By the time I got to know Patsy Healey, she had already made her mark with studies of planning in Latin America. Although I picked some of this up from Brian Mcloughlin and Derek Diamond’s Progress in Planning Series where Patsy was very active, I really got to know her when she was a lecturer at Kingston Polytechnic where she ran the Diploma in Planning. From 1972 to about 1976, I gave lectures on “Models in Planning” as part of the contingent of lecturers drafted in to provide the full syllabus. Kingston Poly was a gentle, interesting place in an old school with some very good staff and students but before long in 1975 or 1976, I think it was, Patsy moved to Oxford Polytechnic where she took charge of the Planning Theory programme as well as courses in general. This is where I got to know her best as my wife was a lecturer in the same department and the University of Reading was not far away across the Downs where I was a lecturer. We had quite a bit to do with Oxford Poly in those days and the cluster of lecturers in that part of the world providing an exciting group.

When I became editor of Environment and Planning B in 1981, we retracked the journal to include a stronger focus on aspects of physical planning. Patsy was invaluable as a sounding board for how far we should go with Planning Theory in that journal. She was instrumental in helping us to define the fine line between various kinds of theory in planning and the strong focus which we have always had on scientific methods, models and urban analytics which are key to making planning work in practice. In later years since she went to Newcastle and myself to SUNY-Buffalo, and then back to UCL, I lost contact a bit with the domain of planning theory, but I will always remember that she, Patsy, was instrumental in convincing Trixie Haselsberger to include me in her conference on Encounters in Planning Thought (Routledge, 2017) held in Vienna in 2014. I was a bit of interloper amongst the sages of the field gathered there but it was an exciting meeting. Patsy was key to the meeting and her contribution to the book and the meeting itself represent an important glimpse of her seminal contributions as well as our collective memory of her work.

Patsy always fought hard for planning. She and me were Fellows of the British Academy in the Anthroplogy and Geography section but we were lone voices amongst a sea of cultural theorists and our meetings were never frequent enough to impress the need for ‘town’ planning in the Academy. In my view it was not just Planning Theory that was Patsy’s contribution but it was to Planning in general and particularly to the role of practice and the community and the need for strong theory to underpin its activity. Patsy’s great contribution was to clarify and impress this perspective on the field.