Abstract
My dear friend Rob Potter died of cancer this April at the age of 64. He earned distinction in several academic and public arenas. He was a talented human geographer, an innovative field researcher, a pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of development studies, a physical planning adviser to the Barbados government, a seasoned and extremely effective university administrator and an understanding and approachable educator and mentor.
Rob’s contributions in these educational and practical arenas went further than many because he took on the most important and demanding endeavour found in academia; namely, being an Editor. At Royal Holloway, where he became a Reader in 1987, Rob took on the Editorial duties of the ‘Royal Holloway and Bedford New College Papers’ in Geography in 1987. He continued as Editor of the Centre for Developing Areas Research (CEDAR) Paper Series at Royal Holloway and between 1992 and 2002, shepherded 38 research papers of that series into print. Starting in 1991, he was a founding coeditor of a series of commissioned research level monographs on Third World Development entitled Global Development and the Environment, published by Mansell Ltd, an imprint of Cassell: London and New York. Eventually, seven volumes were published in the Series.
Most significantly, from January 2001 to the present Rob both instigated and served as Editor-in-Chief of this most important journal of our interdisciplinary field, to whit Progress in Development Studies (PiDS). In his 2003 Editorial commentary on ‘The environment of development’ he challenged contributors to open new paths in their considerations of development issues in this charge:
Whatever else may come to pass, there is a pressing need for the propagation of new forms of global consciousness, whether this consists of fresh awareness of the risks associated with the complex interconnectivities that exist between global development, global inequities and global security issues, or the frank consideration of Tobin-type taxes on global speculative activities in financial markets. It must also take on board the realities of anti-globalization protests, and requires the kick-starting of a far greater awareness of development issues and ‘global otherness’ in the mass media. Only if progress is made on each of these broad fronts post-Johannesburg can we consider ourselves as having entered a new environment for development. (Potter, 2003: 3(1): 3)
In a follow-up Editorial in 2004 on ‘The provenance of Progress in Development Studies’, Rob built his case for the journal’s healthy mix of commentaries and ‘cutting-edge, empirically informed articles’. At the same time he advocated the need for increasingly diverse submissions from different perspectives and sought to widen the sphere of authorship from both the Global North and the Global South.
In 2014, Rob’s Editorial on ‘Progress in Development Studies Comes of Age’ proudly trumpeted the news from Robert Rojek of the London offices of SAGE Publications Limited, informing him that from Volume 9, Number 1, 2009 our journal Progress in Development Studies would henceforth be indexed by Thompson-Reuters (formerly ISI).
In effect, this recognition signalled the journal’s ‘coming of age’, and was a fitting testimony to Rob’s ‘captaining of the ship’. During his time at the helm, Rob successfully brought 11 hefty annual editions into print, and his guidance of this well-recognized outlet for original quality articles in such an interdisciplinary, scientific field has been truly exceptional. Without question, the remaining Editorial Board will have quite a task to maintain the momentum of this forward-looking international journal that Rob had been able to build, these past 14 years.
Throughout his career he demonstrated that scholarship could be applied to the real-world challenges of urban spatial planning and ‘Third World Development’. This included formulating strategies to enable the poor and less poor to have access to essential resources, such as self-help housing and potable water supplies, and providing avenues for the less fortunate to acquire basic needs and essential social services. The goals underpinning Rob’s ethical, educational and practical positions were the improvement of less fortunate people’s lives in overseas, post-colonial locales and promoting meaningful, participatory and sustainable development.
Brought up on a North-West London council estate, Rob attended the Kynaston School for Boys (1961–68). He immediately went on to study Geography at Bedford College, University of London, where he obtained a First Class Honours degree in 1971. Four years later he had completed his PhD, entitled ‘The structural characteristics of the urban retailing system and nature of consumer behavior and perception: A case study based on Stockport, Greater Manchester’ and in 1974 had been appointed Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Bedford College.
Rob’s early scholarly interests mirrored those of 1970s’ analytical geography, focusing on quantitative methods, behavioural geography and urban retailing. Later he looked overseas to less-developed social and economic worlds, and focused his research interests on West Indian/Caribbean urban transformation and physical planning efforts; especially in the islands of Barbados and St. Lucia. It was in these new fields of enquiry, where I met him in the late 1980s, found common interests, friendship and collegiality and embarked on over 25 years of joint research endeavours. The resultant ‘transnational scholarly work’ with our UK and US graduate students, and colleagues at the University of the West Indies (UWI), blossomed in large part because of Rob’s energies and efficiencies. Our close friendship helped the partnership prosper, and Rob gained due recognition from his peers, with several joint-collections published and many journal articles and book chapters accepted for their contributions to the sub-fields of migration and development relations, transnational migration behaviours and development geography.
Rob was on the faculty at Bedford College for thirteen years, before moving to Royal Holloway and gaining a much-deserved promotion as Reader in Geography in 1987. Within six years he had been promoted to Professor of Geography (in 1993), and then served two successive terms as Head of Royal Holloway’s distinguished Department of Geography between 1994 and 1999. Between 2001–02, Rob was Director of the CEDAR, this being his last administrative post at the institution before moving to the University of Reading as Professor of Geography in 2003. He had hardly settled in as Professor of Human Geography before being appointed as Director of Research for the recently formed School of Human and Environmental Sciences, of which he became Head of School in 2008. His academic achievements were further recognized by the University of Reading in 2007 by the higher award of a Doctor of Science (DSc), which was the same year he was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences (AcSS).
Paralleling this meritorious recognition, Rob was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellowship by Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Study, which enabled the two of us to complete our data-processing stages of the National Geographic Society’s sponsored research we had been conducting in the Caribbean. This built on Rob’s earlier 2001–02 work interviewing returning youthful Barbadians, or ‘Bajan-Brits’ about their views on leaving the UK to return to their ancestral homeland. Our joint interviewing in Trinidad and Tobago of returning transnational migrants from the UK and North America about their reasons for returning to the Caribbean, also sought answers to questions about the social remittances’ and other development contributions they had brought back or achieved. This extremely successful collaborative research project involving Rob, myself and Trinidadian Co-Investigator, Dr Godfrey St. Bernard (Research Fellow at SALISES, UWI, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago) would keep us busy for the next few years, while we embarked on a ‘transnational writing prospectus’ across the Atlantic. This culminated in the completion of three coauthored collections and several coauthored chapters, participation at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, together with occasional field visits to further build our interview data set and collaborate with primary informants.
Prolific throughout his career, at the time of his passing Rob had authored (or coauthored) over 250 book chapters and journal articles, with three more in their final preparatory stages. He also supervised 30 PhD students and secured more than 50 research grants to help his mentoring of their collaborative research, which he always was so successful at encouraging and supporting.
Rob’s organizational skills at envisioning, editing and then completing many definitive collections, both single authored and coauthored, produced works that were always exceptional in quality, thorough in depth and well received. In addition, his monographs were often the first of their kind and of direct interest to Caribbean planners and government departments. For example, Rob’s fieldbased examinations and explanations of ‘the chattel house’ system and the low-cost, self-help ‘Tenantries Programme’ in Barbados, resulted in an original monograph entitled Housing Conditions in Barbados. This research was published by the Institute of Economic and Social Research (ISER), at the UWI in 1992. Writing in the development journal Third World Planning Review, UWI’s urban scholar Brian Hudson had this accolade to offer about this exemplary publication: ‘Until Robert Potter’s timely study, no comprehensive analysis had been taken of housing in Barbados’.
With the support of a two-year grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Rob enthusiastically pursued his field examinations of low cost housing conditions and national state policies in Grenada, St Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica. This resulted in another ISER-supported monograph being published in 1994 entitled Low-income Housing and State Policy in the Eastern Caribbean. As an expansion of this comparative work in the Windward Islands, Rob joined with me, since I had been undertaking similar examinations of low-income shanty towns surrounding Port of Spain, Trinidad, to coproduce an edited collection in 1997 entitled Self-help Housing, The Poor and the State in the Caribbean. This comparative collection, which was jointly published by Tennessee University Press and the UWI Press, comprehensively represented the wider Caribbean region. Rob also coauthored a monograph in 2001 with Mark Watson entitled Low-cost Housing in Barbados: Evolution or Social Revolution, published by the UWI Press. They undertook a comprehensive analysis of the upgrading of the island’s Tenantries Programme, and pointed the way forward for the local authorities with regards to how the Tenantries residents’ needs and concerns should best be addressed.
Such a deep understanding of the urban physical planning environment in Barbados, garnered from his initial research in the 1980s into small island physical planning would eventually lead to practical interventions. Due to his knowledge of low cost housing constraints and opportunities, Rob was invited, in the late 1990s, to act as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank and the Government of Barbados. His contribution was to help with the preparation of that country’s third National Physical Development Plan of 1999–2000. Thus, the practical implications of his in-depth research efforts were finally recognized and appreciated in the Caribbean.
Paralleling his human geography interests in how the Caribbean and other post-colonial societies were changing and developing, was his growing involvement in the interdisciplinary field of development studies. Always encouraging forward-looking initiatives, he participated in workshops and colloquia whilst encouraging students’ research in ‘developing areas’ as a valued mechanism for expanding and strengthening this emerging field of social science enquiry.
In all, Rob guided 35 collections and monographs to fruition; the first original publication coming out in 1985, with two later texts Geographies of Development (1999, 2004 and 2008), and The Companion to Development Studies (2002, 2008 and 2014) being updated and republished twice, and each respectively being translated into Japanese (2006) and Chinese (2011). Doing Development Research, which was published in 2006, as a practicum to ‘The Companion…’ continued the tradition of these ‘exemplar texts’ of the emerging interdisciplinary subject of Development Studies. The themes of urbanization, development and more recently migration, characterized the wider compendium of collective and single authored works that Rob wrote. Running through his scholarship was an ever-present dual-message of analytical rigour and progressive criticism, leading to the societal policy implications that this work and thought offered to the peoples of the Commonwealth Caribbean and their ever-changing, post-colonial struggles for ‘better lives’.
In his later years at the University of Reading, Rob widened his research lens beyond the Caribbean and joined a team of social and environmental science colleagues in a five year investigation of water issues in Amman Jordan, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Rob and Professor Stephen Nortcliff were Co-Directors of the ‘Development Studies’ component of this research project, looking at urban waste water recycling and water provision in Amman, Jordan. More than 10 publications resulted, some of which were published as chapters in the project’s comprehensive collection entitled Water, Life and Civilisation, published by Cambridge University Press and UNESCO in 2011.
On his formal retirement at the end of January 2013, Rob’s high esteem at Reading was officially recognized by having the title of Emeritus Professor bestowed on him. Not that Rob retired from all academic pursuits, for he continued to supervise his PhD students, to engage in joint authorship ventures, and to serve as Editor-in-Chief of his well-renowned international journal Progress in Development Studies, until a few weeks before he passed away in mid-April.
I will now turn to Rob’s mentoring of graduate students. He was directly involved in the supervision of over 40 Masters and PhD students with more than a few continuing their careers as professional geographers or development professionals. One of his contemporary colleagues at the University of Reading, Dr Sally Lloyd-Evans, was one of Rob’s PhD students with whom he continued collaborative research and writing. In addition to the joint authorship of several journal articles, Sally was Rob’s coauthor in two publications, The City in the Developing World (in 1998), and Gender, Ethnicity and the Informal Sector in Trinidad (2002); both of which were widely accepted in the Caribbean and in ‘Third World urbanization’ circles. Having worked so closely with Rob for many years, Sally summarized this most valuable dimension of his distinguished university career in this tribute:
Rob will always be remembered as an inspirational research supervisor and conscientious mentor. He always said this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the job. Going way beyond the usual institutional practices, Rob was extremely generous in his capacity for collaborating with his PhD students; taking them on field visits and conferences overseas, publishing with them and passing on his skills in writing and scholarship to us – the next generation.
As his long-time friend and colleague at the University of Reading, Steve Mithen, observed at Rob’s funeral:
Rob Potter was simply one of the best academics, because he was one of the nicest people that any of us will ever have the pleasure and the privilege of having known. He ‘made a difference’ to so many students’ lives, because of his fairness, even-handedness and his humility.
At the same ceremony, Sally Lloyd-Evans offered this most fitting tribute; which summed Rob’s life-long contributions to others:
Everything that Rob did: scholarship, teaching, friendship and of course as a loving husband and father, he did it to the very best of his ability, and with honesty, integrity and enthusiasm …. These personal attributes and life-long principles were highly evident to everyone who knew him. In the words of a recent research student he was supervising, Rob was simply ‘a lovely man’ and I think he would have thought this to be the most important tribute of all.
Rob Potter, geographer, was born on 24 February 1950, and died on 12 April 2014. He is survived by his wife Virginia, whom he married in 1978, and his daughter, Katherine.
3 July 2014