Alice Coleman

Alice Mary Coleman (8 June 1923 – 2 May 2023) was a British geographer. A professor at King's College London, she was noted for directing the 1960s Second Land Use Survey of Britain, as well as for analyses of land use planning and urban design which have influenced the design of residential developments since the 1980s. She was a member of the Freedom Association.

Background Coleman was born in London and grew up in Broadstairs, Kent. She was educated at Clarendon House Grammar School, but her family could not afford to send her to university right away.

Coleman lived in Dulwich, London. She died on 2 May 2023, at the age of 99. ), and the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford. These measures were correlated with various design features such as number of storeys, number of flats in a block etc.

The findings published as Utopia on trial (Coleman 1985) were controversial, with Newman suggesting that insufficient attention was paid to social factors interacting with the physical. Bill Hillier of the Bartlett School of Architecture argued that many of Coleman's findings on the link between large scale housing and social problems were a statistical artefact: simply put, large blocks have more litter than small because they are larger. Nevertheless, in 1991 the government provided £50 million to test the ideas in selected estates under Coleman's direction under the DICE (Design Improvement Controlled Experiment) project (see Coleman 1992). A significant proposal was the removal of overhead walkways linking blocks to reduce opportunities for crime, though the overall effectiveness of DICE, and the general effectiveness of physical design methods over social and economic measures remains controversial.

Graphology Coleman's interest in graphology included editing and contributing to Graphology magazine and writing a graphological thesaurus.

Literacy In 2007, Coleman co-authored The Great Reading Disaster with Mona McNee.