February 3, 2020

Penn IUR Mourns the Loss but Celebrates the Legacy of Neal Peirce

By: Eugénie Birch, Amy Montgomery, and Susan Wachter

No one could write about cities and metropolitan areas better than Neal Peirce. He followed the urban beat for more than six decades, reporting with exquisite insights on the goings on—good and bad—in our local governments. His many accomplishments are reflected in the obituaries from the New York Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, and otherssee the links below.

Sadly, Neal died in Washington D.C., December 27, 2019, struck down by the same cancer that took John McCain and Ted Kennedy.

Neal was a giant in the field—a gentle one as befits a man born and raised in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia and educated at Princeton and Harvard. Perhaps, his stint with the U.S. Army as a counterintelligence officer added to his investigative acuity but more likely it was his editorship of the Daily Princetonian that whet his appetite for his long career in journalism.

While over the years we had followed his writing, we did not know him personally until 2007 when he and his team covered the Global Urban Summit, a month-long urban convening sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio. His assignment was to record the meetings—four weeks, two separate conferences per week and more than 150 speakers. In this instance, we had been asked to organize a week-long session on research while Elliot Sclar (Columbia), Bruce Katz (Brookings), and Bob Yaro (Regional Plan Association) assembled the others. It was an exhausting and memorable event—anyone who was anyone in urbanism was there. Miraculously, Neal captured it all in Century of the City, No Time to Lose (2008), co-authored with Curtis Johnson and Farley Peters. Following this meeting, he founded Citiscope, an online newspaper with correspondents from around the world reporting on the global urbanization processes. Citiscope was the only periodical that detailed the dramatic leadup to the UN’s approval of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In 2017, the Thomson Reuters Foundation adopted it.

Since 2007, we shared a lot with Neal, especially the World Urban Forums in Rio, Naples, and Medellín where he represented the best of urban journalism. He spoke at Penn several times and anchored a special session at Perry World House in preparation for the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in 2016.

Neal Peirce made the urban world a better place for having contributed to his readers’ understanding of its dynamism and possibilities. He viewed cities as offering solutions to global concerns much earlier than anyone else. And with his persuasive, clear voice he urged more action in cities to advance the march to all forms of sustainability—social, economic, and environmental. We will miss him but were honored to have shared some of his life.

Next month, at the World Urban Forum 10 in Abu Dhabi, Neal will be there in spirit at a special session: “Remembering Neal Peirce: The Pioneer of Urban Journalism.”

Selected obituaries:

“Neal Peirce, urban affairs columnist who championed inclusive cities, dies at 87,” The Washington Post, December 27, 2019.

“Neal R. Peirce, Who Put Spotlight on Urban Innovation, Dies at 87,” The New York Times, December 27, 2019.

“Journalist and civic visionary Neal Peirce left lasting impacts in St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 7, 2020.

“Neal Peirce shaped a vision of the Research Triangle,” The News & Observer, January 11, 2020.

“An urban visionary who saw what Charlotte might become,” The Charlotte Observer, January 2, 2020.

“Remembering a pioneering proponent of cities’ power to improve prosperity,” Kinder Institute for Urban Research, January 6, 2020.

“Neal Peirce, chronicler of cities and regions,” Public Square: A CNU Journal, January 14, 2020.

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