction. The meeting turned into an impassioned appeal to Edward Teller, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” not to work on that weapon, according to Meier's family.

Science and Economic Development

Meier's first book "Science and Economic Development: New Patterns of Living" from 1956 predicted many technological advances. New forms of low-energy transportation, new technologies to replace scarce natural resources, the increased use of solar power and the growth of resource-conserving cities.

A review by U.K. economist Alec Cairncross in 1958 described Meier as “a super-planner who has been working on a blueprint for the world of 2000 A.D. and is ready to give marching orders not only to those who control new investment, but also to scientists in their laboratories and pilot plants.”

Communications Theory of Urban Growth

Meier regarded his third book, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (1962), as his most important and original contribution. Professor Jennifer Light of Northwestern University says that although the book was largely ignored on its publication, it is now essential reading for graduate students in communications. His third book ‘A Communications Theory of Urban Growth’ was not widely recognized at the beginning when it was first published,” said son Alan Meier. “Since then it has been translated into many languages. It is remarkable that a book that is forty years old that was speaking about new technologies and new communications would now be considered fresh.”

Trans-disciplinary lens

Meier's teaching at Michigan and Berkeley, his continuing conversations with Buckminister Fuller, Margaret Mead, Constantinos Doxiadis, and other members of the interdisciplinary Delos Symposia, and his international consulting projects with regional planners took him to more than thirty countries and fifty major cities and generated a flood of papers, technical reports, and three more books: "Developmental Planning" (1965), "Planning for an Urban World: Design of Resource-Conserving Cities" (1974), and "Urban Futures Observed: In the Asian Third World "(1980). Always alert for new forms of information technology, he would have been pleased to know that the full texts of several of his books will soon be available through Google Books.

Meier had come to Berkeley “determined to apply systems analysis tools for taking on some of the more intractable urban problems,” says department chair Robert Cervero. Calling Meier “a true renaissance man” who viewed cities through “a truly trans-disciplinary lens,” Cervero says that Meier was among the first urban scholars “to articulate the need for sustainable planning, to warn us of the threats posed by carbon emissions, and to seek out ways to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries.”

To help students understand systems theory and the complexity of both natural and social systems, Meier pioneered the use of simulations gaming in the social sciences. He tried out the first versions of his simulations of an island ecosystem, the building of America's transcontinental railroads, and a Puerto Rican urban community with his children on the living-room floor (Wildlife, Pacific Express, and El Barrio, published in 1973-74; World Cities, 1986). Only a few days before his death, Meier was tickled to learn that on-line simulations of human society had reached the point that real-life law enforcement had to be called in to restore order in SecondLife.com's virtual communities.

Micro-entrepreneurial opportunities

At UCLA, Meier was denied a $50 student loan because his family had no property for collateral. Half a century later, following the death of his wife, Gitta Unger Meier, he used her life insurance to set up a foundation in India, along the lines of the Grameen Bank, to make revolving loans to help poor women establish small-scale businesses.

His research led him to believe that increasing education for girls and micro-entrepreneurial opportunities for women would be the most effective way to limit family size and to foster sustainable development more generally, observed Robin Standish, Meier's wife and collaborator in recent years.

Publications

* 1956. "Science and economic development; new patterns of living." Cambridge, Mass., M. I. T. Press.
* 1959. "Modern science and the human fertility problem". New York, Wiley
* 1962. "Croissance urbaine et théorie des communications". Paris, Presses universitaires de France.
* 1962. "A communications theory of urban growth". M.I.T. Press
* 1965. "Developmental planning". New York, McGraw-Hill.
* 1967. "The influence of resource constraints upon planning for worldwide economic development". Athens, Athens Technological Organization, Athens Center of Ekistics, 1967.
* 1974. "Planning for an urban world: the design of resource-conserving cities". Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
* 1978. "Risk-taking considered in a community ecology framework". Berkeley : Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California.
* 1978. "The new paradigm for planners--:community ecology." Berkeley : Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California, 1978.
* 1981. "Energizing urban ecosystems in the Philippines, Manila". Berkeley, Calif. : Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California
* 1989. "Life alongside a revolution : a Hong Kong diary, June 1989." Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley.

References

External links

* [http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/richardmeier.html IN MEMORIAM Richard Meier 1920-2007] . Office of Public Affairs, University of California.
* [http://rlmeier-planner-and-futurist.blogspot.com/ Richard L. Meier-Planner and Futurist] blog was established by the family of Richard Meier.