Episode Transcript

“We need to give everyone the outlook of the artist, who begins with the art of seeing – and then in time we shall follow [them] into the seeing of art, even the creating of it. In the same way the scholar and the student may be initiated … into the essential outlook of the astronomer and the geographer, of the mathematician and the mechanic, the physicist and the chemist, the geologist and the minerologist, the botanist and the zoologist, and thence more generally, of the biologist. Next, too, the anthropologist … and the economist.”

These bold words, shrewdly linking the practice of the artist to the world of the scientist, are extracted from the final lecture that Patrick Geddes gave in Dundee in 1918, after thirty years of teaching and working in the City. He went on to say;

“…this general and educational point of view must be brought to bear on every specialism. The teacher’s outlook should include all viewpoints. Hence we must cease to think merely in terms of separated departments and faculties and must relate these in the living mind; in the social mind as well – indeed, this above all.”

Geddes called this the ‘synoptic view’; today we would call it multi-disciplinarity. For Geddes, the problem posed by the synoptic view was how to organise it: how to order all these layers of specialist knowledge in a coherent way so that they could help solve the problems of urban living. Cities are notorious as places where the problems inherent in daily living intertwine - social problems, monetary problems, housing, and infrastructural problems. The synoptic view was central to his project for what he called an Outlook Tower which sought to categorise the specialist knowledge of Edinburgh and organise it on its different levels, culminating in a rooftop camera obscura providing an elevated view across Edinburgh, still a major tourist attraction on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile to this day.

Like so many of the men and women who taught in Dundee in its early academic years, Geddes was not a professor from an ivory tower background. In fact Geddes never took a degree himself - but he was a student all his life.

Born in Perth in 1854, he worked in a bank for a year before settling down to his main aim, the study of life. He worked under T H Huxley, then became a demonstrator at University College in London where he got to know Charles Darwin and was greatly influenced by his evolutionary arguments and how they applied to society.

He worked in Dundee from 1889 to 1914 but worked the summer terms only, leaving the rest of the year free to travel and explore. He’s recalled as erratic – his lectures were nominally about botany, but in reality covered anything under the sun, which could be stimulating for students – or intensely annoying, if they were about to sit exams.

While at Dundee, he emphasized the development in understanding of sexual reproduction as a major step in organic evolution and, with the naturalist John Arthur Thomson, published The Evolution of Sex in 1889.

Geddes was a polymath and it is for his work as a town planner that he is best known, and he is remembered as a pioneering thinker on the design and purpose of cities. His book 'Cities in Evolution’ published in 1915 was a seminal text which promoted his Cities Exhibitions, which he organised from 1910 onwards. Borrowing Darwin’s formula for evolution, Geddes argued that cities evolved because they were part of the mechanism by which the species, man, adapted to its environment. He also proposed local Cities Exhibitions as permanent institutions in each city centre which, he argued, were a necessary condition for democracy and participation. His view was that if you did not know about the place you lived, and its social, economic, and political connections to the rest of the country and to the world, you could not be a responsible voter. This is a particularly pertinent view for today’s public servants and legislators, where the need for an informed and engaged electorate has never been more acute.

Geddes was the instigator of several ‘grass roots’ neighbourhood projects in Edinburgh, opening up green spaces in the city, for which he earned a reputation as a community activist. He was the author of several neighbourhood planning proposals in Mumbai (he was professor of sociology at the then University of Bombay from 1919 to 1924). In Mumbai, he developed his concept of ‘conservative surgery’ in which the minimum possible urban clearance is done to make way for new building; conservative survey is often cited as the alternative to massive urban clearance projects. He was also the author of several city plans, most notably the master-plan for Tel Aviv (1925), significant portions of which were laid out and built in an early modern style reflecting the architectural aesthetics of the interwar period.

The University of Dundee celebrates its links with Geddes through the Institute for Urban Research that bears his name, a platform for research and scholarship in Architecture and Planning.  Founded by Town & Regional Planning in the 1990’s, the Geddes Institute, with participation from staff in Architecture, Planning, and Geography, functions as host and showcase for research and scholarship projects and activities in Architecture and Planning at Dundee.

Modern environmental movements across the world regularly paraphrase Geddes’ ideas on addressing the conservation of the planet by starting the process in your own back yard when they use the phrase ‘Think Global, Act Local’. Geddes spent his life seeking connections between art and science, urban and rural, people and place, and in the persistence of this particular phrase based on his ideas, he also neatly links the past with the future – our common future.