1. Prologue: A New Vision of Nature
‘Since the middle of the nineteenth century, many traditional scientific certainties faded away, because of discoveries in Physics, Chemistry and Biology… A convergence between physical, biological and social sciences began and similarities between processes in living, non-living and social systems were noted. This led to hypothesize the existence of similar laws behind processes from different systems…’.[1]
Systems Thinking had general scientific recognition and diffusion since the middle of the XX century, when, scientists and scholars from different disciplines, such as 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, started to outline the image of a complex yet unitary, interconnected world, irreducible to physical laws. Their joint efforts contributed to the progressive abandonment of the old mechanistic, deterministic and reductionistic world vision in favour of an integrative, systemic and unitary image of the World. That was not a rejection of physics tout court, quite the contrary: it was the rejection of the classical paradigm of physics and the acceptance of the fundamentals of the new physics. The ‘new vision’ also emerged after Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which, ultimately, stated that systems couldn’t be viewed in isolation but were ingrained with the observers who/which became one internal variable of the system under observation: relativity of position, on the one side, decoherence, on the other side, were technical terms that determined the impossibility to study systems in isolation, as classical physics and its cognitive apparatus believed. Quantum Mechanics unveiled complementarity as another important working principle of nature, other than discovering the structure of the world as a web of interrelations rather than composed of neatly separated entities. This, also, had important philosophical consequences: it was the action and relations between subatomic particles that created new unitary entities – atoms – whose emergent properties were the result of their combinations into more complex structures or systems and interacting with the human observer, if present. Here, interrelatedness is synonymous with processual and relational continuity: it was that continuity between all existents that also suggested the integrative and fundamental unity of (the phenomena of) nature.
On different basis but similar principles, that fundamental interconnectedness between elements, their systemic complexity and unity – ‘organic’ rather than mechanic – was understood and anticipated by philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead, in the first part of the 20th century, when, through his process philosophy (or philosophy of organism as it is also called his system of thinking), he presented innovative concepts to depict the irreducibility of the world to mere singular facts or isolated beings, thereby implying the fundamental solidarity of the constituents of nature understood as processual entities, among them the human subject as an active part (I’ve talked about this new philosophical mode of understanding nature in Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature; concerning Whitehead’s overall vision of nature, which Geddes was acquainted with, see The Place of Processes: Nature and Life).[2]
One of the first scientists who popularized this new world vision, in between metaphysics, relativity, quantum physics, theories of systems and complexity was the Austrian-born physicist Fritjof Capra, who wrote a series of popular books – 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) – with the aim to bridge the chasm between the sciences (those titles are accessible scientific and philosophical introductions to such complex questions which point to a new understanding of Nature and of its multifold 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) – Scottish polymath, biologist, botanist, sociologist, and town planner – was rather exceptional for his time: here, I have spoken of groundbreaking events and systems of thought that changed our understanding of Nature in a unitary, systemic and organic sense, and became of public dominion only in the second part of the XX 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 men 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 working principles of nature, at the end of the XIX century and in the first part of the XX century.[4] That was quite exceptional: the fruit of a pioneering mind. 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 as a biologist certainly favoured him in finding correspondences and hypothesize a fundamental unity and continuity between sciences (the physical environment) and the social sciences, being his original domain of provenance (field biology and botany) a bridge between those two domains.[5] For instance, decades before Geddes, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the German polymath, geographer, naturalist, and explorer who also exerted some direct influence on Geddes, already had the intuition of an interconnected world at physical, biological and social levels, so that he devoted the final part of his life to trace an outline of this interconnected world from the scientific data he collected during his lifetime. ‘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] On a more theoretical level, the same interest for a holistic, integrated vision of nature was articulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a contemporary of A. von Humboldt. Not to mention another direct reference for Geddes, due to his interest in social questions, the work of the French social scientist Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play: contrary to any form of abstraction, in the book ‘Les Ouvriers Européens’ (The European Workers, 1855) LePlay considered the complementarity of social life and the physical territory, through the triad ‘Lieu, Travail, Famille’, which, later, in Geddesian terms, became ‘Place, Work, Folk’; for Geddes, that was the proof of the possible transposition of basic Darwinian principles (living beings and their environments must be considered as inextricably interrelated) into the realm of the social sciences.[7]
Image 01: Diagrammatic Stairway of Knowledge. This diagram, which offers a way to understand 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, in the article From Space To Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift… which I adapted from 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 couldn’t have been described more efficiently than Patrick Abercrombie (an English planner and professor), who, in 1928, 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, Author’s 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 Introduction to the book ‘Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment’, (1972), editor Marshall Stalley says 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, the former Professor of Planning at IUAV-Venice, Leonardo Ciacci, 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’ activity with respect to some of the philosophical and scientific premises I have mentioned above, scrutinizing his work and thinking through the lenses 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 give us a glimpse into such a new understanding of Nature that I briefly sketched in the passages above and on which Geddes structured one of the most innovative and anticipatory systems of thinking in the field of design’s professions?
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 premises for theorization. These are the same foundations this website calls for, with the aim to show the implications that that mode of thinking may have on spatial and placial concepts. 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]
It is my conviction 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 pointing to a transdisciplinary understanding of design activities (and, therefore, to their unification, at least in their theoretical principles). No doubt, a difficult task, not merely for planners, to whom Geddes directly addressed 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 am calling for a system of thinking that transcends the divisions between disciplines the same way Geddes’ pioneering research did. Let’s see more in detail these questions through a synthetic outline of Geddes’ work and biography. After that, I will sketch some 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 side, and Geddes’ understanding of the concept of region and his proposal for regional surveys, on the other side. I hope this can have a double benefit: to offer an interpretative key for Geddes’ work, which is sometimes hard to follow for argumentation and style; also, I wish to offer another perspective for reconsidering the meaning of spatial/placial concepts on the base of the same, still timely, scientific and philosophical premises which animated Geddes’ thinking and which are changing our understanding nature, from mechanistic to organic or systemic perspectives.
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 date of publication of this article at RSaP – Rethinking Space and Place is symbolic – a 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 was presenting 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 was offering a brand-new perspective to frame the relationship between men and the territory under the title ‘Civics’. As we are going to see, that innovative perspective gave some fruitful results in shaping the modern science of Town Planning, even if Geddes’ innovative system of thinking cannot be limited to Town Planning, but should extend to knowledge in general. For those 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-contingent) understanding of phenomena, as many other scholars interested in representing Geddes’ activity have done before me, I will present facts and happenings concerning his life and work in chronological order; in this way, I believe, we are in a better position to estimate the main events that contributed to shape 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. Despite that, in those early years, his father was his best teacher and encouraged Patrick to be curious and have first-hand experiences with nature. Years later, Geddes reminded his family’s rite of weekly walks in the garden, as ‘his own earliest surveys’.[18] Those natural lessons outside the classroom fired Patrick’s curiosity: when he entered school, every week he read as many books as possible to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He was interested in scientific subjects, mathematics and chemistry, above all; his father built for him a modest laboratory to avoid damages to their principal housing residence after Patrick’s experiments… When he completed his studies at Perth, in 1870, he worked as an apprentice at the National Bank of Scotland; however, he soon understood 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 his attention was captured by him: now he wanted to study Biology, under Huxley, at the Royal School of Mines in London. There, he distinguished himself from his colleagues, even more expert than him, since he was able to offer unforeseen solutions to problems that blocked others, in virtue of the mental flexibility he acquired with his personal experiences: he showed that ‘two reputedly irreconcilable positions could, in fact, be reconciled.’[21] He was accepted as a student in Huxley’s zoology laboratory, where he also was forced to accept formal and traditional scientific methods, even if he criticized them. He was held in awe by his Master, and there was reciprocal respect between the two: in one biological experiment on the muscular mechanism of molluscs, he reached conclusions that Huxley did not expect, and admitted his pupil was right giving him acknowledgement 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, he got a job as a demonstrator of practical physiology. That was an important occupation for Geddes’ theoretical preparation and future development of thinking along holistic and systemic directions 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, under Huxley’s suggestion he spent the summer in the marine biological station of Roscoff, on the north-west coast of Britanny, France; later that summer, he followed the director of the biological station at the Sorbonne, Paris, where he worked at the Ecole de Medicine, studying histology.
Paris exerted a great fascination on the young Geddes, and was decisive at last on a couple of aspects: first, he experienced a form of regionalist spirit through the criticism that French Universities directed against the excessive over-centralization to Paris; second, he became acquainted with the work of the French sociologist Frederic Le Play through which he could hypothesize the first analogy between the social sciences 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 social sciences – Environment, Function, Organism, on the other, the side of applied sciences. On the elucidation and comparison of those two triads, and the complementarity 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. He spent two brief periods at the biological stations of Naples and Aberdeen before he joined an annual expedition for biological research in Mexico after his application for a post in the zoology department at Manchester University was rejected. In Mexico City, he stayed with his brother Robert who worked there. Unexpectedly, long hours spent in open-air conditions under the sun and the dust of excavations to find fossil organisms mined his sight severely: he was forced to stay for months in a darkened room protecting his almost blind eyes. That was quite devastating for a young biologist who, for his future career needed to observe organisms under the microscope. In that dark period, he tried to find a way out through his ability to adapt to environmental conditions: he began to make mnemonic exercises in the dark of the room to strengthen the power of his mind’s eye and invented a technique that he would use for the rest of his life – inventing the so-called thinking machines, diagrams through which he was able to have a mental image of his thoughts. 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, 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. In the meanwhile, he began 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 that paper, he proposed a new classification system that could serve both physical sciences and social scientists: by showing that all physical data and social findings could fall into five categories – Territory, Organism, Production, Distribution, and Results – he wanted to show that his synthetic framework could serve the interest of all specialists.[25] I consider Geddes’ attempt one of the first exemplary cases of transdisciplinary approach applied to human knowledge (my intent to put any existing thing of this world into ‘four boxes’ – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, symbolic – responds to the same necessity of Geddes; the philosophical and scientific context is that of Systems Thinking: see the article On the Structure of Reality)
Even if he continued to apply (unsuccessfully) to botany departments in different British universities, he was convinced about the validity of his unconventional, systemic and holistic, approach to studies which allowed him to draw social and economic conclusions on the basis of biological considerations, therefore showing a convergence between different kinds of knowledge. 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 the other – 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, the society we have inherited from the Industrial Revolution; a criticism which is always valid, since, it seems to me, we are still trapped in the ‘vice versa-modality’. Here, is the origin of Geddes’ versatile figure as a sociologist and as an activist interested in improving the conditions of people in the urban environment – the squalid slums of British cities especially, beginning with Edinburgh. With this latter 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 Marton, who was responsible for the operations of a girl’s club. Geddes and Anna Morton got married in 1886, and they moved into one of Edinburgh’s filthiest slum tenements; soon they showed their commitment to the betterment of the urban conditions of people starting with their own example: they converted their flat into a clean, attractive environment, which was used every week as a meeting point for all their neighbours. With their example and advice, they helped to upgrade the entire neighbourhood, revitalizing its cultural life by taking there the young ‘intelligentsia’ of Edinburgh. Moreover, the Geddeses rented some flats near the place where they lived, renovated them, and created the first hostel for students in Scotland naming it University Hall, which was a body governed by the students themselves. A sociopolitical experiment.
In this period Geddes turned his attention to the education for people, especially the adults: he created The Summer Schools and Summer Meetings inviting notable lecturers from different disciplines, among them the 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, in 1888 he accepted a newly-created chair of Botany at the University of Dundee, which he kept until 1919 and which allowed him to dedicate enough free time to independent research, experiments, surveys, lectures… This also gave him the opportunity to plan and design the university’s botanical garden of the University, arranging it to show the evolution of the species.
He also continued and extended his activity as a promotor of urban ameliorations with civic intents: he extended the University Hall offering a home to 40 students, he purchased properties for his family and teachers of the Summer Schools, requalifying another part of Edinburgh, and, most of all, he bought a medieval structure with an observing tower which offered a magnificent view of Edinburgh and environs which he called 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, that was the first sociological laboratory of the world.[28]
Image 03: Panoramic View of Edinburgh from the Outlook Tower.
The Outlook Tower had great importance for Geddes, at least for two important aspects: first, it gave him the opportunity to clarify many aspects of his thinking about the relation between the territory and men; second, it offered him the opportunity to present his ideas to a vast public and understand the importance of exhibitions as a vehicle of education for people. 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 of this initiative and its educational value convinced Geddes about the validity of his approach and he tried to replicate and promote the idea of Town Exhibitions as educational instruments on many occasions in the following years, beginning with the Paris Expo, 1900.
2.3 Crucial Years: 1903-1915
Now, Geddes’ thinking about the inextricable relationship between the environment, men, and their activities was mature enough to be focused and applied to real cases: in 1903 he had the occasion to apply his ideas to the study of cities by means of regional surveys – where multiple natural, social and cultural perspectives were synthesized (transcended…) into his integral idea 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 (which exceed the limited boundaries of the park), he did not get the final job but he obtained the possibility to publish, at the expanses of the Dunfermline Trust, the client, a dense document of 230 pages in which many future technical precepts (innovative precepts for that epoch), for his activity as a town planner were contained, among them: survey before design, the city as an organic entity, the importance of regionalism (as the meeting ground between local and global dynamics), conservative surgery, participatory planning, the central theme of housing, the importance of gardens (contact with nature), and open public places, the importance of public and civic buildings (museums, art museum, schools, universities, etc.) especially for educational scopes.
Image 05: Frontispiece of City Development (1904), by Patrick Geddes, with the picture of the Abbey Church.
That important theoretical and practical study was immediately followed by two seminal lectures he gave 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. A career which had special theoretical rather than practical relevance for his numerous proposals in India and Palestine, where he will make a city report, a plan for the city and for the University of Jerusalem, and the urban plan for Tel Aviv, the only one which will be realized. However, it was especially in India that Geddes found the appropriate milieu to apply his innovative ideas, which were highly appreciated. He lived there for a certain period with his wife and son Arthur; he obtained a chair as a professor of Sociology at the University of Calcutta (1920-1923), and, most of all, he was asked for many city surveys and plans from North to South from East to West of the Indian Continent.
2.4 Cities in Evolution (1915)
As an architect, I will devote special emphasis on Geddes’ Cities in Evolution – a study on town planning and sociology, apparently, published in 1915 (urban sociology we could probably say today, even if 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). The scope of the book is revealed by the author in the preface: it is not a technical treatise for town planners but it wants ‘to emphasise the possibilities of readier and fuller co-operation’ between the different actors involved in studying, planning, and living the urban environment, with the sociopolitical hope to reunite those actors, the inhabitants of towns and cities especially, ‘in constructive citizenship’.[32] It is only in the passage from the ‘Paleotechnic Age’ of customs and technologies inherited from the Industrial Revolution to a new, incipient ‘Neotechnic Age’ that such constructive citizenship can be pursued.[33] According to Geddes, the territorial stage for the study of cities, intended as the correlation between the physical environment and men’s activities, is not merely local, but ‘regional’, the median territory where local and global instances meet. 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.
Just like the other writings before this one, the outlook of the book reflects Geddes’ overall understanding of the world in transdisciplinary and holistic terms, thereby showing how different studies and disciplines (geography, biology, ecology, anthropology, sociology, arts, planning, architecture, etc.) may relate to explain how a superior, organic reality – that of the city-region – emerges from different dynamics.[34]
That fresh or, as I call it, that transdisciplinary, systemic and organic view was something exceptional for his epoch: the result of his fundamental ‘evolutionary’ understanding of phenomena, which is immediately announced in the title, and which he developed during the years of formation, at first as a schoolchild found of nature, then as a biologist and botanist, and later as a scholar interested in social dynamics. Based on this evolutionary outlook a possible future for cities can be concretely hypothesized and not merely imagined: according to Geddes, if we study and understand the progression of a town or city from past to present, we can anticipate its possible future: that is Geddes’ fundamental belief or thesis. Possible future – Geddes suggests – which we should consider 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, imaginary),[36] given that, contrary to historical urban utopias detached from concrete considerations of the local territory, the extended and all-embracing analyses that Geddes proposes (physical-geographical, biological, ecological, social, and cultural analyses) are based on concrete local data and surveys. 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 recompose opposites and divisions into new, integral units (we already seen it in the episode at the laboratory of biology, when he was a young student, where he showed that ‘two reputedly irreconcilable positions could, in fact, be reconciled’ – see note 21): this was Patrick Geddes.
The ‘synoptic’ vision he had of phenomena allowed him to assess one of the crucial problems of modern cities, unveiling a fundamental sociopolitical message behind his proposals: the question of housing. If the ‘Paleotechnic Age’ of the Industrial Revolution produced slums,[38] the incipient ‘Neotechnic Age’ would have produced 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). To do that an important shift of values and procedures was needed: the passage from the ideal of ‘money wages’, which is the energy-and-environment dissipating product of the ‘Paleotechnic Age’, to the ideal of ‘vital budget’ or ‘family budget’, which conserves energy and organize 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.
Again, with his usual capacity to widen horizons, it is Geddes himself to remind us that housing, even if 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 to get the necessary changes of values for better cities and places, or Eutopias? This, according to Geddes, can only happen through education: education for citizens and education for town planners. Then, the last chapters of Cities in Evolution are dedicated to the educative resources needed for both citizens and planners: Civic Exhibitions on the one hand, Civic Surveys, on the other. As usual for Geddes, two complementary aspects.
Civic Exhibitions integrated classical models of presentation of cities and newly acquired data from social economy and welfare (statistical data) with the main intent to promote civic sense and social well-being; those exhibitions concerning the study of cities brought together different geographical, historical, anthropological, social, statistical, demographic and architectural perspectives integrated into a new synthesis which Geddes understood and promoted as ‘Civics’.[41] Concerning this integrated approach to the new Science of Civics Geddes presented his personal experience:the report for The Civic Survey of Edinburgh, prepared in 1910, which became part of the Town Planning Exhibition of London (1910), and of the 1913 Cities and Town Planning Exhibition in Ghent, among exhibitions in other cities, for which he also prepared an ad hoc City Section to show the adaptability of his method to always different local realities.
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] This is the real novelty of his method with respect to other proposals: not simply the presentation of data, drawings, maps, models, plans, etc. but their interpretation through a new scientific and philosophical outlook which may serve to enhance the civic spirit of citizens as well as the critical attitude of planners.[44]
As regards the educational and didactic aspects for planners, Civic Surveys or City Surveys – the preliminary studies for cities –are necessary before the preparation of town planning schemes. Such surveys start with the analysis of the physical-geographical environment (topography, soil and geology, climate, rainfall, winds, etc. – what I usually describe as physicochemical processes) before the study of the history and present situation of cities and regions, through their social and cultural aspects (sociocultural processes), such as the presence of industries, manufactures, commerce, data (statistics) concerning the population, its movements, occupations, density, distribution of wealth, etc.[45] Those points are complemented by indications concerning possible developments or requirements so that through the analysis of past and present condition, possible futures can be hypothesized.
Some of the practical applications usually suggested by Geddes after his preliminary survey 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, more than one hundred years ago, it was already clear to Geddes that cities were not merely the stage of a battle or confrontation between the Economy, Society and the Environment, but they were the very expression of that and other battles. 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) is not the stage or background for processes (an outdated even if still traditional and very common understanding of places) but is the process itself in the act of reification or materialization, the result of the interlacing action of different dynamics. Then, the city-place (the city-region for Geddes) is the system of physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and intellectual or symbolic processes. Even if Geddes did not express this fundamental working principle of places in the same processual terms that I am using, his understanding of cities in evolution (or of regions) expresses the same conceptual vision. I conclude this section with a suggestion for the interested reader or the student who is going to approach the study of Geddes: to better understand the mechanisms of cities explained in Cities in Evolution I suggest approaching the study of the works and writings that Geddes produced before this one, since they would better understand the genesis and the reasons of the main considerations expressed in this book, which is a sort of fragmentary patchwork of previous writings and thinking.[47]
It seems to me there is not profitable access to Geddes’ thinking if not in the transdisciplinary and holistic, systemic and processual, organic and evolutionary terms I have presented in the opening paragraph. Those are the philosophical and scientific bases of Geddes’ work as well as the premises of this website: a mode of studying the correlation between environmental and human phenomena out of which cities, towns, neighborhoods, and architectures emerge as unitary phenomena. Only through those interpretative keys can one win the difficult style of the book and see the still-relevant information that is hidden behind Geddes’ tumultuous sea of words and seemingly outdated examples.
2.5 The Final Lesson
I conclude this outlook on Geddes’ life and work with some words dedicated to the final lecture that Geddes delivered to his students at the University of Dundee, where he held a chair as Professor of Botany; ‘Biology and its Social Bearings: How a Botanist Looks at the World’ is the title of that lecture, according to the notes taken by Geddes’ assistant Amelia Defries.[48] I believe the lessons contained in that lecture are fundamental to understand why Geddes’ work and thinking is still timely.
Botanists are ‘more reasonable than they seemed, and more practical also for all knowing is classifying’ is one of the introductory statements by Geddes who is evidently referring to two key points 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’ mode of thinking; a necessary asset to have an image of facts, events and happening as complete as possible. Second, the importance of having clear in mind the relationships between different sciences and disciplines – their order (‘all knowing is classifying’). I would say this is the fundamental premise for any type of accurate reasoning: without a clear image of the relative organization of sciences and disciplines only confusing conclusions can be drawn, if conclusions can be drawn at all, especially if we study complex systems or questions. This order that one must have well settled in mind is a necessary prelude to thinking by systems (see Image 1, above). Then it appears clear and consequent Geddes’ following statement in the lecture when he refers to Linnaeus’s detailed cataloguing of Nature as a ‘System of Nature’ and when he says that ‘from science… we get order and system – and good catalogues need clear minds, and make them clearer.’[49] So, Geddes’ background as a botanist (and field biologist) was important because this gave him the opportunity to experience both abstract classifications and nature close to hand: ‘… and this concrete, that abstract, are vitally inseparable in a true and full education’.[50] The message regards the unitary, holistic and systemic understanding of phenomena; this unitary vision must be substantiated by the clear vision, sequence, and order of details within the big picture: theory and practice, detail and general view. In addition to observation – Geddes says –, what if ‘we also get trained to think, and this by turn in detail and in general views?’[51] Fundamentally, Geddes is basing the first part of his intervention to point out a new mode of observing and thinking about nature; in this context, education, the education we receive at school since our first years, is decisive.
Being able to put into relation phenomena is the key to deciphering them correctly; here, Geddes, shows the conceptual leap that allowed him to put into relation biological facts and observations with social facts and observations, which also extend to political and ethical considerations, so vividly present in our days. Let’s see.
Linnaeus’s new classification of the kingdoms of nature, Geddes says, allowed to simplify the old vision of nature from three (animal, vegetable, and mineral) into ‘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] In this final statement is included the conceptual leap proposed by Geddes to introduce the 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]
Geddes, as reported by Amelia Defries, runs easily from botanical to political and economic considerations: he sees the immediate relation between those different domains and, therefore, the sees the real extent of that conflict, which is not merely a social and economic conflict (as it was considered by the greatest part of sociologist, economist, politicians, etc., during the last century) but it needs to be situated within its natural background — 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] A solution to the conflict which is still haunting us, or, better, and indication of the direction to follow for its solution – that is, the reinstatement of the equilibrium between economic, social and environmental questions: this is the solution offered by Geddes, one hundred years ago, to correct the distortions produced by the negative effects of the industrial Revolution. This is the real modernity of Geddes and of his still-valuable teaching: having understood the fundamental unity of nature, which must be considered organic and systemic in its constitution (and synthetically expressed through 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 mechanic. 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 diffused by education, at school, in museums, through cultural activities, etc. at all levels – this is the other always-returning theme of 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, not without taking into consideration human evolution, conditions and aspiration, which are parts of Nature: this was the ultimate content of that final lesson.
After Geddes finished his speech, Amelia Defries noted, 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 confrontation 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. which are correlated with the material world of facts and characterize it as an integral whole or system.
3.1 Place as System of Processes: The ‘Valley Section’
I believe the ‘Valley Section’ is the first fully-fledged synthesis of Geddes’ convictions on how the physical environment and human activities interact reciprocally creating a new environment, which is, all at once, natural and cultural, local and global, and structured on a chronological progression (evolutionary). This fundamental conviction – I would dare to say this fundamental truth, at least a truth for both Geddes and me – is the ground for any other consideration that will take Geddes to have an active role, at first, as a sociologist, and, then, as a town planner. In my opinion, this is also the fundamental reason why Geddes’ work has been continuously rediscovered and still has such good consideration between scholars, at present time.
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 idea of the Valley Section – which, in some of its fundamental traits, he derived from the French sociologist Fredric Le Play, for the content, and from von Humboldt, for the graphic aspect –[58] is at the same time an ideal and practical device to show how, in the course of evolution, human aggregation into groups and organizations became always more complex and layered on multiple meanings until cities and megalopolis appeared as the most advanced state of combination between the environment and the human activities allowed by that environment.
Even if in that lecture Geddes did not precisely use the term ‘valley section’ (which, instead, was formalized in the second lecture before the Sociological Society – Civics: As Concrete and Applied Sociology – the following year)[59] that conceptualization was already there. Let’s see, through the clear and coincise explaination of architectural Historian Welter M. Volker, how the valley section is characterized: ‘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 is naturally inscribed in the relationship between the physical environment and men: the same way ‘the environment determines occupation and life’, in turn, Geddes realizes, ‘life ever re-shapes or transcends environment.’[61] If we should represent through a diagram the progressive reciprocal actions between the contrasting forces of the environment and man through time, we would see a sort of circuit or spiral: this is how Geddes elaborated further the system of forces acting behind the valley section, using another diagram: ‘The Notation of Life’. Before analyzing this latter scheme, let me spend a few words observing how close the dynamics of the valley section described by Geddes are to the place-based and processual conception of reality I am describing in the articles of this website through the concept of place as 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 speaks about it in a physical-geographical sense, he refers to its topography, geology, soil, climate… I synthesize all of those physical (and chemical) occurrences under the synthetic terminology ‘physicochemical processes’. To put it in different terms, but same processual context, we are in the realm of inorganic processes. The territory, any territory is, to begin with, the place of physicochemical processes. Disciplines like physical geography, geology, meteorology, hydrology, etc. (earth sciences) describe those processes. The presence of mountains, hills, plains, rivers, lakes, sea etc., due to the intermingling action of geological, atmospheric and hydrological processes (i.e., synthetically: physicochemical processes) characterize the physical conformation of a territory or land – what Geddes often characterizes via physical geography. It is on the base of all inorganic processes that more complex forms or types of processes appear: ‘biological processes’. This means that in the physical territory life appears, that is, flora, at first, and, then, fauna appear (just like for Geddes’ system, the concept of place as system of processes that I propose 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 the two orders of processes – physicochemical processes and biological processes: this means that there is reciprocal action and, therefore, reciprocal transformation. For instance, it was because of the abundant presence of stromatolites, since approximately 3 billion years ago (microbial reefs created by cyanobacteria – biological elements – producing oxygen) that the composition of the atmosphere (chemical elements/chemical processes) started to change and allowed new forms of life to flourish and evolve. This reciprocal action-reaction between processes (physicochemical and biological) means they evolve together, that is, the systems corresponding to those processes co-evolve, to form a new, emergent system which is something more than the sum of its parts: this new, unitary system, we can now define as the place of ecological processes. The parallel and, at the same time, intersecting action of those processes (physicochemical and biological) determine the distribution of flora and, consequently, of fauna on the territory. That is, it determines the presence, abundance or scarcity of natural resources. It is on the basis of those natural resources than man enters into the big picture.
This biological account I have briefly touched upon is not directly present in Geddes’ narration of the valley section (as far as I know, it couldn’t have been known or formalized in ecological terms since ecology, as a formalized science, is a later occurrence, even if we know that one of its founding fathers – Ernst Haeckel – was a known reference for Geddes); however, as an evolutionary biologist and holistic thinker, he was certainly aware of those dynamics, or at least he must have intuited them before others. It was properly on the basis of those correlated dynamics between territory (the environment or physicochemical processes) and organisms (biological processes) and their adaptation to it (function) that he was able to image the same type of reciprocity between the environment (place), men (folk- the community of men), and their activities (their work).
With the coming into the scene of men and their activities, that scene, or stage, changes again:[62] initially the scene or stage (the environment as mere natural territory, without living beings on it) was represented as the place of physicochemical processes; then as the place of biological processes, and, later, as the place of ecological processes. Now, with the presence of mankind? The processual terminology I have adopted to define this further layer of human complexity on places, a form of accretion, is variably ‘social’, ‘sociocultural’, and/or ‘intellectual or symbolic’, according to the forms and complexity of human processes under consideration (in ascending degree of abstraction: that is, evolution starts from the material and culminate in the immaterial – obviously, I share this vision with Gaddes since both visions are evolutionary: we are going to see it better in the next paragraph). Very briefly, ‘social processes’ define the relationships between individuals which may vary from a few units – e.g., a couple, a family – to huge numbers – e.g. an internet community of millions of followers. Coming back to Geddes’ valley section the presence of miners, woodmen, hunters, etc. are all examples of human communities determined by social processes in interaction with biological and physicochemical processes (the environment, flora and fauna included). That is, social processes (men/folk) combine with ecological processes (place/the environment as the sum of physical and biological occurrences). So, now, I think it is evident the convergence between Geddes’ conception of region (the territorial unit where the correlation between the environment and the activities of men unfold, and vice versa) and the conception of place I am proposing, place as system of processes, since at this stage of evolution, when human activities enter into the scene, the scene that Geddes names ‘region’, for me, is ‘place’: specifically, the place of social processes which acts in combination with, in descending degree of complexity: ecological, biological and physicochemical processes. Then, according to Geddes: region = environment + men; according to me: place = physicochemical + biological + ecological + sociocultural + intellectual/symbolic processes. The conceptual dynamics that I describe are fundamentally the same as described by Geddes. However, while ‘region’, ‘environment’ and ‘men’ are generic notions, terms like ‘place’ (in the revised sense I call for), and ‘physicochemical, biological or sociocultural processes’ are more specific and, at the same time, more universal. Then place is no longer a generic term and not even a determinant of geographical or social processes only, as in many traditional accounts of place. Here, place – this concept of place I am speaking of – represents an overarching concept, at the same time universal and particular.
3.2 Place as System of Processes: ‘The Notation of Life’
Now, I want to focus on another parallel: Geddes’ understanding of ‘region’ and ‘place’, on the one side, and the reformed understanding of spatial concepts that I am proposing 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, he never focused on the ‘semantic’ or ‘philosophical’ relevance of that notion, neither on its ‘physical’ meaning – in the sense of pertaining to the science of physics and its laws, that is: he never investigated the concept of place – i.e., the abstract notion – from a theoretical, universal perspective. On the contrary, he had a unique and exceptional ability to read concrete places, or territories, from the practical perspective of the naturalist and the social scientist, combining the two perspectives into an integrated, unitary vision. Therefore, we must derive his understanding of placial notions (place, region, or territory), from the general body of his works and attitude to life.
The initial temptation is to attribute Geddes’ use of the word place a common meaning derived from physical geography: place as an indication of the concrete qualities of a territory: its topography, climate, soil, etc., all that we could term under the general expression ‘inorganic’ or ‘physicochemical processes’. This interpretation can be justified, if we analyze the graphic below – The Notation of Life, a theoretical device Geddes used to illustrate his understanding of the relationship between man and the territory taking to the formation of cities (Geddes also called his schemes, in-between verbal statements and graphic formulae, thinking machines)[63] – where, in the first quadrant, in the upper left, below the term PLACE we read “(GEOG.)”, which stands for ‘geography’; therefore, here, place is explicitly assigned a traditional, geographical connotation. This is a common, even if reductive, manner to understanding places (reductive if compared to the overarching horizon I would like to attribute to the concept of place).
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.
Yet, now we know it, this ‘reductive’ hypothesis is somehow far from Geddes’ approach to any questions; in fact, we have seen in the prologue that Geddes was far from mere ‘reductionism’ as a mode of thinking or as a mode of understanding nature, even if he also used reductionist hypotheses as starting point to go beyond them (e.g., see note [14]). If we return to that graphic or diagram, we see that that quadrant is just the initial phase of a processual and systemic understanding of the territory/environment, which is very much like the understanding of the reformed notion of place I am speaking of at RSaP – Rethinking Space and Place as the accretion of physicochemical, biological, socio-cultural, symbolic (or intellectual) processes, respectively. Similarly, that diagram – The Notation of Life – is not a static diagram but must be read as a process of accretion, quadrant after quadrant (place, work, folk, feeling, experience, emotion, thoughts…). To read the diagram we must begin in the upper quadrant, high on the left, then move down, then to the right, then up to the top right quadrant, and finally left again, to form a spiral which starts again moving towards the center.[64] In this way, it is as if place, which starts as a simple physical-geographical determinant (a natural entity), accrues its meaning, charged, from time to time, with social, cultural, spiritual and intellectual values until the formation of the most complex system – that of the city – is completed to become the place of symbolic processes concretized into 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 men’s activities; at first, place, as a geographic determinant, is correlated with the most simple activities of men 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 the collective life of man: 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 intellectual and spiritual ambitions and productions of men, 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 seen or read as the re-composition into unity of the dichotomy between concreteness (upper half: ‘simple practical life’ and ‘chord of expression in effective life’) and abstraction (bottom half, ‘chord of simple mental life’ and ‘chord of full inner life’). According to the placial terminology I often adopt in this website, the re-composition of dichotomies into a new integral and functional unity can be formalized with the following notation: *( )*, that is, place( )space, processes( )systems, abstract( )concrete, mind( )body, physical( )mathematical, local( )global…
Overall, this fourfold evolutionary interpretation of the relationship between the environment and men, through ‘town’, ‘school’, ‘cloister’ and ‘city’, finds a correspondence in the processual and evolutionary reformed vision of place that I am proposing through the sequence: physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and symbolic (e.g., spiritual, intellectual) processes; even in this case abstract symbolic processes define the final and highest level of consciousness in the correlation between men and places, which, therefore, may exist in both natural and cultural states or forms (I made the example of New York City, a human metropolis, as the most complex placial/systemic structure, from abstract and spiritual values down to geographical/physical values – see What Is Place? What Is Space?). Fundamentally, understanding place and the territory as a system of processes – which is what I am proposing – is a way to decipher the somewhat convoluted theorization behind both Geddes’ difficult writing style and his thinking machines, or diagrams.[67]
Is this interpretation and analogy in processual terms really respondent to Geddes’ understanding of the relationship between natural and sociocultural phenomena, and, most of all, does it correspond to Geddes’ understanding of place or am I stressing too much the central role of place in Geddes’ scheme?
Being acquainted with Geddes’ main works and texts, I believe that systemic interpretation is fundamentally coherent, therefore, possible. However, I believe it is less misleading to associate that systemic interpretation to Geddes’ overall understanding of the environment as ‘region’ rather than as ‘place’, even if this fact requires going beyond the generic and somewhat simplistic consideration that regions are places. Maybe, we can better appreciate this subtle difference if we consider the following statement by Geddes: ‘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 that 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 – the starting point of a processual chain of processes that are layered on place as a natural entity. That is also the reason why in that 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. Of course, the possibility to deduce the character of place from the character of a region (and vice versa) remains, even if in this way, we would not discriminate between the two notions treating them as unclarified notions.
Maybe the main difference between these different spatial or placial 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 while the region refers explicitly to a vast territorial unit or environment, the place I am speaking of may refer to both wide and specific, or limited, territorial units. Fundamentally, I am saying that the same dynamics behind the formation of a region are also at work behind the formation of any environmental unit, whether big or small. Every time a phenomenon appears (hence, not merely a territorial phenomenon…), 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. That difference has great practical implications: for instance, limiting our interests to the boundaries of design professions, the concept of place as a system of processes is valid in the domain of urban and regional planning (the domain which is under the lens of Geddes’ attention), but it is also valid in the domain of architecture, as well as in that of product or industrial design (e.g., for the latter case see the example of the glass bottles, Image 6 in Places Everywhere), while the contrary is not true. Just to let you understand the universality of my considerations on place, the concept of place as a system of processes can also be used to investigate the development of ‘spatial environments’ (concerning astronomical space: artificial environments on the Moon, on Mars, spaceships or space modules, etc.). Place as system is an omni-comprehensive concept, universal and particular at the same time (and not just in territorial or gegraphical sense), but the region is not. Through the concept of place as system, the dynamics Geddes unveiled, which allowed him to hypothesize new forms of town planning at the regional level, can be extended to hypothesize new forms of planning at any scale: design, architecture, landscape architecture, town planning, from neighbourhoods to megalopolis, or even ‘spatial planning’ (in the sense of new human environments in astronomical space). The working concept that allows this staggering extension of meanings is ‘place’ (considered a system of processes), not ‘region’. Elsewhere – see The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society – to express this continuity of place (I mean the continuity of its dynamics) in the domain of visible things and phenomena I have spoken in terms of ‘fractals’: in principles, no matter the scale of investigation (object, building, neighboroods, city, region, ecoregion, continent, planet, astronomical space) the four basic classes of processes or dynamics that characterize any place – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes (all other processes are derivative from or contained within those 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 equating the two concepts of place. As we have seen in the passage above on the explanation of The Valley Section, according to Geddes, the nature of a region as a unitary territorial structure is determined by the whole of physicochemical, biological, (hence ecological), socio-cultural and intellectual processes that insist on it. Then, in this case, we are certainly far beyond the understanding of a region as a mere physical-geographical determinant; the region is the omni-comprehensive term that defines, all at once, natural and cultural aspects, the same way the concept of place-as-system I call for does. That’s why I am saying that it is Geddes’ notion of region, and not his concept of place, to be very close to my conceptualization of place-as-system of processes; a notion which greatly extends the traditional boundaries of physical-geographical considerations to include, biological, sociocultural and intellectual or symbolic aspects. Had place and the concept of place been the theoretical and practical focuses of his research, he would have probably spoken in terms of 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. So, it seems to me, here, we are confronted with a similar systemic understanding of two different placial notions: ‘region’ (Geddes) and ‘place’ (the concept that interests me). This semantic difference obviously recomposes in the same understanding of the environment and its working principles.
There is another important reason that suggests to me to draw a difference between the two conceptions of place (Geddes’ notion of place and the revised notion of place as system of processes). I have anticipated it in the opening section. Let’s see this question in more detail.
Granted that we can attribute Geddes’ understanding of region (or territory) a systemic horizon, Geddes never went so far as to study the spatial concepts he devised (either region or place) from physical and metaphysical perspectives (i.e., concerning the domains of physics and philosophy), that is: he never went so far to study those concepts from more universal perspectives, which he could have derived from his practical and theoretical experience of biologist at first, and then as a social scientist and town planner. Had Geddes made that final step he would have reached a fully-fledged, transdisciplinary spatial theory (or placial theory, we’d better say in this case). One question is to study places, or regions, from whatever specific and practical perspective, or a combination of practical perspectives, which is what Geddes did anticipating any other modern town planner; another question is to generalize those implications into more universal perspectives which is what the theorization of a concept requires. Fundamentally, place and the concept of place (or region and the concept of region) are two different entities: one concrete and particular, the other abstract and universal; they require different types of studies and approaches, which are anyway correlated.
This also gives me the opportunity to clarify once again what ‘transdisciplinarity’ is about since the concept of place I call for here, as well as Geddes’ concept of region, can be fully grasped only by adopting a transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on Whitehead’s conception of ‘philosophical generalization’ or ‘imaginative construction’ I would describe ‘transdisciplinarity’ as an imaginative construction, the generalization of particular factors observed in various areas of human interest – e.g., physics, biology, social sciences, the arts, architecture, etc. – which are all storehouses of human experience. In this way, we can discover general laws or invariants that can have significant practical application even outside one’s domain of pertinence.[69] The concept of place I have imagined starting from practical considerations and projects in the realm of architecture and planning took me to extend its range of applicability and meaning to other realms (e.g., earth sciences, ecology and the social sciences) and finally to extend its meaning, even more, by considering the domains of physics and metaphysics; this final step helped me to correct and verify the applicability of that concept ‘even outside [my] domain of pertinence’, which is architecture and planning. It seems to me it is only this latter step that represents a discontinuity between Geddes’ understanding and my understanding of spatial (or placial) concepts. 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: Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One, and Part Two; Concepts of Place, Space, 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, such as: Place and Space: A Philosophical History; Places Everywhere; Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality; Place, Space, 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 condition of existence; after all, its conceptualization corresponds to a working, systemic principle that can be extended to different, if not all, domains of human knowledge.
3.3 ‘The Identity of Places’ and ‘Regional/Civic Surveys’
It has been more than a decade now that I felt the necessity of a place-based document or report that could systematically assist practitioners interested in understanding the overarching, complex, and interconnected dynamics of places. Last year, I decided to answer a call launched by CCA – Canadian Centre for Architecture – proposing to work on a ‘placial’ framework to follow for one of their research groups; that framework, based on my conception of place considered as a system of processes, contained the though-provoking idea of an Identity Card for Places (The Identity of a Place: Place-Based Interventions Between Land and Society), that is, a synthetic document which should contain the basic information needed to have a first basic and systemic understanding of the many components that determine the identity of a place, from natural to socio-cultural.
A few months ago, I had the chance to test that proposal on two real cases which I am going to present in one of the forthcoming articles (the renovation of two industrial areas in a small town close to the countryside, in a province of Northern Italy). The presentation of that article for this website was born as an omni-comprehensive article on Place, Planning and Architecture which I wanted to structure in the following way: a first part dedicated to the elucidation of the idea of the Identity Card for Places as a prelude to the correct evaluation of the dynamics of a place before intervening on it, through planning and design; a second part dedicated to a historical survey of the ways in which architects and planners approached to places as their direct focus of interest; the third and final part dedicated to the presentation of those case studies to explain how they developed from the place-based document or report – i.e., ‘The Identity Card for Places’ – that I made before the project. As the information and documentation for that article was growing and growing I decided to split it into three parts: it was the part dedicated to the historical analysis of how architects and planners approached places that took me to a deepened understanding and appreciation of Patrick Geddes’ work; before that moment – that is, before a couple of months ago – for me Geddes was just the name of a planner associated with the Garden City Movement, nothing more. To make a long story short, I was deeply impressed when I read his ‘Civics: As Applied Sociology’ and his ‘City Development’, other than other works and writings: someone – let’s say it frankly – almost totally neglected by the mainstream community of architects, critics, and historians, already used a similar systemic, evolutionary and organic approach to the one that led me to hypothesize a reformed understanding for the concept of place and to propose an Identity Card for Places; so, concerning the latter, after being aquainted with Geddes’ work, what I believed could be seen either as a bizarre idea or as an impractical idea, or even a naïve hypothesis was actually not bizarre at all, neither impractical (maybe a bit naïve): that idea was nothing other than the proposition, in different language but similar processual and systemic thinking, of the Geddesian hypothesis of regional surveys. I redirect you to that article – The Place of Architecture and the Architecture of Place – Part I: The Identity of Places – to consider the fundamental value of the analysis of places, whether we think about it in terms of the Geddesian formula ‘Regional Survey’ or with the thought-provoking idea of an ‘Identity Card for Places’, which, at any rate, we could imagine in the more reassuring terms of ‘Place Survey Report’.
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] 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] Geddes, Patrik. 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] PatrickGeddes, ‘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] PatrickGeddes, ‘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. 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) 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.
