My partner, Michael Edwards, who has died aged 83, was an economist of land and housing and an inspirational teacher to generations of students. He was also a community planning activist. For five decades, Michael’s scholarship showed that property relations lie at the heart of any serious discussion of planning in the public interest.
From 1987 he was a mainstay of 25 years of campaigns over the King’s Cross railway lands. Later he co-founded Just Space, a network of community groups that holds the successive London Plans (the mayor’s statutory spatial development strategy for the Greater London area) to account. He understood this activism as part of the “struggle to get the planning system used by citizens to control their own city and protect their own rights to occupy it”.
Born in Northampton, to Jeanie (nee Wilson), who worked as a teacher and then in publishing, and Ted Edwards, who ran the British Boot and Shoe Institution (an educational body), Michael attended Bedales school, in Hampshire, then in 1961 went to Worcester College, Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics, concentrating on economics and statistics. After an MPhil in town planning at University College London (1964-66), he spent three years at Nathaniel Lichfield’s planning and development consultancy, advising on the masterplan for Milton Keynes.
In 1969 Michael joined the Bartlett at University College London as a lecturer; he retired in 2008, was re-employed within weeks, and never left. As honorary professor, he remained central to departmental life and was still drafting responses to London Plan consultations this year. In 1990 he established the Bartlett School of Planning’s first master’s programmes, which ran in parallel with initiatives in Newcastle, Turin and Venice, forging lasting links with colleagues across Europe and beyond.
From 1979 to 1996 he was a driving force in the Bartlett International Summer School, a gathering of academics, trade unionists and activists united by an explicitly Marxist analysis of the built environment, and in 1991 he co-founded the International Network for Urban Research and Action (Inura).
In 2014 UCL gave him a lifetime achievement award for public engagement. His last book, King’s Cross from Below, co-edited with Jason Katz, was cleared for production only weeks before he died. With 36 contributors, it is a polyvocal work carrying the resources of past campaigns and Michael’s careful political-economy analysis into the continuing politics of the area.
We had met in 1967, then again via my brother, who with Michael was a founder member of Random Association, a Hackney commune that ran from 1972 to 1990. I joined in 1976 and Michael and I became a couple in 1974 and registered a civil partnership in 2022. A keen vegetable-gardener and winemaker, his DIY skills were legendary if idiosyncratic; “Gramps’ll fix it” became a catchphrase among his granddaughters. Michael was a lovely man, open, confident and kind, and treated everyone he met as an equal.
He is survived by me, our children, Ossie and Daisy, our granddaughters, Effi, Della and Anna, and by his brother, Gavin.
