I was a scholar. Some of my work did contribute to what we knew. But due to my academic career being cut short (as much my responsibility as others), much never saw the light of day. So I will be offering some of that work here. This was a 20-page holographic manuscript, and I thought all I would need to do was type it up. Not so. As I did I began to delve into it and did more research on the subject. It is bordering on almost as much work as when I first did it. I had gained access to a Geddes archive at Rutgers while a graduate student, so some of this is my original research. Almost no one remembers him, but he laid important foundations for where we are now and influenced many important people 100 years ago. He should be remembered.

I am publishing the unfinished paper here (I will finish it in time) so the tab Academia is not empty, and so people who are interested can begin seeing this part of my work. It will be added to as I make progress. There will be a heading and a tab to the next sections as added.

Patrick Geddes

I will turn Geddes’ methods on himself. This will be a Survey of his life and work, taken from one environment/habitat to the next. I am as concerned with the influences on him as I am with those who he influenced through his ideas. Some analyses are my own, but I must necessarily lean heavily on the works of his biographers.

Patrick Geddes was born in 1854 in a small Scottish town. His father was a retired army officer, his mother a school mistress and devoted gardener. Much of Geddes later ideas have their roots in his early childhood. Due to precarious health, he did not begin his formal schooling until eight. His sister taught him to read when he was three, his father would take him on long country excursions (much like my mentor Lewis Mumford’s uncle took him on tours of New York City), and conversations around the family hearth elaborated on what had been seen and placed them in the wider context of his father’s experiences.

In fact much of Geddes’ ideas and style of presentation can be traced to the structure of the home life of his early childhood. Both his Sunday Talks with my Children and his Talks from the Outlook Tower mirror the daily pattern of evenings in the Geddes’ household. This is much in this that recommends a retired father! All his life Geddes was noted to be more a lecturer than a writer. ALL his major works were co-authored with either his student J. Arthur Thomason or his colleague Victor Branford. It took someone else to harness his active mind and get it onto paper!

His Cities in Evolution grew out of his talks which were so important a part of the famous “Cities Exhibition”. The Exhibition, an agglomeration of maps, photographs, documents, drawings, and the like were nothing but his lecture notes! And like his talks the Exhibition underwent daily transformations!

Geddes own comments on his exceedingly oral style, in response to his friends’ urgings to organize the tremendous amount he had almost written throughout his life:

“When a man starts to crystallize his thoughts into print he ceases to think. I am still thinking!”

He was sixty years old at the time!

His ideas of the requisite conditions for a productive environment for human life and education can be seen as projections of his learning experiences at home. In his first formal written proposition (yes, he did write!) for town development, written for a Carnegie competition for Carnegie’s hometown in Scotland, Dunfermline, we can see his home environment repeated in the plan. Geddes said of his plan: that “he who would see the world may literally do worse than come to Dunfermline.”

His feelings for his father’s experience and the influence it had on his ideas showed throughout his life as he refused to draw or recognize disciplinary boundaries. As intellectual and academic life was devolving more and more into separate subjects and specialties, he remained an interdisciplinarian!

In the details of the plan one can see the meticulous care of the home environment which his mother took (for example, where to plant the irises and podophylla!). The structure of his own education is reflected in his plan for a “primitive village” for “open air” education.

From his sixteenth to his nineteenth years, Geddes had the leisure to study the natural sciences under noted professionals in the field. He also had the freedom to read in the arts and literature. Carlyle, Ruskin, and Emerson became heroes. I 1884, he wrote a lengthy evaluation and critique: “John Ruskin, Economist”. He praised Ruskin for showing an awareness of the particularity of the cultural milieu in which the study of economics must take place. Geddes damned the “political economists” of the day. First, for not accepting in publications views not their own, such as Ruskin’s. Second, he found economics a not very “dismal science”, that placed so much faith and hope that the one principle of competition would set everything “aright” in society. He further praised Ruskin for recognizing that cooperative institutions played their role in economic life. He said Ruskin was much more a biological economist than those of his fellows who claimed to use “natural law” in their analyses. Yet those same people ignored the evidence of cooperative life among the “lower creatures”.

Geddes, however, in all his work, made the work serve as his own polemic. Thus he writes:

“For two distinct trends of education are at work in our modern universities…..One is the School of Cram evolving towards the Chinese, the other the School of Culture evolving towards a Greek ideal, or more accurately, towards Tartarean and Olympian ideals respectively.”

He was farsighted, and his fears for the future of life affected his being a man of action, not just thought, reflected in his life’s work. Many of his ideas of tremendous import on social evolutionary theory were mere written sketches, yet his plans of practical action were developed to great lengths!

Cities in Evolution, his major work on cities as social and organic processes with a history, deals theoretically with only one transformation, from Paleotechnic to Neotechnic. It was replete with the social facts and the social needs of present-day English urban life (1915), with practical suggestions for their solution. Throughout you sense a subdued sense of urgency. “We have long delayed and further delay is now (particularly with his book!) no longer excusable!” Lewis Mumford said that the reason Geddes theoretical ideas were so little developed was his sense of urgency in solving such problems. In Geddes mind the ideas were well worked out, but his writings (those he himself was able to settle down to) were plainly polemical.

Geddes read Lay Sermons by Thomas Huxley in 1874 and was captivated. Huxley accepted him to the Royal College of Mines as a student, but he first had to earn the necessary formal credits before he could enroll. My impression is that he always chafed at formalities. Geddes bet his fellow students he could pass any examination they picked merely by cramming for one week. They chose Engineering and he passed. The effect of this experience on his later educational ideas should be obvious.

His London days included attending lectures by the British Positivist Richard Congreve, who introduced him to the ideas of Comte. Comte classified the natural sciences as preliminary to the social sciences and useless without it. This had a major influence on Geddes’ development of his idea of Civics as the true science of cities and civilization.

He then spent 1878 and 1879 studying histology in Paris. He refers to this period as the turning point in all his future politics. “Il faut refaire la Patrie”. It is necessary to reconstruct the Fatherland. That was a current theme. Of this he wrote: “…I have sought to repeat for others what…appears to me the main use of going to Paris: not simply…to be educated…but above all to be moralized…What morality does one find there?… Morality of action – to make the thing as it should be!” (quoted in Stalley, 1972: 9).

Another, and most critical influence, occurred in Paris when Geddes attended a lecture on the sociology of Frederic Le Play. Given by Edmond Demolins, a disciple of the French sociologist, Geddes made the triad of “Famille, Travail, Lieu” – Folk, Work, Place – the basis of his life. The time in Paris could not be more important. We shall see how he related the fundamental biological concepts of evolution (Organism, Function, Environment) to this anthropogeographical frame.

He presented an important paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh n 1884, “An Analysis of the Principles of Economics”. I’d like to insert here how many times over the years in my own lectures and speaking I have reminded people that Economics and Ecology have the same root. He applied the principles of the energy flow of “oecology” to social phenomena. To aid his analysis he invented terms such as “man-day” and “man-power” to aid his analysis. Yes, they have come down to us to this day! The major reaction to this was indignation that a Botanist dared to step out of his academic field!

He won a few disciples, however. Among them was J. Arthur Thompson, a young biology student, who in his own right became one of the most important scientists of the era, and with whom he co-authored two important books on Evolution. Geddes radicalism in scientific thought and his reputation for ignoring social convention left him jobless for much of the 1880’s. He undertook social action to renew and recreate his own Fatherland, Edinburgh. He convinced university officials to let him use the facilities for summer meetings. Among those who came to lecture at his meetings were Ernst Haechel, Elisee and Elie Reclus, Edmond Demolins and Peter Kropotkin (to my non-academic readers: this is the first revision of a paper I wrote 50 years ago. I am going to come back to it to add end notes with brief summaries about the many people of the day I am referring to, so please come back to see that).

A Brief Geddes Bibliography

1885 John Ruskin, Economist, Round Table Series III, Edinburgh (privately printed – 100 copies), in the Boston Public Library archives.

1881 Lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh: “On the Classification of Statistics”, Rutgers University archive

1884 Lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh: “An Analysis of the Principles of Economics”, Rutgers University archive

1889 The Evolution of Sex, with J. Arthur Thomson. New York, The Humboldt Publishing Company. This was an exposition on biological evolution, necessarily straying into civic affairs as was Geddes wont.

1904 “City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens and Culture – Institutes: A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Edinburgh. Patrick Geddes and Colleagues. Rutgers collection.

1911 Evolution, with J. Arthur Thomson. New York. Henry Holt and Co.

1915 Cities in Evolution, London. Williams and Norgate.

1931 Life: Outlines of General Biology, with J. Arthur Thomson. London. Williams and Norgate.

(A note: Thomson died the year after Geddes)