Visionaries of Regenerative Design I: Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1931)
Geddes was convinced that “our greatest need today is to grasp life as whole, to see its many sides in their proper relations; but we must have a practical as well as a philosophical interest in such an integrated view of life” (in Mairet, 1957, p.xii). He wrote these lines calling for ecological consciousness almost a century ago! Patrick Geddes’ call for an integrated view of life deserves even more attention today when the effects of the Industrial Revolution have had profound global effects and have literally re-designed the face of the Earth.
[This is an excerpt from my 2006 PhD Thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’. This research and 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert in whole systems design and transformative innovation have led me to publish Designing Regenerative Cultures in May 2016. I am sharing this series of excerpt on Visionaries of Regenerative Design, as the field is gaining in practitioners and ‘co-creating the future without knowledge of your history and lineage is like planting cut flowers.’]
Patrick Geddes firmly believed that “there is a larger view of Nature and Life, a rebuilding of analyses into Synthesis, an integration of many solitary experiences into a larger Experience…” (Geddes, 1895, p.32). Such a synthesis of knowledge and action that embeds economical, social and cultural considerations firmly into an understanding of the ecological limits of the biosphere will have to go hand in hand with a reintegration of the arts, the humanities and the sciences into a new trans -disciplinary perspective that will guide collaborative and interdisciplinary research in the 21st century.
Seeing “life as whole”, which is to understand life as a dynamic process in which humanity participates, raises awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of nature and culture. Patrick Geddes understood that such a participatory worldview informed by detailed knowledge about the natural conditions of a local region will be instrumental in facilitating the emergence of sustainable human societies uniquely adapted to their particular region.
Inspired by the French sociologist Frederic Le Play’s (1802–1886) triad of ‘Lieu, Travail, Famillle’ — which Geddes translated to “Work, Place, Folk” — Geddes developed a new approach to regional and town planning based on the integration of people and their livelihood into the natural givens of the particular place and region they inhabit. He emphasized an inventory of a region’s hydrology, geology, flora, fauna, climate and natural topography, as well as its social and economic opportunities and challenges. As such, the Geddesian methodology pioneered the bioregional planning approach almost a century before the emergence of bioregionalism.
Since the first United Nations conference on the environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 the Local Agenda 21 approach to citizen participation in the challenges of sustainability at the community scale has spread internationally. It may come as a surprise to many that the popular rallying call of grass-roots sustainability “Think Global, Act Local” can be attributed to Geddes’ most popular book Cities in Evolution, which was published in 1915 (Stephen, 2004, p.14). Patrick Geddes led by example through his theoretical and practical work as a planner and educator, in his native Scotland as well as in India, Cyprus, France and Palestine.
Anybody who has enjoyed a scenic stroll through the old town of Edinburgh, up the Royal Mile and down to the Grassmarket, owes part of this experience to the spirited regeneration work of Patrick Geddes and his wife Anna. Between 1887 and the beginning of the 20th century, they engaged the inhabitants of the dilapidated old town slums in a clean up of their own neighbourhood and established the world’s first student-run halls of residence along the Royal Mile.
During that time, Geddes also created a “sociological laboratory” and centre for popular regional education in a global context that he called the “Outlook Tower”. He built Ramsay gardens on the castle esplanade, he took up the chair of Botany at the University College, Dundee, and pioneered the first international summer school in Europe. Geddes was the archetype of an academic that could not be confined to a single discipline and either a purely practical or a purely theoretical focus for his endeavours. He was a generalist who moved freely between the roles of biologist, sociologist, town and regional planner, exhibition designer, public and academic educator, as well as patron of the arts and natural philosopher.
Geddes participatory approach to civic action, that emphasized the need for humanity’s integration into natural process at the scale of the region, and his recognition of education as the facilitator of societal change, along with his interdisciplinary design methodology offers thoroughly modern pathways to sustainability.
Geddes was keenly aware that fundamental change in the physical domain requires fundamental change in the underlying attitudes and consciousness, and identified interdisciplinary education as the facilitator of such societal change. He believed in the possibility and necessity of society’s evolution towards higher levels of consciousness and co-operation. Volker Welter suggested that Geddes identified “misadaptation to the natural environment as the underlying cause of urban problems.” He goes on to explain:
“For Geddes, conflicts arise not between classes but between occupational groups and the environment. As the aim is to adjust the whole city to the environment, cooperation among citizens becomes not only a viable option but a necessity” (Welter, 2002, p.66).
According to Geddes, it was through the notion of right livelihood that humanity could begin to integrate into natural process rather than continue to dominate and exploit nature through ever more destructive technologies. He believed that eventually, the destructive technologies that emerged from the Industrial revolution and led to the progressive subjugation of human beings and the environment to the machine, would give way to anew “geotechnology” that was to meet human needs within the limits of the planetary biosphere.
Geddes talked about a shift from the “paleotechnic age” where life as a whole was threatened to the “neotechnic age” — also refered to him as the “eutechnic age” — when life would resurge. He saw life as the underlying process that connects nature and culture. During the paleotechnic age technological progress involves the renunciation of the organic and its substitution by the mechanical; wealth is measured in purely monetary terms rather than in terms of quality of life and environmental health.
In contrast, during the emergence of the eutechnic age, the goal of technology is to meet human needs and to integrate into natural process thus creating a healthy environment. Geddes believed that, in this eutechnic age, nature conservation and restoration would be a priority. It would lead to a greening of the cities and the development of a “new technology based on new sources of energy, clean, unpolluting and efficient …” (Leonard, 1992, p.76).
Furthermore, Geddes suggested that eventually a shift away from the predominantly competitive outlook that characterized the paleotechnic age would lead to a focus on greater cooperation at the regional, national and global scale during the eutechnic age (to be understood as eu from the Greek word for good, thus, ‘the age of good technologies’).
From an optimistic point of view, one could regard the frequent calls for the consideration of ethical, social and environmental responsibility in business, government, and civil society, along with the progress made in fields like green product design, renewable energy technologies and in integrated planning approaches as indications that we are finally — a hundred years after Geddes’ proclaimed his vision of the eutechnic age — reaching the critical mass for such a shift to actually occur. The systems theorist, Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist Joanna Macy describes this shift from the currently still dominant “industrial growth society” to a “life sustaining society” as “the time of the great turning” (Macy & Brown, 1998, pp.17–18).
With regard to the filed of economics, Geddes took his initial inspiration from John Ruskin. In an early paper, entitled ‘John Ruskin: Economist’, first published in 1885, Geddes agrees with Ruskin’s assessment that market forces should not control economics, but what was needed instead was a new approach to economics that focussed on true quality of life by answering to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity (Meller, 1993, p.30). Based on his biological understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems, Geddes suggested that a high degree of specialization in the function of an organism within a highly complex society would lead to a decrease of individual competition.
In a paper entitled ‘An Analysis of the Principles of Economics”, that Geddes presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1883, he compared the physical principles of economics based on mechanical metaphors of industrial production and the absorption and dissipation of energy, with the biological principles of economics that took an evolutionary perspective of life as a process that connects culture and nature. Geddes warned that the specialization of labour — if not balanced with profoundly interdisciplinary education — could have detrimental effects on individual, cultural and eventually environmental health (in Meller, 1993).
A clear focus on education was needed to support the continued evolution of culture and society. He argued that the “key objective of the biological principles of economics was not food and shelter but culture and education”(in Meller, 1993, p.60). For Geddes, the creation of an educated, and regionally adapted culture was the prerequisite for the long-term assurance of the provision of food and shelter for all citizens.
Helen Meller has suggested that it was this conviction, which lead Geddes to pronounce his famous dictum “social evolution depends on art” (in Meller, 1993, p.60). Geddes believed a society was able to evolve healthily if its people and their livelihoods were adapted to the specific conditions of their local region. Such adaptation required a form of interdisciplinary education that made people aware of how their livelihood fitted into the overall pattern of adapting local culture to local nature. In Geddes opinion, art and architecture had the dual function of expressing and educating about the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture.
The impulses set by Patrick Geddes had a very important influence on the emergence of what I am describing in this thesis as the natural design movement [Today, I would call it the Regenerative Design Movement]. His notion of scale-sensitive, ecologically and socially conscious planning and design, as well as his emphasis of the critical role that trans-disciplinary education plays in enabling and empowering an informed citizenry to implement such design is of remarkable relevance to the creation of a sustainable society.
[To continue reading other parts of this doctoral thesis, take a look at the chapter on ‘The Natural Design Movement’, from ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ by Daniel Christian Wahl 2006. … For my more recent writing see Designing Regenerative Cultures, 2016]
