Patrick Geddes’ ideas on civic engagement in the 21st century.
Part 1: Who is Patrick Geddes?
Our work in Space Engagers develops ideas on civic engagement through the process of inclusive and interactive mapping that were espoused in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In a series of blogs I will (re)introduce these ideas and explain how they relate to our work.
This first blog provides some background to Patrick Geddes.
A Vigorous Institution
If one dropped in on a luncheon group at the faculty club of a metropolitan university and asked a dozen scholars: Who is Patrick Geddes, there would probably be a dozen answers, and though some of the answers would be hazy, they would all, I think, be different; and one might get the impression that Professor Geddes is a vigorous institution, rather than a man.
— (Mumford 1925, 523)
Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) is commonly labelled a polymath, although one biographer suggests his more conventional university peers might have described him as a “jack of all subjects” and “a menace to the isolation of specialized fields of learning” (Boardman 1978, 243). In the above quote Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) reinforces this point and proceeds to prove his proposition by obtaining a range of imagined confirmations from the biologist, economist, sociologist, geographer, physicist, dramatics instructor, and librarian. It is only the professor of philosophy and logic that has not heard of Geddes, but Mumford (1925) reassures the reader that it is only a matter of time before he is recognised as “a rigorous systematic thinker” comparable to Aristotle, Leibnitz or Pythagoras (523).
Further confirmation of Geddes’ prolific range of talents can be gleaned from an aggregation of titles of key texts on his life and work: “The Interpreter Geddes — the man and his Gospel” (Defries 1927); “Maker of the Future” (Boardman 1944); “Biologist, Town Planner, Re-educator, Peace Warrior” (Boardman 1978); “Social Evolutionist and City Planner” (Meller 1990); “Spokesman for the Environment” (Stalley 1972); “Pioneer of Sociology” (Mairet 1957); “A Most Unsettling Person” (Kitchen 1975).
Geddes was forever questioning and trying to make sense of the world in a “constant fury of thought” (Mumford 1925, 523), and Boardman (1978) suggests that his very active mind never really switched off:
His life was dominated by ideas, incessant and self-propagating, which governed his waking hours and which at night brewed themselves subconsciously until the approach of daylight should turn them loose.
— (Boardman 1978, 240)
Boardman (1978) called him “a trail-blazer, a master of many complex elements that make up the science and art of city-planning.” (243) Geddes acknowledged this role as an ideas man, an initiator: “I’m just the boy who rings the bell and runs away” (Geddes, quoted in Defries 1927, 68–69).
A century of Geddesian thinking
Over the past century Geddesian ideas have been repeatedly viewed as core to emerging ways of thinking. For example, Odum (1944) considers it “peculiarly appropriate that his [Geddes’] own contribution should now become, like the stones that the builders rejected, pillars of a new world” in the 1940s; Kitchen (1975) notes that in the 1970s “his ideas and actions” were evident in the foundation of “our current regional, environmental and ecological thinking” (24); Rubin (2009) observes a resurgence in the appreciation and interpretation of Geddesian theory and practice in the environmental planning movement from the 1970s onwards; and Batty and Marshall (2009) observe that it is only in recent years that a multi-disciplinary, evolutionary perspective is emerging that resonates with Geddesian thinking.
Patrick Geddes as social-ecologist
Geddes understood the world in terms of social and ecological systems. Specifically, he understood that man was an integral part of nature, albeit an intelligent one.
His most famous thinking machine (a visual tool for representing complex ideas), the Valley Section, is an illustration of interdependent and interconnected social and ecological systems over space and time.
“By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.”
— (Geddes, reported in Defries 1927)
The above quote from a lecture in Dundee (where he was the professor of Botany) also illustrates the clarity of his understanding.
Geddes was also thinking about natural resource depletion and the limits of non-renewable resources in the late 1800s:
“Natural Resources: oil-wheat-coal-etc.. Are they eternal? How long will they last? Can they be artificially created? Or preserved.”
— (from a thinking machine sketch (undated). Source: National Library of Scotland Archives, Miscellaneous Geddes Papers, MS 10656)
Geddes applied this intelligence and understanding of social-ecological systems to the cities he saw around him at that time — the industrial city. Like us, Geddes was living in a period of rapid and unprecedented technological, social and environmental change. The discipline of town planning, of which Geddes was a founder, effectively emerged as a reaction to the ills of the polluted and overcrowded industrial city, and rural depopulation and decay.
Geddes describes the industrial city of his time as “dissipating resources and energies”, and then reflects on the social consequences of “depressing life” “unemployment and misemployment”, “disease and folly”, “vice and apathy”, “indolence and crime” (Geddes, 1915, 86). He then describes the transition to a future city in a new era of advanced technologies and ways of doing things. The future city was to be energy efficient and low impact, and to operate within the renewable and assimilative capacities of the planet.
All this connects Geddesian thinking with the current discourse on urban resilience, where social-ecological resilience thinking is applied to the city. Geddesian thinking and practice contains many insights into what urban resilience means in practice. The next blog on Geddes will explore his ideas on civic engagement, and in particular interactive mapping.
References:
- Batty, M., and S. Marshall. 2009. “The evolution of cities: Geddes, Abercrombie and the new physicalism.” Town Planning Review 80(6): 551–574. doi:10.3828/tpr.2009.12.
- Boardman, P. 1978. The worlds of Patrick Geddes: biologist, town planner, re-educator, peace-warrior. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Boardman, P. 1944. The Maker of the Future. USA: The University of North Carolina Press.
- Defries, A. 1927. The Interpreter Geddes: The Man and His Gospel. London: George Routledge & Sons.
- Kitchen, P. 1975. A most unsettling person: an introduction to the ideas and life of Patrick Geddes. London: Gollancz.
- Geddes, P. 1915. Cities in Evolution: An introduction to the town planning movement and to the study of civics. 3rd ed. (1968) London: Ernest Benn Limited.
- Mairet, P. 1957. Pioneer of Sociology: The life and letters of Patrick Geddes. London: Lund Humphreys.
- Meller, H. 1990. Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner. London: Routledge.
- Mumford, L. 1925. “Who is Patrick Geddes?” Survey Graphic (February 1): 523–524. http://www.unz.org/Pub/TheSurvey-1925feb01-00523.
- Odum, H. 1944. “Patrick Geddes’ Heritage to “The Making of the Future”.” Social Forces 22 (3): 275–281. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2571970.
- Rubin, N. H. 2009. “The Changing Perspectives of Patrick Geddes: a case study in planning history.” Planning Perspectives 24(3): 349–366. doi: 10.1080/02665430902933986.
- Stalley, M. 1972. Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for man and the environment (a selection). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
