1. Prologue: A New Vision of Nature
‘Since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the traditional certainties of science began to dissolve under the impact of new discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology… The rigid boundaries separating these disciplines started to blur as a convergence emerged between the physical, biological, and even social sciences. Researchers began to observe striking similarities between processes in living organisms, non-living systems, and human societies. These parallels gave rise to the hypothesis that the same fundamental laws might govern processes across all such systems…’.[1]
Systems Thinking has gained widespread scientific recognition and diffusion since the mid-20th century, when scientists and scholars from various disciplines, including Ludwig von Bertalanffy (biologist), Alexander Bogdanov (physician and polymath), Kenneth Boulding (economist), Gregory Bateson (social scientist), Howard Odum (ecologist), Ilya Prigogine (physical chemist), David Bohm, Fritjof Capra (physicists), and many others, collectively outlined a complex yet unified and interconnected world view, irreducible to physical laws. Their joint efforts contributed to a gradual shift away from the old mechanistic, deterministic, and reductionistic worldview, replacing it with a more integrated, systemic, and unified view of the world. That was not a rejection of physics tout court; rather, it was a rejection of the classical physics paradigm and an acceptance of the fundamental principles of the new physics. The ‘new vision’ also emerged after Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which showed that systems cannot be viewed in isolation, as they are intertwined with the observers, who become an internal variable of the system being observed. The technical terms relativity of position, on the one side, and decoherence, on the other side, demonstrate the impossibility of studying systems in isolation, contradicting the classical physics and its cognitive apparatus. Quantum Mechanics revealed complementarity as a fundamental principle of nature, showing that the world is a web of interrelations rather than composed of separate entities. This, also, had important philosophical consequences: it was the interactions between subatomic particles that created new unitary entities, atoms, whose emergent properties resulted from their combinations into more complex structures or systems and and their interactions with the human observer, if present. Here, interrelatedness implies a processual and relational continuity, suggesting that all existents are fundamentally united and integrated within the natural world.
On different basis but similar principles, the fundamental interconnectedness between elements, their systemic complexity and unity – organic rather than mechanic – was understood and anticipated by philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, in the early 20th century. Through his process philosophy (or philosophy of organism as it is also called his system of thinking), he introduced innovative concepts to show that the world cannot be reduced to individual facts or isolated beings, implying the fundamental solidarity of nature’s processual entities, including the human subject as an active part (as discussed in Place, Space, Matter, and a New Conception of Nature; see The Place of Processes: Nature and Life for Whitehead’s overall vision of nature, which Geddes was familiar with).[2]
One of the first scientists who popularized this new world vision that integrates relativity, quantum physics, metaphysics, systems theory, and complexity was Fritjof Capra, an Austrian-born physicist, who wrote a series of popular books including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (1997), The Hidden Connections (2002), The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (2016), aiming to bridge the gap between science and philosophical thinking, and providing explanations for the new understanding of Nature and its multifaceted phenomena, including spatial phenomena. Specifically, Systems Theory found its justification as the study of ‘the relationship between patterns and processes of organization in physical, biological, psychological and social systems, challenging the mechanism and reductionism inherent in earlier models, and emphasizing holism, emergence and the self-organizing nature of living systems.’ [3]
The argument of this prologue suggests the reasons why the figure and the work of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish polymath who was a biologist, botanist, sociologist, and town planner, was rather exceptional for his time: here, I have spoken of groundbreaking ideas and systems of thought that changed our understanding of Nature in a holistic, systemic and organic way, which only became widely accepted in the second half of the 20th century. Patrick Geddes, trained as a biologist by ‘an engineer in the organic world’ such as T. H. Huxley, (a disciple of Darwin, the man who put human beings within nature and not over against it), impressed by Comte’s and Spencer’s classification and hierarchy of the sciences (see Image 01, below), self-taught geographer, sociologist, and town planner, was already considering those fundamental principles of nature at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, which was quite exceptional and a testament to his pioneering mind.[4] Of course, Geddes was not the first to have intuitively worked on concepts inspired by the fundamental interconnectedness and systemic unity of nature. His background in biology helped him find connections and hypothesize a fundamental unity and continuity between the physical environment and the social environment, as seen by the social sciences, with his original field of biology and botany serving as a bridge between the two domains.[5] For example, decades before Geddes, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, and explorer who directly influenced Geddes, had an intuition of an interconnected world at physical, biological, and social levels, which led him to spend the latter part of his life outlining this interconnected world based on the scientific data he collected. ‘Everything is interconnectedness’ von Humboldt wrote in his diaries, while in his magnum opus – Cosmos – he wrote: ‘The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.’[6] Similarly, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a contemporary of A. von Humboldt, shared the same interest in a holistic, integrated vision of nature at a more theoretical level. Another direct reference for Geddes, due to his interest in social questions, is the work of the French social scientist Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882): contrary to any form of abstraction, in the book ‘Les Ouvriers Européens’ (The European Workers, 1855) LePlay considered the interconnection of social life and physical territory, through the triad ‘Lieu, Travail, Famille’, which, later, in Geddesian terms, became ‘Place, Work, Folk’; this concept demonstrated to Geddes that basic Darwinian principles (the interrelation of living beings and their environments) could be applied to the social sciences.[7]
Image 01: Diagrammatic Stairway of Knowledge. This diagram, which offers a way to understand the relationships between different disciplines, appears in the book ‘Life: Outlines of General Biology’ (Vol. II) by Thomson and Geddes (1931); it represents ‘the succession of… four distinctive sciences, mathematical, physical, biological, and social, and… their own ascending complexity, and their respective dependence upon their predecessors: so that each (after the first) can only be substantially based and supported by the extension of the preceding ones, so far as they can go towards elucidating its problems and expressing their contributions in their own distinctive ways‘.[8] Confront it with Table I, from the article From Space To Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift… which I adapted from K. Boulding’s ‘Image’ (1956) and L. von Bertalanffy’s ‘General System Theory’ (1968).
The exceptionality of Geddes’ work and his modernity consists in having systematically applied the intuition of the unity of world phenomena – characterized by the complementarity of natural and cultural processes – to the modern science of Town Planning, which he contributed to shape, arriving quite explicitly at an understanding of the territory, i.e., the ‘region’, in unitary terms – complementary and systemic – for the first time. This shift of vision from a mechanistic to a systemic or organic, and holistic conception of nature applied to town planning was aptly described in 1928 by Patrick Abercrombie, an English planner and professor, who said: ‘There was a time when it seemed only necessary to shake up into a bottle the German town-extension plan, the Parisian Boulevard and Vista, and the English garden village to produce a mechanical mixture which might be applied indiscriminately and beneficently to every town in this country … Please dream! Bluntly, what Geddes taught us was, that if you wish to shape the growth of a town you must study it: it sounds simple, but Civic Survey [one of the key points of Geddes’ approach to Town Planning, my note] is a sinister and complicated business. And, indeed, a Civic Survey is not sufficient: it is necessary to go outside town and survey its Region – to grasp in a word its relation to the country and further to the world at large!’[9]
In the 1972 book introduction to ‘Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment’, (1972), editor Marshall Stalley notes that ‘Geddes anticipated an era. His great contribution was a recognition of the oneness of the environment of man and the interrelationship of the natural environment with the physical and the social environment, the recognition that physical planning and social planning are two aspects of the same thing.’[10] Similarly, on the modernity of Geddes, Leonardo Ciacci, a former Professor of Planning at IUAV-Venice and author of a recent book on ‘Patrick Geddes‘ (2023), writes: ‘… his plans are not as innovative as his thinking and his teachings which are still timely, especially today, at the end of the era of industrialization, while we are going toward a new reality still in definition… Now, after one century, for a growing number of scholars, from different disciplines, Geddes is a source of continuous suggestions for interpreting and acting on the new reality of a globalized world.’[11] Among those scholars, Eisenman and Murrey (2017) elucidated Geddes’ work with respect to some of the philosophical and scientific premises I have mentioned above, scrutinizing his activity and thinking through the lens of an integral, contemporary, critical approach: they considered Geddes belonging to the category of ‘integrative holistic thinkers – people whose worldview draws them toward meaning-making narratives and frameworks that unite the many dimensions of the human condition.’[12]
However, who better than Geddes himself can provide insight into this new understanding of Nature, which I outlined above and which formed the basis of one of the most innovative and forward-thinking systems in the design profession?
The requirements of twentieth-century science have had to be frankly reconsidered, and this from that more comprehensive and unified standpoint, synthetic yet evolutionary, which especially distinguishes the opening period from the recent one, which has been, in the main, so content with its multiplicity of unrelated specialisms… I may define this as a change from the formal view of things, considered and analysed separately, and statically thought of as at rest or dead, towards the vital or kinetic view – the synthetic correlation of all studies, henceforth thought of within the moving drama of evolution.[13]
Patrick Geddes
In a nutshell: processual and systemic thinking as the philosophical and scientific bases for theorization. This website – my research at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place – advocates for the same foundations, with the goal of exploring how that mode of thinking can impact our conception of spatiality. This holistic, processual and systemic or organic (‘synthetic’ and ‘vital or kinetic’ in Geddes’ terms) focus that Geddes reserved to Town Planning through the study of physical, biological, ecological and sociocultural processes as complementary terms of the same equation, is not fully assimilated yet, even if, in the last couple of decades, this approach is coming back into the attention of a growing number of scholars, architects and practitioners, for obvious reasons: climatic issues and questions of sustainability – environmental, social and economic sustainability – are on the top list of any agenda: their interconnections and complex handling require a systemic, holistic understanding of natural and human phenomena in addition to usual reductionist approaches, whose importance was also recognized and considered by Geddes.[14]
I firmly believe that Geddes’ influential work and thinking should not be limited to Town Planning and/or Landscape Architecture: just to remain within designers’ professions, his principles can be extended to Architecture promoting a transdisciplinary understanding of design activities and, consequently, their unification, at least in theoretical principles. Undoubtedly, a challenging task, not only for planners, to whom Geddes directly offered the following advice: ‘… the planner’s standpoint changes. No longer has he simply here to garden or there to build, even reconciling as best he can in detail past and present with future, so far as his foresight can go. He must now strive to place himself at a more comprehensive standpoint, the hardest of all to reach – that of the city as a whole – and this not only the particular and concrete city, the local growth, with its advantages and limitations – he must think out for himself anew the civic problem in its many aspects, comparing city with city over the world; and beyond this again he must not shrink from formulating the ideal of the city. This now is no mere Utopia, but is to be stated in terms of modern science, which begins to turn from deciphering the past of evolution to seeking the practical secret of its future guidance.’[15]
With a focus on the unitary character of nature, elaborated through the concept of place-as-system of processes, I advocate for a system of thinking that bridges disciplinary divides, much like Geddes’ groundbreaking research. Let’s examine these questions in more detail through a synthetic outline of Geddes’ work and biography. After that, I will draw parallels between my reformed concept of place-as-system of processes and my proposal for a systematic study of the identity of places, on the one hand, and Geddes’ understanding of region and his proposal for regional surveys, on the other. I hope to achieve two goals with this work: first, to provide an interpretive framework for understanding Geddes’ often challenging arguments and writing style, and second, to offer a fresh perspective on spatial and placial concepts, building on the same, still timely, foundational scientific and philosophical principles that guided Geddes’ thinking and are transforming our understanding of nature from a mechanistic, deterministic, and reductionistic view to an organic, systemic, and probabilistic one.
Seed was cast on many soils and several of the crops that have grown therefrom, under other men’s detailed care, are not connected in most people’s minds with the sower.
H.J. Fleure on Patrick Geddes, 1953
2. The Work and the Life of Patrick Geddes: An Outline
The day and time of publication of this article at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place is a symbolic homage to Patrick Geddes: exactly 120 years ago, at 5 p.m., on Monday, July 18th, 1904, during a meeting before the Sociological Society in London, Geddes presented his unconventional system of thinking, which mixed physical-geographical, biological, ecological, sociological, cultural, historical, educational, political and urban considerations into an integrated whole. Fundamentally, he offered a brand-new perspective to frame the relationship between men and the territory under the title ‘Civics’, which, as we will see, yielded fruitful results in shaping the modern science of Town Planning, although his innovative system of thinking extends beyond Town Planning to knowledge in general. For these reasons, I refer to his approach or system of thinking with the label-attribute ‘transdisciplinary’.[16] Since Geddes’ thinking was based on an evolutionary (time-and-place contingent) understanding of phenomena, I will present the facts and events of his life and work in chronological order, as many other scholars have done before me. This approach will enable us to better understand the key events and places that shaped his vision and approach to life, from childhood to maturity.[17]
Image 02: The Tay Valley seen from Kinnoull Hill, Perth, the place where the young Patrick Geddes grew up.
2.1 Geddes’ Early Years and Education
Geddes was born in the village of Ballater, West of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1854, the fourth son of Captain Alexander Geddes and Janet Stivenson, a teacher. Soon after Patrick’s birth, they moved to Perth, North of Edinburgh, where Patrick was raised. During his infancy illness threatened his life and this fact delayed his entry into school. Years later, Geddes recalled his family’s rite of weekly walks in the garden, as ‘his own earliest surveys’.[18] These outdoor lessons sparked Patrick’s curiosity, and when he started school, he devoured as many books as possible every week to quench his thirst for knowledge. He was particularly drawn to scientific subjects like mathematics and chemistry. His father even built him a small laboratory to prevent damage to their home after Patrick’s experiments. After completing his studies in Perth in 1870, he worked as an apprentice at the National Bank of Scotland, but soon realized he wanted a career in the sciences, so ‘he resumed his studies in chemistry, geology, botany, mineralogy, and physiology… and without the compulsion of pending examinations’ he continued reading to satisfy his curiosity and his literary taste, with authors such as Wordsworth, Ruskin, Emerson and Carlyle, among his favorites.[19] When he was twenty, he selected Botany as his specialized academic field; so, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh where he just stayed one week before returning home disappointed by the rigid, almost flat, exclusively theoretical approach and the lack of critic spirit with which teachers treated the argument he loved so much: ‘what he had always considered a floral wonderland was there treated as just so much material to classify and dissect… He was accustomed to viewing and understanding whatever subject he approached – rocks, plants, people – in the context of their natural habitat. He could not limit his focus for the sake of convention…’.[20] However, that week he became acquainted with the work of biologist Thomas Huxley, a disciple of Darwin, and was captivated by it; as a result, now he wanted to study Biology, under Huxley, at the Royal School of Mines in London. There, he distinguished himself from his colleagues, who were more expert than him, by offering unforeseen solutions to problems that blocked others, thanks to the mental flexibility he had acquired through his personal experiences. He demonstrated that ‘two reputedly irreconcilable positions could, in fact, be reconciled.’[21] Later, he was accepted as a student in Huxley’s zoology laboratory, where he had to adopt formal and traditional scientific methods, despite criticizing them. His Master held him in awe, and the two shared a mutual respect: in a biological experiment on the muscular mechanism of molluscs, he drew conclusions that surprised Huxley, who acknowledged his pupil’s correctness in a scientific article. Geddes never accepted the teaching of others passively: ‘extreme admiration never thwarted his compulsion to investigate every question as thoroughly as possible for himself and to reach his own conclusions.’[22] In London he also had long walks across the city and tried to metabolize its cultural aspects, spending time in art museums and theatres.
In his fourth year in London, thanks to Huxley’s help, Geddes got a job as a demonstrator of practical physiology. That job played a crucial role in his theoretical preparation and future development of holistic and systemic thinking since his research ‘focused on the little-explored borderland between plant life and animal life… becoming more aware than most contemporaries of that “gray” realm of living beings in the province of neither zoology nor botany, strictly defined. These researches led him to question any traditional or facile system of categorization.’[23] An exemplary case for understanding the unity and continuity of nature.
In 1878, on Huxley’s suggestion, he spent the summer at the marine biological station in Roscoff, on the northwest coast of Brittany, France, and later that summer, he worked at the École de Médecine in Paris, studying histology under the director of the biological station at the Sorbonne.
The young Geddes was deeply fascinated by Paris, which ultimately influenced him in two significant ways: firstly, he developed a regionalist spirit through the French Universities’ criticism of Paris’ excessive centralization, and secondly, he discovered the work of French sociologist Frederic Le Play, which led him to draw an analogy between social and biological sciences: Liue, Travail, Famille (Place, Work and Family, that is territory, work on territory, and family as the basic units – territorial, economic, and social – of the relationship between man and the environment), on the one side – the side of the social sciences; Environment, Function, Organism, on the other, the side of the applied sciences. On comparing and elucidating the two triads and exploring the complementary relationship between sciences and social sciences, he will elaborate on his mature thinking as a sociologist and town planner.
The following summer of 1879 was a watershed in Geddes’ life and career. After his application to the zoology department at Manchester University was rejected, he spent two brief periods at the biological stations in Naples and Aberdeen before joining an annual expedition for biological research in Mexico. In Mexico City, he stayed with his brother Robert who worked there. Unexpectedly, spending long hours in open-air conditions, exposed to the sun and dust of excavations while searching for fossil organisms, severely damaged his eyesight, forcing him to spend months in a darkened room to protect his almost blind eyes. That was quite devastating for a young biologist who, for his future career, needed to observe organisms under the microscope. During that dark period, he attempted to find a way out by adapting to his environmental conditions; he started performing mnemonic exercises in the dark to strengthen his mind’s eye and developed a technique he would use for the rest of his life – creating the so-called ‘thinking machines,’ diagrams that enabled him to visualize his thoughts mentally. This is the episode narrated by Abbie Ziffern, when he was in the obscurity of his room: ‘While feeling the windowpanes of the room one day, it occurred to him that the wooden strips formed a diagram on the windows, dividing the wall space into compartments which could be labelled to represent concepts. He began to fold paper, envisioning in his mind’s eye a different label for each rectangle on the paper. For instance, a sheet of paper folded lengthwise, then folded into three equal parts, became a chart with six compartments… he could consider each box the container of his thoughts on the indicated topic.’[24] Later on, I will return to the analysis of one of his most famous diagrams or thinking machines – The Notation of Life.
Then, his career as a field biologist unexpectedly came to an end, and another life and different challenges were disclosed to him.
2.2 From Scientific to Sociocultural, Economic, and Political Interests
He returned to Scotland in February 1880 where he accepted a post at the University of Edinburgh as a botany demonstrator and a zoology lecturer. Meanwhile, he started writing articles and papers and attending meetings at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where, in 1881, he presented the paper ‘On the Classification of Statistics and Its Results’. In this paper, he proposed a new classification system that could serve both physical sciences and social scientists by categorizing all physical data and social findings into five groups: Territory, Organism, Production, Distribution, and Results. He aimed to demonstrate that his synthetic framework could cater to the interests of all specialists.[25] I consider Geddes’ attempt one of the first exemplary cases of a transdisciplinary approach applied to human knowledge (my intent to categorize everything in the world into ‘four boxes‘ – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, symbolic or intellectual – responds to the same necessity of as Geddes; the philosophical and scientific context is that of Systems Thinking–see the article On the Structure of Reality)
Although he continued to apply unsuccessfully to botany departments at various British universities, he remained convinced of the validity of his unconventional, systemic, and holistic approach, which integrated biological considerations to draw social and economic conclusions, demonstrating a convergence of different knowledge areas. He extended the principles presented in his earlier proposal to another major paper ‘An Analysis of the Principles of Economies’ (1884). In one passage his transdisciplinary approach, which allowed him to jump from one disciplinary domain to another, becomes apparent: ‘When any given environment or function, however apparently productive is really fraught with disastrous influence to the organism, its modification must be attempted, or, failing that, its abandonment faced… the technological mechanisms of society must serve people, not vice versa.’[26] Starting from biological considerations, a sharp criticism to the modern society, which we have inherited from the socio-economic milieu of the Industrial Revolution; ; a criticism that remains valid, as it seems to me, since we are still trapped in the ‘vice versa-modality’. This marks the origin of Geddes’ versatile figure as a sociologist and activist interested in improving the urban environment, particularly the squalid slums of British cities, starting with Edinburgh. With this scope in mind, in the same year, 1884, he organized the Edinburgh Social Union. It was in the context of his social activities that he met his future wife, Anna Morton, who ran a girl’s club. Geddes and Anna married in 1886, and they moved into one of Edinburgh’s filthiest slum tenements. They soon demonstrated their commitment to improving urban conditions by setting an example to follow: they converted their flat into a clean, attractive environment, which they used as a weekly meeting point for their neighbors. With their example and advice, they helped upgrade the entire neighborhood, revitalizing its cultural life by attracting Edinburgh’s young intelligentsia. Moreover, the Geddeses rented and renovated some flats near their home, establishing Scotland’s first student hostel, University Hall, which was self-governed by the students–a sociopolitical experiment.
During this period, Geddes focused on adult education, establishing The Summer Schools and Summer Meetings, which featured prominent lecturers from various fields, including evolutionist biologist Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term ‘ecology’, please remember this detail for a following passage of this article), biologist J. Arthur Thomson and political philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Again, when a full professor’s chair in the Botany department at Edinburgh became available Geddes applied for it but his application was rejected for a more conventional botanist. Then, Geddes accepted a newly created chair of Botany at the University of Dundee in 1888, a position he held until 1919. This role allowed him to dedicate time to independent research, experiments, surveys, and lectures, as well as plan and design the university’s botanical garden, showcasing the evolution of species.
He continued and expanded his efforts to promote urban improvements with civic intentions, including extending University Hall to accommodate 40 students, buying properties for his family and Summer School teachers, and redeveloping another area of Edinburgh. Most notably, he purchased a medieval structure with an observation tower, which offered a stunning view of Edinburgh and its surroundings, and renamed it The Outlook Tower which became ‘a three-dimensional teaching device… devoted to conveying facts and ideas’ through a permanent exhibition on the city and the territory outside of Edinburgh (coexistence of local and global aspects).[27] According to American sociologist Charles Zueblin, it was the first sociological laboratory in the world.[28]
Image 03: Panoramic View of Edinburgh from the Outlook Tower.
The Outlook Tower held great significance for Geddes in two key ways: it allowed him to clarify his thoughts on the relationship between territory and human activities, and it provided a platform to share his ideas with a broad audience, highlighting the educational value of exhibitions for the public. Fundamentally, the Outlook Tower was a summary of Geddes’ philosophical and scientific positions.
This is how Geddes explains the exhibition at the Outlook Tower (see Image 04, below) which he considers a Civic Observatory and Laboratory: ‘the general principle is synoptic one, of seeking as far as may be to recognise and utilise all points of view — and so to be preparing for the Encyclopaedia Civica of the future. For this must include at once the scientific and, as far as may be, the artistic presentment of the city’s life: it must base upon these an interpretation of the city’s course of evolution in the present; it must increasingly forecast its future possibilities… Primarily in this way, yet also from the complemental side of nature studies and geography.’[29] This is the philosophical and scientific premise; at the top of the building – where the exhibition begins – there was (and, still, there is) a camera obscura and the possibility to overlook ‘the city and even great part of its region [this is the symbolic value of this synoptic vision]… near and far… Next, a storey below this high Outlook of the artist and its associated open-air gallery for his scientific brother the geographer, both at once civic and regional in rare completeness, there comes […] the Prospect of the special sciences. Here, is set forth the analysis of the outlook in its various aspects — astronomic and topographical, geological and meteorological, botanical and zoological, anthropological and archeologic, historical and economic, and so on. Each science is thus indicated, in its simple yet specialised problem. This and that element of the whole environment is isolated, by the logical artifice of science, from the totality of our experience. The special examination of it, thus rendered possible, results in what we call a “science”…Yet this science, this body of verifiable and workable truths, is a vast and wholesale suppression of other (and it may be more important) truths, until its reintegration with the results of other studies, into the geographic and social whole, the regional and civic unity before us. Here in brief, then, is our philosophy of civics, and our claim for civics in philosophy… The storey below this prospect is devoted to the City. Its relief-model maps, geological and other, are here shown in relation to its aspects and beauty expressed in paintings, drawings, photographs, etc.; while within this setting there has been gradually prepared a Survey of Edinburgh, from its prehistoric origins, and throughout its different phases, up to the photographic details of the present day. In this way, the many standpoints usually divided among specialists are here being brought together… The next lower storey is allotted to Scotland, with its towns and cities. The next to Greater Britain, indeed at times to some representation of the whole English-speaking world, the United States no less than Canada, etc., the Language being here taken as a more sociological and social unity than can be even the bond of Empire. The next storey is allotted to European (or rather Occidental) civilisation, with a general introduction to historical studies and their interpretation… largely international and general; and furthermore, to the comparison of Occidental cities. Finally, the ground floor is allocated to the Oriental civilisations and to the general study of Man, departments naturally as yet least developed. But the general principle — the primacy of the civic and social outlook, intensified into local details with all the scientific outlooks of a complete survey; yet all in contact with the larger world, and these successively in enlarging social zones, from that of the prospect outwards — will now be sufficiently clear; and of course, be seen as applicable to any city.’[30]
Image 04: The Outlook Tower, Edinburgh; on the left, the drawing as it appears in the 1915 edition of Cities in Evolution, with the indications of thematic uses of its storeys for the civic exhibition.
The public success and educational value of this initiative convinced Geddes of the validity of his approach, leading him to replicate and promote the idea of Town Exhibitions as educational instruments on numerous occasions in the following years, starting with the Paris Expo in 1900.
2.3 Crucial Years: 1903-1915
By 1903, Geddes’ mature thinking on the interconnectedness of the environment, human beings, and their activities enabled him to apply his ideas to real-world cases, specifically through regional surveys of cities, where he integrated multiple natural, social, and cultural perspectives into his comprehensive concept of Civics. The opportunity to apply to a concrete case was offered to him when he obtained the commission for designing a Park for the small town of Dunfermline, north of Edinburgh, Scotland. After eleven months of painstaking analysis and global proposals that went beyond the park’s boundaries, he did not get the final job, but he was given the opportunity to publish a 230-page document at the expense of the Dunfermline Trust, the client. This dense document contained many innovative technical precepts for his work as a town planner, including surveying before designing, viewing the city as an organic entity, the importance of regionalism as a meeting ground between local and global dynamics, conservative surgery, participatory planning, the central theme of housing, the importance of gardens as a means of connecting with nature, open public places, and public and civic buildings such as museums, art museums, schools, and universities, particularly for educational purposes.
Image 05: Frontispiece of City Development (1904), by Patrick Geddes, with the picture of the Abbey Church.
Immediately following that important theoretical and practical case study, he delivered two seminal lectures before the Royal Society, in 1904, and 1905, which were later published in the Sociological Papers: ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’ (1905), and ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’ (1906). They especially complemented the theoretical/philosophical part of Geddes’ work defining his all-embracing theory of Civics.
Civics is that branch of Sociology which deals with Cities -their origin and distribution; their development and structure; their functioning, internal and external, material and psychological; their evolution, individual and associated. Viewed again from the practical side, that of applied science, Civics must develop through experimental endeavour into the more and more effective Art of enhancing the life of the city and of advancing its evolution. With the first of these lines of study, the concretely scientific, our philosophical outlook will not fail to widen; with the second, the practical, our ethical insight will not fail to deepen also.[31]
Patrick Geddes
That was the beginning of Geddes’ career as a town planner for the following thirty years. His career had special theoretical relevance, which influenced his numerous proposals in India and Palestine, including a city report, a plan for the city and the University of Jerusalem, and the urban plan for Tel Aviv, the only one that was realized. However, India proved to be the ideal environment for Geddes to apply his innovative ideas, which received high appreciation. He lived there with his wife and son Arthur for a certain period, during which he held a professorship in Sociology at the University of Calcutta from 1920 to 1923, and was sought after to conduct numerous city surveys and develop plans across the Indian Continent, from north to south and east to west.
2.4 Cities in Evolution (1915)
As an architect, I will place special emphasis on Geddes’ Cities in Evolution, a 1915 study that combines town planning and sociology – what we might today call urban sociology, although that term is not as inclusive as Geddes intended; at all effects it is a study of Civics, according to the universal sense attributed by Geddes to that word. In the preface, the author outlines the book’s scope, which is not a technical guide for town planners, but rather aims ‘to emphasise the possibilities of readier and fuller co-operation’ among the various stakeholders involved in studying, planning, and living in urban environments, with the sociopolitical goal of uniting these actors, particularly urban inhabitants, ‘in constructive citizenship’.[32] Such constructive citizenship can only be pursued during the transition from the ‘Paleotechnic Age‘ of inherited Industrial Revolution customs and technologies to a new, emerging ‘Neotechnic Age‘.[33] According to Geddes, the territorial stage for studying cities involves correlating the physical environment with human activities, not just locally, but regionally, where local and global factors intersect. This idea of ‘region’ as the meaningful territorial unit where natural and cultural processes meet was developed by the author years before. In Cities in Evolution, to better define his idea of city-region, Geddes introduced new terms such as ‘conurbation’ and ‘megalopolis’ (via the attribute ‘megalopolitan’), which later became part of the traditional vocabulary of planners and architects.
Similar to previous writings, this book’s outlook reflects Geddes’ comprehensive and holistic understanding of the world, demonstrating how various studies and disciplines, such as geography, biology, ecology, anthropology, sociology, arts, planning, and architecture, intersect to explain the emergence of a superior, organic reality – the city-region – from diverse dynamics.[34]
That fresh or, as I call it, transdisciplinary, systemic, and organic perspective was exceptional for his time. This was rooted in his fundamental ‘evolutionary’ understanding of phenomena, which is immediately evident in the title – Cities in Evolution – and developed over the years through his experiences as a nature-loving schoolchild, biologist, botanist, and scholar of social dynamics. Based on this evolutionary outlook, a possible future for cities can be concretely hypothesized, rather than simply imagined. According to Geddes, by studying and understanding a town or city’s progression from past to present, we can anticipate its possible future – a fundamental belief or thesis of his. Geddes suggests that we should consider possible future scenarios as ‘Eu-topias’ (‘eu’=good, ‘topos’=place, therefore ‘good places’) the ‘place of effective health and well-being’,[35] rather than ‘U-topias’ (‘u’ means a negation, that is ‘non-places’ intended as something not real, or imaginary);[36] unlike historical urban utopias, Geddes’ approach is based on concrete local data and surveys, incorporating physical-geographical, biological, ecological, social, and cultural analyses. It is important to point out that Geddes’ attention to local (regional) dynamics goes hand in hand with the attention he reserves to more global dynamics: in Cities in Evolution, he dedicates different chapters to the study of foreign realities as a mode of confrontation and, if possible, adoption of good practices developed elsewhere.[37] That was also made clear by his permanent exhibition at the Outlook Tower. Complementarity or correlation between different aspects is one of the main secrets of Geddes’ evergreen recipe: local and global, nature and culture, concrete and abstract, thought and action, matter and spirit, science and art, old and new, synoptic and detailed vision, past and present… A man able to reconcile opposites and divisions into integral units (we have already seen that in the episode at the laboratory of biology, where, as a young student, he showed that ‘two reputedly irreconcilable positions could, in fact, be reconciled’ – see note 21): this was Patrick Geddes.
His ‘synoptic’ vision of phenomena enabled him to identify one of the key problems of modern cities, revealing a fundamental sociopolitical message behind his proposals: the issue of housing. If the ‘Paleotechnic Age’ of the Industrial Revolution produced slums,[38] the incipient ‘Neotechnic Age’ could produce corrections and positive effects on housing politics (on a technical side, Geddes’ usual reference for the betterment of housing conditions was the Garden Cities Movement initiated by Ebenezer Howard and realized by Raymond Unwin). A crucial shift in values and procedures was necessary: transitioning from the ideal of ‘money wages’, a product of the energy-wasting ‘Paleotechnic Age’, to the ideal of a ‘vital budget’ or ‘family budget’, which conserves energy and organizes the environment ‘towards the maintenance and evolution of life, social and individual.’[39] In this way the organic health and well-being of citizens and the environment could be pursued.
Once again, Geddes reminds us with his characteristic ability to broaden our perspectives that housing, although an issue ‘of central importance…is but part of that general progress which it is our essential theme to insist upon — from the present predominantly paleotechnic civilisation – variously compounded in each place and phase of mechanical, militaristic, and monetary factors — towards a higher neotechnic phase, characterised by finer industries and arts, by geotechnic and hygienic endeavour, by rustic and urban improvement; and all involved with a corresponding rise of social and individual ideals and practice accordingly.’[40]
Then, How can we achieve the necessary changes in values to create better cities, places, or Eutopias? This, according to Geddes, can only happen through education: education for citizens and education for town planners. Therefore, the final chapters of Cities in Evolution focus on the educational resources required for both citizens and planners, including Civic Exhibitions and Civic Surveys. As usual for Geddes, two complementary aspects.
Civic Exhibitions combined classical models of presentation of cities and newly acquired data from social economy and welfare (statistical data) with the aim to promote civic sense and social well-being; by integrating geographical, historical, anthropological, social, statistical, demographic, and architectural perspectives, these exhibitions studying cities promoted a new synthesis, which Geddes understood and promoted as ‘Civics’.[41] Regarding his integrated approach to the new Science of Civics, Geddes drew on his personal experience, including the 1910 report for The Civic Survey of Edinburgh, which was featured in the Town Planning Exhibition of London, in the same year, and the 1913 Cities and Town Planning Exhibition in Ghent, as well as other cities, where he also showcased an ad hoc City Section to demonstrate the adaptability of his method to diverse local contexts.
Each place has a true personality; and with this shows some unique elements — a personality too much asleep it may be, but which it is the task of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken.[42]
Patrick Geddes
The fundamental, unitary message contained in his method – Civic Surveys – diffused through Civic Exhibitions was clearly stated by Geddes: ‘All our activities — industrial and commercial, hygienic and educational, legal and political, cultural, and what not — become seen in relation to one another, as so many aspects and analyses of the city’s life. To make this life more healthy and more effective, the unrelated individual activities with which we have been too long content are found insufficient; we need fuller co-ordination and harmony of them, like that of the instruments of the orchestra, of the actors in the drama.’[43] The true innovation of his method, compared to other proposals, lies not only in presenting data, drawings, maps, models, and plans, but also in interpreting them through a new scientific and philosophical perspective, which can foster civic spirit in citizens and critical thinking in planners.[44]
From an educational and didactic perspective for planners, Civic Surveys or City Surveys are preliminary, necessary studies for cities before the preparation of town planning schemes. These surveys begin by analyzing the physical-geographical environment (topography, soil and geology, climate, rainfall, winds, etc. – what I usually describe at RSaP as physicochemical processes) followed by the study of a city’s or region’s history and current situation, including its social and cultural aspects, such as industries, manufactures, commerce, population data, movements, occupations, density, and wealth distribution, etc. (sociocultural processes).[45] The analysis of past and present conditions, along with indications of possible developments or requirements, allows for the hypothesis of possible futures.
Some of the practical applications usually suggested by Geddes after the preliminary surveys concern the following points: housing, the improvement of slums, the repair or renewal of existing buildings rather than their demolition, the preservation of historical buildings (conservative surgery), the increase of open spaces and their gardening, the establishment of halls collegiate residence with associate dwellings, the focus on civic/educational buildings (museums, universities, etc.).[46]
To sum up, over a century ago, Geddes recognized that cities were not just the backdrop for conflicts between the Economy, Society, and the Environment, but rather the very embodiment of those and other struggles. To put it in the placial and processual terms that I am calling for at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place, place (i.e., the city or region) is not the stage or background for processes (an outdated even if still traditional and very common understanding of places) but rather is the process itself, which takes shape through the interlacing actions of various dynamics and becomes reified or materialized. Then, the city-place (or the city-region for Geddes) is a system of interacting physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and intellectual or symbolic processes. Although Geddes did not articulate this fundamental principle of places in the same processual terms as I do, it seems to me his understanding of cities in evolution (or regions) expresses the same conceptual vision. In Section 3, we will see better affinities and divergencies between the two models. I conclude this paragraph with a suggestion for the interested readers or the students who are going to approach the study of Geddes: to better understand the mechanisms of cities explained in Cities in Evolution, I suggest them approach the study of Geddes’ earlier works and writings, as they provide valuable insight into the genesis and underlying reasons for the main considerations presented in this book, which is a (somewhat chaotic and disorganic) compilation of his previous thoughts, lectures and writings.[47]
It seems to me there is not profitable access to Geddes’ thinking if not in the transdisciplinary, holistic, systemic and processual, organic and evolutionary approach, as outlined in the opening paragraph. Those are the philosophical and scientific bases of Geddes’ work as well as the foundations of this website, which explores the interconnectedness of environmental and human phenomena, giving rise to cities, towns, neighborhoods, and architectures as unified entities, or places. To uncover the still-relevant information hidden beneath Geddes’ complex writing style and outdated examples, one must use those interpretative keys.
2.5 The Final Lesson
To conclude my outlook on Geddes’ life and work, I’d like to share some words inspired by his final lecture at the University of Dundee, where he was Professor of Botany, titled ‘Biology and its Social Bearings: How a Botanist Looks at the World’, as recorded by his assistant Amelia Defries.[48] I believe the lessons from that lecture are essential to understanding why Geddes’ work and thinking remain relevant today.
Botanists are ‘more reasonable than they seemed, and more practical also for all knowing is classifying’; this is one of the introductory statements by Geddes that highlights two crucial aspects of education: first, the importance of both theoretical and practical approaches to the investigation of phenomena. This reminds us that complementarities and correlations are distinctive traits of Geddes’ characteristic way of thinking–a necessary asset to have an image of facts, events, and happening as complete as possible. Secondly, it is crucial to understand the relationships between different sciences and disciplines, including their order, as ‘all knowing is classifying.’ This fundamental premise is essential for accurate reasoning, as without a clear image of the relative organization of sciences and disciplines, only confusing conclusions can be drawn, especially when studying complex systems or questions. Having a well-settled understanding of this order in one’s mind is a necessary prelude to thinking by systems (see Image 1, above). This is evident in Geddes’ statement in the lecture, where he refers to Linnaeus’s detailed cataloguing of Nature as a ‘System of Nature,’ emphasizing that ‘from science… we get order and system – and good catalogues need clear minds, and make them clearer.’[49] Geddes’ background as a botanist and field biologist was significant, as it allowed him to experience both abstract classifications and the concreteness of nature firsthand: ‘… and this concrete, that abstract, are vitally inseparable in a true and full education.’[50] The message emphasizes the importance of a unitary, holistic, and systemic understanding of phenomena, which requires a clear vision, sequence, and order of details within the broader context, integrating theory and practice, as well as detailed and general views. In addition to observation – Geddes suggests –, what if ‘we also get trained to think, and this by turns in detail and in general views?’[51] Fundamentally, Geddes’ intervention begins by highlighting a new way of observing and thinking about nature, and in this context, the education we receive at school since our early years, is decisive.
The key to deciphering phenomena correctly lies in being able to relate them; Geddes demonstrates a conceptual leap by relating biological facts and observations to social, political, and ethical considerations, which are highly relevant today. Let’s see.
Linnaeus’s new classification of the kingdoms of nature, Geddes says, simplified the old vision from three — animal, vegetable, and mineral — to ‘two, the organic and the inorganic’ and this, in turn, allowed to see more clearly that ‘these are deeply related’ and that ‘the leaf is the chief product and the phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.’[52] This final statement incorporates the conceptual leap proposed by Geddes, which draws an analogy between the world of plants, animals, and human phenomena: ‘By leaves we live’ means that all energy derives from plants, while modern man has traded this natural energy with money: ‘Some people have the strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests. Moreover, the leaves made the coal: coal is but plant-life fossilized; and hence the coal-miners are the modern masters of Energy. Not so long ago these men were literally sold with the mines — they were thus actually serfs, if not slaves, until the nineteenth century; but now, in the twentieth, they are claiming a directive share in the energy they set loose. From the fossil-leafage, which they deal with, has come the past industrial revolution, and now is threatened another.’[53]
As reported by Amelia Defries, Geddes seamlessly transitions from botanical to political and economic considerations, recognizing the direct connection between these domains and the true extent of their conflict, which goes beyond social and economic aspects, as seen by most sociologists, economists, and politicians in the last century; the natural background of this conflict is the environment at large: ‘The economics of the leaf-colony, and its fossil plants, and the economics of metals are coming into conflict; thus the first will again have the largest significance, as in the rural world of old.’[54] Geddes, a hundred years ago, offered a solution to the ongoing conflict, or rather, a direction to follow for its resolution, by reinstating the balance between economic, social, and environmental issues, and correcting the distortions caused by the Industrial Revolution’s negative effects. The true modernity of Patrick Geddes and his still-valuable teaching lies in understanding the fundamental unity of nature, which must be viewed as organic and systemic in its constitution (and synthetically expressed through the correlation of inorganic, organic, social and symbolic states or, physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and intellectual/symbolic processes: this is the interpretation I am proposing at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place) rather than mechanical. Also, Geddes understood the connections between those different states (natural and human, material and spiritual) thanks to a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge. This message about nature and life, about their correlation and unity (we cannot ‘unriddle the secrets of human life, in its struggles and progress and failure, without the study of simple life in nature and in garden’)[55] and against the division of knowledge into separated departments, must be disseminated through education, at all levels, including schools, museums, and cultural activities, which is a recurring theme in Geddes’ teachings.[56] This is the way through which new ideals and values can be transmitted and new citizenship created. A return to Nature is desirable and necessary, but it must take into account human evolution, conditions, and aspirations, which are all part of Nature – a crucial lesson to remember.
After Geddes finished his speech, Amelia Defries noted that the young chairman rose and said: ‘The Professor has given us a method by which to live and teach and work, and a fuller comprehension of life as a whole.’[57]
3. A Comparison with Geddes’ Spatial Concepts and Theories
In this final section, I will propose an analysis of some important Geddesian notions, on the background of the systemic, place-based understanding of reality that I am considering at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place: ‘place as system’, that is, place understood as an all-embracing system of processes – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and intellectual (or symbolic). It is the materialization of such processes which defines the world as we see and experience it: the world of rocks, mountains, clouds, sun and rain, lakes, trees, flowers, parks, dogs, birds, streets and squares, buildings, statues, books, clocks, etc.; but also the world of relationships that connect and create bonds between people, creating groups, institutions, the world of immaterial ideas, ideals, ambitions, values, aesthetic appreciations, intellectual considerations, spiritual beliefs, etc., all of which are correlated with the material world of facts and form reality as an integral whole or system.
3.1 Place as System of Processes and ‘The Valley Section’
I believe the ‘Valley Section’ represents the first comprehensive synthesis of Geddes’ core conviction that the physical environment and human activities interact reciprocally, creating a new environment that is simultaneously natural and cultural, local and global, and structured around a chronological progression (evolutionary). This fundamental principle – which I would argue is a fundamental truth, at least for both Geddes and myself – serves as the foundation for any further consideration of Geddes’ work, which led him to take an active role first as a sociologist and then as a town planner. In my opinion, this is also the primary reason why Geddes’ work continues to be rediscovered and holds such high esteem among scholars to this day.
Image 06: Stained glass reproduction of the Valley Section; originally placed above one of the doors next to the main stairs of the Outlook Tower.
Geddes presented his idea on how territorial factors condition human activities and social aggregation in the famous lecture he read before the Sociological Society, at the University of London, on July 18th, 1904. His concept of the Valley Section, influenced by French sociologist Fredric Le Play’s ideas on content and von Humboldt’s graphic approach,[58] serves as both an ideal and practical tool to illustrate how human aggregation evolved into increasingly complex and layered groups and organizations, ultimately giving rise to cities and megalopolises as the most advanced state of integration between the environment and human activities allowed by such environment.
Although Geddes did not specifically use the term ‘valley section’ in that lecture (which was later formalized in his second lecture, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, before the Sociological Society the following year),[59] the concept was already present. Let’s see how architectural historian Welter M. Volker clearly and concisely characterizes it: ‘The valley section is a longitudinal section which begins high up in the mountains and then follows the course of a river down the mountains and through a plain toward its estuary at the coast. The valley section does not comprise a single valley, but a number of valleys… Into this region Geddes inscribed different meanings. Along the bottom of the diagram, he notes the so-called natural, i.e. best adapted, occupations represented by tools of different trades and crafts. For example, the miner is the natural occupation of the mountain zone where raw materials can be extracted from the rock. Or, the smaller farmer is best adapted to the relatively harsh condition higher up the plain. If these occupations, Geddes argued, exist in harmony with their particular environment, human societies would materialise in the form of such human settlements as can be seen along the valley section. Higher up in the mountains one finds isolated huts and small villages, further down these settlements increase gradually in size until they culminate in a metropolis at the coast. This large metropolis is the one settlement which is not matched with one particular natural occupation. Ultimately, the large city was created by the united efforts of all the other natural occupations and smaller settlements. Geddes does not refer to the obvious fact that a geographical hinterland might support a coastal metropolis. Instead, he expresses in the valley region that Enlightenment theory of social evolution that describes mankind’s development through the four stages of hunting, pastoral, and agriculture toward commercial societies.’[60]
Image 07: The Valley Section by Patrick Geddes, in some of its different representations. Below, it is represented in its connection with an urban environment.
Along with this synthetic description of the working principles behind the valley section, I recall the reciprocity that naturally exists between the physical environment and humans: just as ‘the environment determines occupation and life’, Geddes realizes that, in turn, ‘life ever re-shapes or transcends environment.’[61] If we were to represent in a diagram the progressive reciprocal actions between the contrasting forces of the environment and humans over time, we would see a sort of circuit or spiral: this is how Geddes further elaborated the system of forces acting behind the valley section, using another diagram, ‘The Notation of Life’. Before examining the latter scheme, I will briefly discuss how the dynamics of the valley section, as described by Geddes, align with the place-based and processual conception of reality I present on this website, where I define place as a system of processes.
The first analogy regards the starting point – literally, the ground – of any phenomenon of nature, including human nature: the physical territory. Geddes discusses its physical-geographical aspects, including topography, geology, soil, climate, and so on. I categorize these physical and chemical aspects or phenomena under the term ‘physicochemical processes’. In other words, within the same processual context, we are dealing with inorganic processes. To begin with, any territory is the place of physicochemical processes (i.e., the place where physicochemical processes occur). Disciplines like physical geography, geology, meteorology, hydrology, etc. (earth sciences) describe those processes. The presence of mountains, hills, plains, rivers, lakes, seas, etc.,, which result from the intermingling action of geological, atmospheric, and hydrological processes (i.e., synthetically: physicochemical processes), characterizes the physical conformation of a territory or land – what Geddes often describes in terms of physical geography. More complex forms of processes – i.e., biological processes – emerge from the appropriation of (or integration with) such inorganic processes. This is evident in the physical territory, where life first appears in the form of flora, followed by fauna, (just like for Geddes’ system, the concept of place as system of processes that I suggest acts in the background of the theory of evolution). The original territory, the physical-natural place, then evolves into the place of biological processes. There is a correlation between physicochemical processes and biological processes, indicating reciprocal action and, consequently, reciprocal transformation. For instance, the abundant presence of stromatolites, which have been around for approximately 3 billion years, led to a change in the atmosphere’s composition, allowing new forms of life to flourish and evolve, as these microbial reefs created by cyanobacteria (biological element) produced oxygen (chemical element). The reciprocal action-reaction between physicochemical and biological processes means they co-evolve, forming a new, emergent system that is more than the sum of its parts; we can now define this unitary system as the place of ecological processes. The distribution of flora and, consequently, fauna on the territory is determined by the parallel and intersecting action of physicochemical and biological processes. That is, it determines the presence, abundance or scarcity of natural resources. Human beings’ significant presence and distribution on planet Earth is rooted in their relationship with such natural resources.
Although the biological and ecological account I have described is not explicitly mentioned in Geddes’ narration of the valley section, it is likely that, as an evolutionary biologist and holistic thinker, he was aware of these dynamics or at least he intuited them. In fact, the formalized science of ecology as we know it now did not exist at the time (despite one of its founders, Ernst Haeckel, being a known reference for Geddes). Based on the correlated dynamics between territory and organisms (physicochemical and biological processes), and their adaptation to it (function), Geddes was able to imagine a similar reciprocity between the environment (place), people (folk), and their activities (work).
With the arrival of humans and their activities, the scene or stage undergoes another transformation, shifting from physicochemical processes, where the environment was a mere natural territory devoid of living beings, to biological and ecological processes.[62] What happens now with human beings present? To describe this additional layer of human complexity in places, I use processual terminology, which can be categorized as ‘social processes’, ‘sociocultural processes’, or ‘intellectual/symbolic processes’, depending on the forms and complexity of human processes being examined. This categorization represents a increasing level of abstraction, ranging from the material, such as the simple presence of a small community, to the immaterial, like the sharing of spiritual values and beliefs, a vision I share with Gaddes, which will be discussed in more detail in the next paragraph. To briefly define, social processes refer to the relationships between individuals, ranging from small units like couples or families to large groups like online communities with millions of followers. In Geddes’ valley section, the presence of miners, woodmen, hunters, and others exemplify human communities shaped by social processes interacting with biological and physicochemical processes, including the environment, flora, and fauna. In other words, human activities, or social processes, combine with ecological processes, which encompass the physical and biological environment. It is clear that Geddes’ concept of region – the territorial unit where the environment and human activities intersect – aligns with my understanding of place as a system of processes. At this stage of evolution, when human activities enter the scene, what Geddes calls ‘region’ is, in my view, ‘place.’ Specifically, this place is shaped by social processes that interact with, in descending order of complexity, ecological, biological, and physicochemical processes. In any case, at any level, place (the place of processes) is what substantiates the various structured layers of reality. Then, as Geddes puts it: region = environment + men; whereas according to me: place = physicochemical + biological + ecological + sociocultural + intellectual/symbolic processes. The conceptual dynamics that I describe are fundamentally the same as those described by Geddes. However, whereas ‘region’, ‘environment’, and ‘men’ are general concepts, terms like ‘place’ (in the revised sense I advocate for) and ‘physicochemical, biological, and sociocultural processes’ are, at the same time, more specific and universally applicable. In my hypothesis, place is more than just a generic term or a determinant of geographical or social processes, as we often read in traditional social, geographical, or urban and architectural accounts. Here, place – the concept of place I am referring to – represents an overarching concept that is both universal and particular. ‘Reality is a place, a place of processes’; ‘everything is a place’; ‘we are all places’. These propositions emerge from the place-based approach to life and nature that I am advocating for, which, it seems to me, closely aligns with Geddes’ perspective.
3.2 Place as System of Processes and ‘The Notation of Life’
Now, I’d like to draw a parallel between Geddes’ understanding of ‘region’ and ‘place’, on the one side, and the reformed understanding of spatial concepts that I am discussing at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place, on the other side.
Place is a relevant notion for Geddes, especially, but not exclusively, in the geographical sense. As far as I know from his published writings, it appears that he never explored the semantic, philosophical, or physical implications of the concept of place, nor did he examine it from a theoretical, universal perspective. In contrast, he possessed a unique and exceptional ability to read concrete places or territories from both the practical perspectives of a naturalist and a social scientist, integrating the two into a unified vision. Therefore, we must infer his understanding of placial notions, such as place, region, or territory, from his overall body of work and attitude towards life.
The initial temptation is to assume that Geddes uses the word ‘place’ to refer to a territory’s physical characteristics, such as its topography, climate, soil, and other inorganic or physicochemical processes, (i.e., the common meaning derived from physical geography). This interpretation can be justified by analyzing the graphic below – The Notation of Life, a theoretical device Geddes used to illustrate his understanding of the relationship between humans and territory in the formation of cities (Geddes also referred to his schemes as ‘thinking machines’, which fell between verbal statements and graphic formulae)[63] – where, in the first quadrant, under the term ‘PLACE,’ we find ‘(GEOG.),’ which stands for ‘geography;’ thus, here, place is explicitly associated with traditional geographical connotations. Although this is a common way to understand places, I would like to attribute a broader meaning and scope to the concept of place, moving beyond the reductive view.
Image 08: Place as a key concept in The Notation of Life, a diagram by Patrick Geddes; with this graphic device he aimed at illustrating his understanding of the territory in relation to the activity of men, according to evolutionary and processual dynamics. PLACE – the place of geography (GEOG. in the diagram, in the upper left quadrant) – is the starting point.
However, we now know that this reductive hypothesis is far removed from Geddes‘ approach to any questions; as we saw in the prologue, Geddes avoided reductionism as a mode of thinking or understanding nature, even though he used reductionist hypotheses as a starting point to go beyond them (e.g., see note [14]). Referring back to that graphic or diagram, we observe that the quadrant we have just examnined represents the initial phase of a processual and systemic understanding of the territory or environment, which aligns with the reformed notion of place I discussed at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place, where place is understood as the accretion of physicochemical, biological, socio-cultural, and symbolic or intellectual processes, repectively. Similarly, The Notation of Life diagram is not static and should be read as a process of accretion, with each quadrant building upon the previous one (place, work, folk, feeling, experience, emotion, thoughts…). To read the diagram, we must start in the upper left quadrant, move down, then right, up to the top right quadrant, and finally left again, forming a spiral that moves towards the center.[64] In this way, a place, initially a simple physical-geographical determinant (a natural entity), gradually accumulates meaning by being charged with social, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual values over time, ultimately forming the complex system of the city, where symbolic processes are concretized in the human city center. In the diagram, central part, ‘town’, ‘school’, ‘cloister’, and ‘city’ represent the four successive phases of a place in its relation to human activities; at first, place, as a geographic determinant, is correlated with the most simple human activities to form the town; then, this place-as-town, is correlated with the institutionalization and abstraction of such activities into more advanced social formations of which ‘schools’ are a necessary and, at the same time, representative part or phase – schools are intended by Geddes as ‘schools of thought’, which means a self-reflective attitude toward collective life: only if such attitude is developed can human activities develop into more advanced states or forms represented by social formations; successively, place is correlated with the human intellectual and spiritual ambitions and productions, symbolically represented by ‘the cloister’; here, we are in the realm of religion, philosophy, contemplative, meditative, and imaginative life, ideals, etc.[65] Finally, these phases may evolve into the most complete and complex ‘unity’ – ‘the city proper’ – where beauty, art, culture, and politics, express not merely the highest human ideals, but, most of all, their concrete realization.[66] In this way, the diagram can also be interpreted as a reunification of the dichotomy between concreteness (represented by the upper half, encompassing ‘simple practical life’ and ‘chord of expression in effective life’) and abstraction/symbolism (represented by the bottom half, comprising ‘chord of simple mental life’ and ‘chord of full inner life’). On this website, I often use a specific terminology to describe the re-composition of dichotomies into a new, integral, and functional unity, which can be formalized using the following notation: *( )*, such as place( )space, processes( )systems, abstract( )concrete, mind( )body, physical( )mathematical, and local( )global…
Overall, this fourfold evolutionary interpretation of the relationship between the environment and humans, which involves the stages of ‘town’, ‘school’, ‘cloister’, and ‘city’, parallels the processual and evolutionary reformed vision of place that I am presenting through the sequence of physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and symbolic (including spiritual and intellectual) processes. In the framework that I propose, abstract symbolic processes define the highest level of consciousness in the correlation between humans and places, which can exist in both natural and cultural forms; for instance, consider New York City as the most complex placial/systemic structure, encompassing abstract and spiritual values down to geographical and physical (geological) values (as discussed in What Is Place? What Is Space?). Ultimately, understanding places and territories as a system of processes, as I propose, provides a way to unravel the complex theorization underlying Geddes’ challenging writing style and his thinking machines, or diagrams. [67]
Does this interpretation and analogy, in processual terms, accurately reflect Geddes’ understanding of the relationship between natural and sociocultural phenomena, particularly his concept of place, or am I overstating the central role of place in his scheme?
Familiar with Geddes’ main works and texts, I think that a systemic interpretation is fundamentally coherent and therefore possible. However, I believe it’s less misleading to link systemic interpretation to Geddes’ broader understanding of the environment as a ‘region’ – as he did, afterall – rather than a ‘place’, and move beyond the generic and somewhat simplistic notion that regions are simply places. Maybe, we can better appreciate the difference by considering Geddes’ statement: ‘town-planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it is to be folk-planning.’[68] In this context, Geddes speaks of domestic, social, spiritual, and artistic aspects that must be considered in addition to place, which, once again, seems to be taken as a (‘mere’) traditional physical or geographical determinant – a sort of passive determinant. That is also the reason why in the diagram – The Notation of Life – Geddes speaks of work-place and folk-place, which are characterizations of place that regard the successive evolutive phases of a place: at first, in correlation with human activities (work), and, then, with the institutions, representing people (folk), which result from those activities. But, we see, even from a simple linguistic perspective, in this way place is not an independent concept, which is contrary to my hypothesis (place is an active determinant, at any stage).
The primary distinction between these different spatial concepts – ‘region’, as seen by Geddes, and ‘place as system of processes’, which is the concept I am proposing at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place – is that whereas Geddes’ region explicitly denotes a large territorial unit or environment (a physical/geographical environment, to begin with), the place I refer to can encompass both broad and specific, or limited, territorial units. Fundamentally, I am saying that the same dynamics or principles behind the formation of a region (as seen by Geddes) are also at work behind the formation of any environmental unit, whether big or small – that unit I call ‘place’. Every time a phenomenon appears, independently of its scale or size, we can frame it within the hypothesis of ‘place’ not within the hypothesis of ‘region’, which has a more specific territorial connotation. My hypothesis of place requires that a region can also be understood in more abstract or symbolic terms (including mathematical or geometrical senses) than Geddes’ region. This distinction has significant practical implications: for instance, within the design professions, the concept of place as system applies not only to urban and regional planning (the field of inquiry that is under Geddes’ attention), but also to architecture and product or industrial design (as seen in the example of glass bottles, Image 6 in Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place), whereas the reverse is not true: Geddes’ region has an exclusive domain of application. To illustrate the universality of place understood as a system of processes, consider that it can also be applied to the development of ‘spatial environments’, such as artificial environments on the Moon, Mars, spaceships, or space modules, in the context of astronomical space. Place as system is both universal and particular, extending beyond territorial or geographical boundaries, whereas the region, as seen by Geddes, is not. Through the concept of place as system, the dynamics that Geddes unveiled, and which allowed him to hypothesize new forms of town planning at the regional level, can be extended to hypothesize new forms of planning or design at any scale: industrial design, architecture, landscape architecture, town planning, ranging from neighbourhoods to megalopolis, and even ‘spatial planning’ (in the sense of new human environments in astronomical space). The working concept that allows this staggering extension of sense is ‘place’ (considered as a system of processes), not ‘region’. Elsewhere – see The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society – I have described the continuity of place dynamics in the domain of visible things and phenomena using the concept of ‘fractals’. Regardless of the scale of investigation, whether it’s an object, building, neighborhood, city, region, ecoregion, continent, planet, or astronomical space, the four fundamental classes of processes that characterize any place – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes (all other processes being derivative or contained within these categories) – are always present.
For these reasons, I am more inclined to associate Geddes’ conception of region with my conception of place-as-system, rather than considering them equivalent. As we have seen in the passage above on The Valley Section, Geddes believes that a region’s nature, as a unified territorial structure, is shaped by the combination of physicochemical, biological, ecological, socio-cultural, and intellectual processes that affect it. In this case, we clearly move beyond viewing a region as merely a physical-geographical determinant; instead, the region becomes an all-encompassing term that simultaneously defines both natural and cultural aspects, much like the concept of place-as-system I propose. That’s why I argue that Geddes’ notion of region, rather than his concept of place, closely aligns with my understanding of place-as-system of processes, which expands traditional physical-geographical considerations to encompass biological, sociocultural, and intellectual or symbolic aspects. If his research had focused theoretically and practically on place and the concept of place, he would have likely referred to his work as Place Surveys rather than Regional Surveys. I would say he certainly rethought the concept of region, and, indirectly, he contributed to extending our horizons towards a more appropriate and complete understanding of the concept of place. It seems to me that we are faced with a similar systemic understanding of two distinct spatial concepts: ‘region’ (as defined by Geddes) and ‘place’ (which is of particular interest to me). Clearly, this semantic difference tends to disappear when we share a common understanding of the environment and its underlying principles.
There is another important reason that suggests to me to draw a distinction between the two conceptions of place (Geddes’ notion of place and the revised notion of place as a system of processes). I have anticipated it in the opening section. Let’s see this question in more detail.
Although Geddes viewed region or territory as having a systemic horizon, he never examined the spatial concepts he developed, such as region and place, from both physical and metaphysical perspectives, drawing on his experience as a biologist, social scientist, and town planner. If Geddes had taken that final step, he would have developed a fully-fledged, transdisciplinary spatial theory, which we might better call placial theory in this context. One approach is to examine places or regions from specific, practical perspectives, as Geddes did, anticipating other modern town planners; another approach is to generalize these implications into more universal perspectives, which is necessary for conceptual theorization. Fundamentally, place and the concept of place (or region and the concept of region) are two distinct entities: one is concrete and particular, while the other is abstract and universal, requiring different study approaches that are correlated.
This provides an opportunity to clarify the concept of transdisciplinarity, which is essential to understanding the concept of place I am arguing for, as well as Geddes’ concept of region. Building on Whitehead’s idea of ‘philosophical generalization’ or ‘imaginative construction’, I define ‘transdisciplinarity’ as an imaginative construction that generalizes particular factors observed across various areas of human interest, such as physics, biology, social sciences, the arts, architecture, etc. These specific areas are storehouses of human experience, allowing us to discover general laws or invariants with significant practical applications beyond their original domain.[69] Starting from practical considerations and projects in architecture and planning, I developed a conception of place that I later extended to other fields, including earth sciences, ecology, social sciences, and, particularly, physics and metaphysics. This final step, because of its universality, allowed me to verify the concept’s applicability beyond my original domain of architecture and planning. It seems to me, this final step represents a discontinuity between Geddes’ understanding and my understanding of spatial (or placial) concepts. Then, the reformed sense I wish to attribute to the concept of place, is not only a ‘working’ or ‘practical/pragmatic’ concept in the same physical-geographical, biological, and sociocultural senses (including architectural/symbolic sense) attributed by Geddes to the concept of region; for me place is also (not to say before all) a ‘physical’ and ‘philosophical’ (or ‘metaphysical’) notion, in the sense that it also confronts the generalizations that come from the domains of ‘physics’ and ‘philosophy’: on the one hand, considering the Aristotelian, Newtonian, and Machian or Einsteinian senses, which I have explored in a series of historical- scientific articles, including Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One, and Part Two; Concepts of Place, Space, Matter, and the Nature of Physical Existence, Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality;[70] on the other hand, in the philosophical sense, through a series of philosophical or historical-philosophical articles, including Place and Space: A Philosophical History; Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place; Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality; Place, Space, Matter, and a New Conception of Nature; Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature; Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One, and Part Two.
Before all, place is a fundamental condition of existence; then, its conceptualization can be applied as a working principle across various domains of human knowledge.
3.3 ‘The Identity of Places’ and the ‘Regional/Civic Surveys’
For over a decade, I have felt the need for a place-based document or report that could systematically help design practitioners understand the complex, interconnected dynamics of places. Last year, I responded to a call from the Canadian Centre for Architecture proposing to work on a ‘placial’ framework for one of their research groups; that framework was based on the concept of place as a system of processes and featured the thought-provoking idea of an Identity Card for Places – a synthetic document that provides a basic, systemic understanding of the various components that shape a place’s identity, from natural to socio-cultural and symbolic factors (see The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society). A few months ago, I had the opportunity to test that proposal on real cases, which I will present in an upcoming article, featuring the renovation of three industrial areas in a small town near the countryside in a province of Northern Italy. Then, the idea for a new article at RSaP originated as a comprehensive piece on Place, Urban Planning, and Architecture, and was originally structured into three parts: the first part would explain the idea of the Identity Card for Places, which is essential for evaluating a place before intervening through planning and design; the second part would survey the historical approaches of architects and planners to places as a direct focus of interest; and the third part would present the case studies developed from the place-based document made before the project – i.e., ‘The Identity Card for Places’. However, as the information grew, I decided to split the article into three articles, and it was while working on the historical analysis of how architects and planners approached places that I gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of Patrick Geddes’ work, beyond the traditional association of his name with the Garden City Movement, which was my previous limited knowledge of him. To make a long story short, I was deeply impressed by his works, particularly ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’ and his ‘City Development’, which showcased a systemic, evolutionary, and organic approach similar to my own understanding of the concept of place as system and the proposal of an Identity Card for Places. In fact, after discovering Geddes’ works, I realized that my idea of an Identity Card for places, which might have seemed bizarre, impractical, or naive, was actually not so: it was a similar proposition, expressed in different language, but rooted in the same processual and systemic thinking as the Geddesian hypothesis of regional surveys.
I redirect you to the article The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part I: The Identity of Places to consider the fundamental value of the analysis of places, whether through the Geddesian formula ‘Regional Survey’ or the thought-provoking idea of an ‘Identity Card for Places’, which we could also imagine in the more reassuring terms of ‘Place Survey Report’. For a historical survey of how architects have approached place as a direct topic of inquiry in past epochs, I redirect you to the article The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey. For the case study, see The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part III: A Case Study.
POSTSCRIPT (August 2025): I recently found that the historic International architecture magazine Le Carré Bleu – feuille Internationale d’architecture, dedicated issue 2/1993 to the work of Patrick Geddes. The issue, titled L’ACTUALITÉ DE PATRICK GEDDES, BIOLOGISTE – ÉDUCATEUR – URBANISTE, offers a fascinating exploration of Geddes’s multifaceted and always timely legacy. I invite readers to click on the title-links to access the original documents and the online magazine, which is free of charge.
Notes
[1] See the paper: From Space to Place. A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture as a Way to Handle the Increasing Complexity and Connectivity of Real-World Systems.
[2] Some of the innovative concepts by Whitehead – such as ‘the theory of prehension’, ‘concrescence’, or ‘withness’ – had a more or less direct echo in Geddes’ work. I was not surprised when I noted that Whitehead’s ‘Science and the Modern World’ had an explicit citation in the book Geddes co-authored with Thomson: Arthur J. Thomson, and Patrick Geddes, Life: Outlines of General Biology, vol. two (London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931), 1497 (representative selection of useful books: ‘Guide to Biological Reading – Philosophy & Biology’). Fundamentally, the evolutionary, processual, and unitary outlook of nature as an interpretative key of phenomena is the philosophical ground of both Whitehead’s and Geddes’ theorizations (the same philosophical principles play an important part in my reformed understanding of spatial concepts). It was Thomson who wrote a review for Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, in 1925. On the website of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, which hosts Geddes’ papers, we read the following note regarding the scope and the content of that review: ‘Alfred North Whitehead, 1861–1947, was the originator of “Process theory” in philosophy. Significantly, for Geddes and Thomson, the theory rejects philosophies which value static notions of being and instead advances a dynamic notion of becoming that views the world as “a web of interrelated processes” over an independence of things.’ Web link: https://atom.lib.strath.ac.uk/review-by-j-arthur-thomson-of-science-and-modern-world-by-n-whitehead
[3] Debora Hammond, ‘Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Systems Thinking’ in triple 3(29) 2005, 22
[4] Patrick Geddes studied with T.H. Huxley, who was a disciple of Darwin. For the description of T.H. Huxley ‘who called himself an “engineer” in the organic world’, see Fleure H. J.: ‘Patrick Geddes (1854–1932)’, in The Sociological Review, 1(2), 1953, 5–13, 5. On Geddes’ enthusiastic engagement with the ideas of Darwin, Fleure, on page 7, wrote: ‘One of the most fundamental elements of Darwin’s thought was that living beings and their environments made up a whole, that to separate them and discuss influences of heredity and environment apart was to go astray into artificial abstractions, and on this truth, Geddes seized with enthusiasm.’ On the influence of Auguste Comte’s Thinking on Geddes, in the address to the introductory meeting of the Dunfermline Naturalists’ Society, 17th December 1902, Geddes said: ‘It is two generations since Comte demonstrated the dependence of sociology upon biology…’. In Patrik Geddes, ‘A Naturalists’ Society and its Work’ (in Scottish Geographical Magazine, 19:2, 1903) 94. See also: Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick: Rutgers university Press, 1972), 8. Concerning Spencer’s hierarchy of the sciences and their influence on Geddes’ thinking see Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and Planner (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005), 33
[5] The fruit of the correlation between biological studies and the realm of the social sciences was appreciable in the text he co-authored with naturalist J. Arthur Thompson, ‘The Evolution of Sex’ (1889), which, Fleure says, ‘is full of sociological implications and applications.’ In Fleure H. J.: ‘Patrick Geddes (1854–1932)’, in The Sociological Review, 1(2), 1953, 5–13, 8.
[6] See Detlev Doherr, ‘Alexander von Humboldt’s Idea of Interconnectedness and its Relationship to Interdisciplinarity and Communication’, in Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 13, 6, 2015, 48. As far as I know, Geddes cited the work of von Humboldt as a source of direct inspiration for his work on a few occasions: Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II’. Sociological Papers, Vol. II. London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906, 65. Specifically, with respect to his concept of ‘Valley Section’ and the use of ecological maps that could support them, Geddes said that those maps broadly speaking ‘are all variants of Humboldt’s first diagrams’: in Arthur J. Thomson, and Patrick Geddes, Life: Outlines of General Biology, Vol. two (London: Harper & Brothers, publishers, 1931) 1396; see also Eisenman, Theodore S. and Murray, Tom, ‘An integral lens on Patrick Geddes’, in Landscape and Urban Planning, 166, (2017), 45.
[7] Many times, on different occasions, Geddes cited his intellectual debts towards those who preceded him and posed the theoretical basis for his work – e.g., Darwin, Huxley, Comte, Spencer, LePlay, and many others; however, Geddes expressly says in one of his works, ‘with all respect to each and all these classifications and methods, indeed with cordially acknowledged personal obligation and indebtedness to them from first to last, no one of these seems fully satisfactory for the present purpose [he is referring to his idea of a new urban sociology which, among other fruitful results, will take him to new ideas and approaches to Town Planning]; and it is therefore needful to go into the matter afresh for ourselves, though utilising these as fully as we can.’ Everything, Geddes continues, is ‘everywhere latent and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately systematised’. This is ultimately the task Geddes set forth for his life. In: Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II’. Sociological Papers, Vol. II. London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906, 67. See also: Cities in Evolution, second edition 1947, 200.
[8] In Arthur J. Thomson and Patrick Geddes, Life: Outlines of General Biology, vol. two. (London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931) 1303.
[9] Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 66-67.
[10] Ibid., x.
[11] Leonardo Ciacci, Architetti e Urbanisti del Novecento: Patrick Geddes (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2023), 12, 56. I am the author of the English translation.
[12] Theodore S. Eisenman and Tom Murray, ‘An integral lens on Patrick Geddes’, in Landscape and Urban Planning, 166, (2017), 44
[13] Patrick Geddes, City Development: a Study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Bournville: The Saint George Press, and Edinburgh: Geddes & Company, 1904), 18.
[14] In a passage of the lecture ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, Geddes, who is the proponent of an antireductionist vision of world phenomena, shows that he is also aware of the importance of the traditional reductionist approach to science to add a deeper insight to the scientific method; so, by focusing on geographical determinism as a method to explain the Valley Section (a diagram concerning the relationships between the natural territory and human activities) he observes: ‘why raise so controversial suggestion [the adoption of geographical determinism]? this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civic importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine this aspect of the city’s map and shield, and to get from it what it can teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor excluded from consideration when we come to them.’ Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II’. Sociological Papers, Vol. II. London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906, 64. Both approaches, the reductionist and the systemic, are necessary to have a complete understanding of phenomena: general and detailed view, all at once. Here, as a kind of methodological advice or suggestion, it is opportune to point out what also Eisenman and Murrey noted in their paper, reporting a consideration made by Lewis Mumford: ‘Synthesis is not a goal: it is a process of organization in operation, never finished. Any attempt to produce a single synthesis good for all times, all places, all cultures, all persons is to reject the very nature of organic existence’. In Eisenman, Theodore S. and Murray, Tom, ‘An integral lens on Patrick Geddes’, in Landscape and Urban Planning, 166, (2017), 51.
[15] In Patrick Geddes, City Development: a Study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Bournville: The Saint George Press, and Edinburgh: Geddes & Company, 1904), 19.
[16] There is much confusion and arbitrariness behind the use of terms such as ‘transdisciplinary’, ‘multidisciplinary’, and ‘interdisciplinary’, which are often used indiscriminately and interchangeably, even with respect to Geddes’ work. Since those terms have strong scientific (i.e., specific) connotations, I suggest their use be as close as possible to the original scientific designations given by those scholars who first coined or used and elucidated those terms in the context of their seminal research. Therefore, I have adopted the classification made by Eugene P. Odum – one of the founding fathers of Ecology – after Erich Jantsch, an Austrian polymath and physicist, who, in 1970, at a Seminar on Interdisciplinarity in Universities organized by CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation), wrote a pioneering, almost neglected paper on that argument – Towards Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Education and Innovation (published in 1972), – proposing the first systematic organization and explanation of those terms, which were later adopted and popularized by E.P. Odum and G.W. Barrett, since the fifth edition of their successful book ‘Fundamentals of Ecology’. This is the schema from that book:
Image 09: ‘Progression of relations among disciplines from disciplinary reductionism to transdisciplinary holism (after Jantsch, 1972)’, in Fundamentals of Ecology (fifth edition) by E.P. Odum and G.W. Barrett.
On the basis of those premises, I consider the holistic approach used by Geddes ‘transdisciplinary’, since he was able to hypothesize a multi-level coordination between different domains of human knowledge – physical geography, anthropology, biology, social sciences, design disciplines, etc. – integrating them into a new synthetic expression (Civics); after all, as Geddes understood very well, the city itself is a whole, an integrated system of many different processes. Geddes’ unitary work on the correlation between men and the environment transcends the boundaries of many disciplines going beyond sectorial divisions or reductive statements. On ‘transdisciplinarity’ as a new synthesis of knowledge, see also my reference to Whitehead’s considerations on note [69].
[17] For the biographical notes, I will mainly draw on the pages of ‘Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment’; the biographical section was compiled by Professor Abbie Ziffren. In: Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 4-101.
[18] Ibid., 4.
[19] Ibid., 5.
[20] Ibid., 5.
[21] Ibid., 6.
[22] Ibid., 7.
[23] Ibid., 8.
[24] Ibid., 11.
[25] Ibid., 15.
[26] Ibid., 16.
[27] Ibid., 26.
[28] Leonardo Ciacci, Architetti e Urbanisti del Novecento: Patrick Geddes, 22
[29] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915), 320.
[30] Ibid., 321-325.
[31] Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’. Sociological Papers. London: McMillan & Co., Limited, 1905, 111.
[32] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915), v.
[33] In the same way ancient civilizations were distinct into ‘Paleolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’, Geddes proposes a meaningful division between the ‘Paleotechnic Age’ and ‘Neotechnic Age’: the first – which correspond to the modern age – is characterized by the discoveries and technologies of the Industrial Revolution, and, therefore, it is an era rooted in the order of the machine; the other, the incipient era of disengagement from the past, according to Geddes, is ‘rooted in the order of Nature’, and will shape new values other than using technology to favour the creation of a better environment, a better place (Eu-topia). In Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 60-83.
[34] In different parts of the text Geddes refers to the nature of the city as ‘a whole’, in an organic sense, similarly to the way an organism, which is a ‘whole’ entity, evolves with-in the environment: so he speaks of railways, streets, telegraphic wires as ‘the roaring pulses of the intensely living whole’ – the city – or he speaks of the necessity of ‘a synoptic view’ of the city, that is the ‘seeing of the city…as a whole’, which demands ‘comprehensive foresight and civic statesmanship as a whole’. Among his organic analogies, we also find a passage where Geddes equates architecture, i.e., buildings, to ‘fossil shells and corals’, with that meaning a mechanistic or formal way to intend architecture (devoid of life, that is, without taking into consideration its inhabitants, which should be the starting point of any thought about architecture) which is very far from the organic understanding of phenomena he proposes. In: Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915), 27, 14, 25, 142. This analogy between city and organism is also pursued through frequently used terms such as ‘growth’ and ‘body’ (with special reference to politics, institutions and citizens).
[35] In Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 73.
[36] Geddes offers this explanation of the difference between Eu-topia and U-topia (Ou-topia) in ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’, 117. It is his approach in concrete regional terms that distinguishes his proposals as Eu-topias, possible good places, concretely realizable, against historical U-topias (Ou-topias), which are realizable nowhere.
[37] E.g., See Chapter VIII, where he presents a ‘eulogy of modern France and of Paris, of the United States also, with examples of their contemporary civic progress and city design’, or Chapters IX and X, where he refers to exemplary cases of town planning in Germany with the following intent: ‘Learn from Germany? Certainly yes! Imitate Germany? Certainly no.’ (in Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 206), or, again, Chapter XI, where Geddes also presents the case for recent planning improvements in Canada, Australia and India.
[38] ‘What is this concrete goal and final generalisation of the paleotechnic industry and its economics alike, this synthetic achievement and concept of its main doing and thinking? In a single word, it is — Slum.’ In Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 116.
[39] Ibid., 60.
[40] Ibid., 243.
[41] Ibid., 266.
[42] Ibid., 397.
[43] Ibid., 268.
[44] ‘From all these, our main thesis becomes clear — that Region and Industry, Place, Work, and People, are reobserved and reinterpreted by such studies.’ Ibid., 286.
[45] A schematic outline for the city survey is presented by Geddes, in Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 356, 357.
[46] Ibid., 326.
[47] see Pierre Chabard ‘Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution: The Writing and the Readings of an Intempestive Classic’ in Manifestoes and Transformations in the Early Modernist City, ed. Christian Hermansen Cordua (London: Routledge, 2016), 172.
[48] The transcription of that 1919 lecture, among other places, is contained as an Appendix in the second new and revised edition of Cities in Evolution (1947), edited by Geddes’ son, Arthur, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.
[49] Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1947), second new and revised edition, 214-215.
[50] Ibid., 215.
[51] Ibid., 215.
[52] Ibid., 216.
[53] Ibid., 217.
[54] Ibid., 217.
[55] Ibid., 223.
[56] In the final part of the lesson Geddes drew a schema on the blackboard for a new organization of some departments of knowledge within universities with the scope to cover all the domains of human knowledge, creating couples of opposite disciplines, e.g., Physics & Aesthetics, Biology & Psychology, Sociology and Ethics etc., so to escape ‘the extremes of the materialistic and the idealistic position.’ Ibid., 229.
[57] Ibid., 230.
[58] In Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Geddes explicitly mentioned his intellectual debit towards the French Sociologist Le Play ‘as one of the main founders of sociology’ who must be acknowledged the merit for ‘his renewed insistence upon the elemental rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organization alike, from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in varied and varying environment.’ In Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, Part II. In Sociological Papers, Vol. II. (London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906), 61. Concerning the use of diagrams and maps and the possible influence that von Humboldt may have exerted on Geddes, see note 6, above.
[59] This is the incipit of paragraph B – ‘Initial Methods of Concrete Survey’ of Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology: ‘Hence our civic studies began (…) with the survey of a valley region inhabited by its characteristic types-hunter and shepherd, peasant and fisher-each on his own level, each evolving or degenerating within his own region. Hence the concrete picture of such a typical valley section with its types of occupation…’. In Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, Part II. In Sociological Papers, Vol. II. (London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906), 60.
[60] Welter M. Volker, Post–War CIAM, Team X, and the Influence of Patrick Geddes: Five Annotations (Conference proceedings, CIAM Team, 2002), 90-91.
[61] Patrik Geddes, ‘A Naturalists’ Society and its Work’. In Scottish Geographical Magazine, 19:2, 1903, 94
[62] The terms ‘scene’ and ‘stage’ are spatial or, better, placial (that is place-based) concepts (spatial if the scene/stage is abstract; placial, or place-based if, as in this case, it is concrete.
[63] Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, Part II. In Sociological Papers, Vol. II. (London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906), 66.
[64] The conceptual explanation contained in the diagram – or thinking machine – was the main subject of Geddes’ conference at the Sociological Society on Monday, January 23rd, 1905; the title was ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II’. The final diagram, as we see it in the version I have also published, was not completed until 1927: see, Welter M. Volker, Post–war CIAM, Team X, and the Influence of Patrick Geddes: Five Annotations, Conference proceedings, CIAM Team, 2002, 92.
I want to point out a conceptual similarity between Geddes’ schema – The Notation of Life – and a diagram I conceived for the project ‘Badel Block Redevelopment in Zagreb’ – see Image below – more than ten years ago (when for me Patrick Geddes was just the name of an old town planner, associated with the Garden City Movement), and which I used to explain the processual, evolutionary and combinatory processes of formation of a city (the city as the stratification of physicochemical, biological and sociocultural processes). The two diagrams are very similar in their conceptual and systemic hypothesis, other than for their use of the spiral as a graphic, processual and dynamic, form of expression (a ‘triple helix’ in my case) to communicate progression (evolution) along spatiotemporal scales.
Image 10: ‘Badel Block Redevelopment Project‘, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto. The diagram shows the city of Zagreb understood as the unitary expression (correlation) of physicochemical, biological and sociocultural processes along an evolutionary timeline.
[65] A referential placial image for the cloister, representative of ‘Geddes’ understanding of the correlation between the Medieval university town and contemplative life’, can be that of the famous painting by Antonello da Messina, St. Jerome in his Study, 1475. In Holm Lorens, Gopinath Deepak, Jarron Matthew. The City is a Thinking Machine: Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution, 16.
[66] Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology’, Part II. In Sociological Papers, Vol. II. (London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906), 91-92.
[67] Geddes was aware of the difficulties behind his writing style and argumentations; e.g., in City in Development, he wrote: ‘the variety and intricacy of subject, and the sometimes needful abstractness of thought, make this volume less readable than I had hoped.’ In Patrick, Geddes, City Development: a Study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Bournville: The Saint George Press, and Edinburgh: Geddes & Company, 1904), 19.
[68] Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 77.
[69] Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), 5.
[70] From the very beginning of my research on ‘place’, I tried to establish a connection between the traditional concept of place and the modern concept of field in physics since I believed – and still I do – in the unitary character of all phenomena of nature: so, for me, the analogy between place and field was an immediate possibility to unveil the fundamental connection between all existing things (and related phenomena), all of them understood as different states of place or fields, rather than solitary ‘things’, ‘objects’, or ‘matter’ – See the paper: From Space to Place. A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture as a Way to Handle the Increasing Complexity and Connectivity of Real-World Systems or Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality or Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place. In this regard, at RSaP, I have often quoted some passages from Einstein and Infeld, e.g.: ‘… what are the physical criterions distinguishing matter and field? … From the relativity theory we know that matter represents vast stores of energy and that energy represents matter. We cannot, in this way, distinguish qualitatively between matter and field, since the distinction between mass and energy is not a qualitative one. By far the greatest part of energy is concentrated in matter; but the field surrounding the particle also represents energy, though in an incomparably smaller quantity. We could therefore say: Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy is small. But if this is the case, then the difference between matter and field is a quantitative rather than a qualitative one. There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other…There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality.’ In Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (London: The Scientific Book Club, 1938), 256-258. Again, let’s see what Leopold Infeld says concerning this new – ‘placial’ I’d say – vision of nature: ‘The transition from particle physics to field physics is undoubtedly one of the greatest, and, as Einstein believes, the greatest step accomplished in the history of human thought. Great courage and imagination were needed to shift the responsibility for physical phenomena from particles into the previously empty space and to formulate mathematical equations describing the changes in space and time… I see an object; how can I understand its existence? From the point of view of a mechanical theory the answer would be obvious: the object consists of small particles held together by forces. But we can look upon an object as upon a portion of space where the field is very intense or, as we say, where the energy is especially dense. The mechanist says: here is the object localized at this point of space. The field physicist says: field is everywhere, but it diminishes outside this portion so rapidly that my senses are aware of it only in this particular portion of space.’ In Leopold Infeld, ‘Quest: An Autobiography’ (New York: Chelsea Publishing Company, 1980), 257. It was also based on those kinds of considerations of the new physics that I began to hypothesize Nature as an endless chain of places (Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place) or of different states of place, passing from natural phenomena to human-cultural and symbolic phenomena (i.e., physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, symbolic states of place and/or processes), rather than a collection of separated/individual things, bodies, objects… or buildings in ‘space’ (however, this belief of mine had distant roots since my very conception of ‘building’, which I started to develop during my years at the university, already showed my understanding of the architectural phenomena as something extended in the circumambient world, rather than something secluded in a specific portion of ‘space’ – see Archi-textures). A mode of understanding nature as a whole, unitary and organic, state of different places. Place, at the same time, is that which guarantees unity and differentiation – the principle (= archè) of all things. And physics reconnects to philosophy.
Works Cited
Chabard, Pierre. ‘Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution: The writing and the Readings of an Intempestive Classic’. Manifestoes and Transformations in the Early Modernist City, ed. Christian Hermansen Cordua. London: Routledge, 2016, 169-179.
Ciacci, Leonardo. Architetti e Urbanisti del Novecento: Patrick Geddes. Roma: Carocci Editore, 2023.
Doherr, Detlev. Alexander von Humboldt’s Idea of Interconnectedness and its Relationship to Interdisciplinarity and Communication, in Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol. 13 (6), 2015, 47-51.
Einstein, Albert and Infeld, Leopold. The Evolution of Physics. London: The Scientific Book Club, 1938.
Eisenman, Theodore S. and Murray, Tom, ‘An integral lens on Patrick Geddes’. Landscape and Urban Planning, 166, (2017), 43–54.
Fleure, Herbert John. Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). The Sociological Review, 1(2), 1953, 5–13.
Geddes, Patrick. ‘A Naturalists’ Society and its Work’. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 19:2, 1903, 89-95,
—. City Development: a Study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Bournville: The Saint George Press, and Edinburgh: Geddes & Company, 1904.
—. ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’. Sociological Papers. London: McMillan & Co., Limited, 1905, 103-118.
—. ‘Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II’. Sociological Papers, Vol. II. London: McMillan & Co. Limited, 1906, 55-111.
—. The Civic Survey of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, Chelsea: Civic Department Outlook Tower, Crosby Hall 1911.
—. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. London: Williams & Norgate, 1915.
—. Cities in Evolution, new and revised edition edited by The Outlook Tower Association Edinburgh and The Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction London. London: Williams & Norgate, 1947, 214-230.
—. ‘The Movement towards Synthetic Studies, and its Educational and Social Bearings’. The Sociological Review, a20(3), 1928, 223-232.
Hammond, Debora. ‘Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Systems Thinking’. tripleC 3(29) 2005, 20-27.
Holm Lorens, Gopinath Deepak, Jarron Matthew. The City is a Thinking Machine: Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution.
Infeld, Leopold. Quest: An Autobiography. New York: Chelsea Publishing Company, 1980.
Jantsch, Erich. ‘Towards Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Education and Innovation’. Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities. Washington: OECD Publications Center, 1972.
Lefaivre, Liane and Tzonis, Alexander. Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, second edition. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Parker, Harry. The Regional Survey Movement and Popular Autoethnography in Early 20th-Century Britain, in History of the Human Sciences Vol. 36(3-4), 2023, 3–26.
Stalley, Marshall. Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972.
Volker M. Welter. Post–war CIAM, Team X, and the Influence of Patrick Geddes: Five Annotations. Conference proceedings, CIAM Team, 2002.
Thomson, Arthur J., and Geddes, Patrick. Life: Outlines of General Biology, vol. two. London: Harper & Brothers, publishers, 1931.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Patrick Geddes, from a drawing by Gerald Smith, 1912, in Amelia D. Defries, The Interpreter Geddes: The Man and His Gospel (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1927).
Image 01: from the book by Arthur J. Thomson and Patrick Geddes. Life: Outlines of General Biology, Vol. Two. (London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931), 1303.
Image 02: by Matthew Hall, from Google Maps, Images
Image 03: via www.daytripper365.com
Image 04: The Outlook Tower, source image via Wikipedia.org
Image 05: from the book City Development (1904), by Patrick Geddes.
Image 06: via Edinburgh University Press Blog, www.euppublishingblog.com
Image 07: The Valley Section, University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections. Coll-1167 – A1.13
Image 08: The Notation of Life, from the second edition of Cities in Evolution, (1947), page 194.
Image 09: from the book Fundamentals of Ecology (fifth edition) by E.P. Odum and G.W. Barrett, page 15.
Image 10: Badel Block Redevelopment Project, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto.
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Aado
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Alessandro Calvi Rollino
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