Scotland's renaissance man

2004 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Patrick Geddes - the biologist, botanist and social thinker who was Professor of Botany at the University between 1888 and 1918.

Murdo McDonald, Professor in Fine Art, and Professor Greg Lloyd of the Geddes Institute in the School of Town and Regional Planning, share their thoughts on the man who was one of the founders of Scottish nationalism and who is internationally recognised as the father of town planning.

Murdo McDonald on Patrick Geddes

Patrick Geddes was an extraordinary polymath, whose power lay in his interdisciplinarity.

In her pioneering biography of Geddes, Amelia Defries helped to characterise this generalism by quoting a comment that he, 'specialises in omniscience'. Echoing this half a century later, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote that Geddes, 'knew that watertight compartments are useful only to a sinking ship, and traversed all the boundaries of separate subjects.' Interviewed in 1994 the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo said, 'Specialisation, specialists, I consider in a way to be an accident of our present time. I think we should go back to the idea of the general view, and in Scotland you have a good grounding in this approach, not least because of the work of Patrick Geddes.'

Geddes's contemporary, the philosopher, classical scholar and educational theorist John Burnet, professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, made an elegant statement of the value of such a generalist approach when he wrote, 'The most important side of any department of knowledge is the side on which it comes into contact with every other department. To insist on this is the true function of humanism.' Geddes and Burnet were in many respects very different, yet Burnet's words could also have been said by Geddes. This underlines the fact that in Geddes’s generalism we find not an intellectually maverick trait but the expression of an enduring interdisciplinary current in Scottish thought. It is this generalism that enabled Geddes to make pioneering contributions not only to biology, but also to town planning; not only to ecology, but also to the revival of communities through the agency of the arts.

In his last lecture to his students in Dundee, before he left to take up the chair of civics and sociology in Bombay, he made this wonderfully-concise statement of his ecological vision, 'How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.'

Greg Lloyd on Patrick Geddes

Sir Patrick Geddes contributed to the natural sciences, sociology, and town and regional planning. Indeed he is hailed as one of the founders of modern land use planning practice, and made an important contribution to environmental thinking - alongside John Muir and Frank Frazer Darling.

His working relationship with Dundee was very flexible, allowing him space to travel and study elsewhere, but his experiences in the city undoubtedly influenced him as he developed his thinking across a wide spectrum of interests. Indeed, his theoretical ideas have much to offer today. He is credited, for example, with the phrase 'world cities' - a concept much in vogue today with the widespread interest in globalisation.

Geddes was particularly associated with the Regional Survey Movement which promoted the integration of plant ecology and sociology, and this proved to be an influence on early town planning legislation. In particular, his ideas relating to regionalism are important in the context of devolution and the belated recognition that public policy and private decision making have marked spatial outcomes. Geddes stressed the dynamic relationships between 'place, work and folk', and explored how regional economies respond to change and adapt through cultural evolution in very individual ways. Dundee must have been a valuable learning space.

Today town and regional planning seeks to promote and control land and property development in the social interest for the purposes of local economic development, community regeneration and environmental sustainability. An important insight of Geddes was his emphasis on the need to understand and capture the spatiality of change. This reflects current European planning practice, and will be evident in the National Planning Framework shortly to be published by the Scottish Executive. There can be little doubt that Geddes’s Dundee experiences provide a rich legacy for modern town and regional planning practice.