Wherever she went and whoever she encountered, Patsy Healey was a breath of fresh air. She exuded charm, intelligence, and commitment to her peers, and was supportive of everyone engaged in what she called the ‘Planning Project’. The scope of her munificence extended to all those who professed support for improving our cities and regions, as well as those who knew little about the profession of town planning but could appreciate its concerns. In a life dominated by many different activities focused on establishing the intellectual foundations for such a turbulent landscape of ideas, the many contributions to planning that Patsy Healey made will ring down the years. Without doubt, she is one of very few who have grappled head on with the complexity of cities and regions and their planning, pioneering new ways of thinking about how we can improve the places that define our communities. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of planning, she stands alongside the greats – Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Patrick Abercrombie, and Peter Hall amongst others – who sought to establish a robust and relevant basis for the design of better environments and their communities. Patsy, however, ploughed a somewhat different furrow from her predecessors, standing astride the paradigm change which moved planning from its physical orientation to that of the social sciences and their practice. She was instrumental in accelerating this change.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 22