Appleyard, Donald

Biographical Information

Donald Appleyard, who spent a major part of his life energies making cities and neighborhoods safe and livable, died in Athens, Greece, September 1982, an innocent victim of a senseless, speeding automobile. Appleyard was 54 years old. Appleyard, Professor of Urban Design, was a member of the faculties of the Departments of City and Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

A native of England, he was educated there as a surveyor and architect. Later he studied city planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, he became a member of the M.I.T. faculty and taught there for six years.

Over the years, his interests became focused on the livability of cities and neighborhoods, particularly upon streets. Appleyard was that rare combination of innovative path-breaking academic researcher and quiet, insistent activist, professional, intent on getting things done--things that made cities better places for people to live. He was a person of ideas-- especially concerned with expanding the scope of urban design to encompass thinking from the social sciences.

Most of all, Donald Appleyard was a humanist urban planner who loved to work with people on their environmental problems, a person concerned about community and public life. Recognized the world over as such, he was called upon by people and professional colleagues to help them make better urban environments.

Appleyard's research dealt in large measure with subjects including the effects of traffic upon the lives of local residents, the physical characteristics of cities as fulfilling and joyful places to live, how to manage traffic in residential areas, conservation of neighborhoods and the like. He was an innovative and creative researcher in exploring these interests, which accounts for his considerable impact on the field. His methods involved the development of new survey techniques to relate people's perceptions and values to the design process and to resulting physical environments. He was largely responsible for the pioneering environmental simulation laboratory which permits testing and comparing different environments and designs by use of models and video photography where viewers can experience a simulated environment as if they were in it. Examples of the simulation laboratory work include: making films of the effects of future high-rise development on the San Francisco skyline, demonstrating the neighborhood impacts of alternative transportation technologies, and evaluating the impact of a controversial interstate highway.

Professor Appleyard's work was known throughout the world. He was invited to lecture at universities in more than forty countries. At Berkeley, his teaching was central in shaping the education of a new generation of professionals sensitive to the physical environment as people experience it.

He authored more than one hundred articles and professional reports and a host of books, including The View From the Road (1963), Planning a Pluralistic City (1967), The Conservation of European Cities (1979), Improving the Residential Street Environment (1981), and Livable Streets (1981). Of his writing, Grady Clay, Editor of Landscape Architecture magazine, calls his book Livable Streets, "by far the most thorough and detailed work on urban streets to date, offering precise ammunition for activists and citizens for years to come... as a resource for the future, it is a classic." At the time of his death, Appleyard's research and writings were taking him in new, but related, directions, including a major work on the study of environmental symbolism.

Professionally, Appleyard was active in projects that ranged from detailed neighborhood planning and design, such as the Berkeley street diverter program, to plans at a citywide scale, such as Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela. He was a major contributor to the San Francisco Urban Design Plan, had worked in Africa and Mexico, and at the time of his death was on leave working in Athens on neighborhood planning.

Over the years, he had been chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture and had received numerous awards, not the least of which was a Fulbright Senior Fellowship to Italy in 1975, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Graham Foundation Fellowship. He was at the height of his productive, creative years at the time of his death.

Donald Appleyard is survived by his wife, Sheila, and their four children: Justin, Moana, Bruce and Ian. He is survived, too, by thousands of people who may not have known him but whose environments and lives are more joyful and satisfying because he helped to plan them--humanely.

Allan B. Jacobs C.C. Cooper-Marcus T.G. Dickert

--University of California: In Memoriam, 1987

From the guide to the Donald Appleyard papers, 1954-1982, bulk 1966-1982, (The Bancroft Library)