Geddes, Patrick (1854–1932)

Scottish academician and city planner

Born in Ballater, Scotland, Patrick Geddes began his career as a biologist, spent a fruitful but largely unreported middle period as a university and civic reformer, and then began, in his fifties and sixties, a highly visible and international public life with an increasing focus on city planning. Geddes's intellectual work includes an evolution doctrine based on cooperation rather than natural selection, a focus on city development as the main arena for human evolution, a concept of differentiation of occupation types rooted in the regional environment, and a theory that civic institutions make possible a collective human consciousness that transcends material constraints.

In his later work, Geddes provided an antidote to the limitations of the early city planners, mainly architects or engineers concerned with the physical form of cities and regions. Geddes contributed innovations that focused on social phenomena. One of these was the concept of “conservative surgery” in slum-remedying schemes: Rather than raze an entire neighborhood, he would recommend clearance of a small pocket to improve circulation or provide a place for congregation while sparing the bulk of the buildings, which would then function more effectively.

Another of Geddes's contributions was the advice to make surveys prior to planning. The survey was intended to ensure that the complexity of city development would be reflected in sensitive attention to detail in the plan. The advice that the survey be a regional one, not confined to the city limits, also appealed to planners, who favored the comprehensive view of a natural unit not arbitrarily broken up by political boundaries.

Related was the advice that the civic survey, while partly a technical planning tool, might result in a permanent exhibition with a civic education function. Geddes himself prepared two such exhibitions, which he showed in world's fairs and various cities. He advocated that the results of the survey be permanently institutionalized in a civic museum, which would function as a center for the transmission of civic culture. His own example of this was the Outlook Tower, a five-story building he purchased on a hill in Edinburgh. At the top, one could observe the region around the city; inside were more exhibits.

More dramatic was Geddes's notion of civic pageant. Geddes felt that by reenacting city history, the actors would see beyond their normally limited roles to possible cooperative projects. Best known, perhaps, was the civic pageant and parade he staged upon his arrival at Indore, India, in 1917, on a commission to produce plans for that city. This kind of public drama surpassed anything that city planners had developed as a mode of operation, but it intrigued many of them.

Though he fascinated and influenced many city planners, Geddes alienated and mystified others, and his influence in other fields—notably sociology—faded after the early 1900s. With time, the importance of Geddes's ideas diminished in city planning as well, for as planners began to adopt the methods and substance of social science in the second half of the twentieth century, their work became more compartmentalized, and interest in Geddes's more global viewpoint diminished. Despite recent attention, Geddes remains a marginal if provocative figure whose real import has yet to be explored.

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