Patrick Geddes

This paper has its origins a lecture given at the invitation of The Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in May 2009. It reflects the thinking that finds fuller expression in my book Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Geddes was one of the key thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His integrated ecological and cultural vision had international impact. Yet despite the fact that his Outlook Tower and Ramsay Garden are prominent and intriguing features of the Edinburgh skyline, the distinctively Scottish intellectual context of his thinking has not been understood. In this paper, which I have taken the opportunity of revise, I place Geddes with respect to his own intellectual background, a background which had interdisciplinarity at its heart. I explore the relevance of that generalist view for his achievements local, national and international. An interview about the book can be found here: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/04/02/interview-with-murdo-macdonald-author-of-patrick-geddess-intellectual-origins/. Full contents list can be found here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-patrick-geddes-s-intellectual-origins.html

O livro é uma contribuição à história do pensamento urbanístico e suas tradições. Construído por meio da montagem, operação que permite criar oposições, fricções e incongruências, na qual a impureza é o grande libelo conceitual, ao lado da busca incessante da alteridade. Nesse labirinto, tensiona-se pensamento e argumento, instigando suas possibilidades e limites. Trata-se de um livro dedicado aos vários outros deserdados da história oficial do movimento moderno em arquitetura e urbanismo, evidenciando que uma herança, qualquer herança, é sempre uma montagem, uma construção, e que essa herança dupla que a autora buscou montar - volume 1 (2020), fantasmas modernos e volume 2 (2021), pensamentos selvagens - é apenas uma entre várias outras possíveis. Prefácio de Cibele Rizek.

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.


Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine

Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions

In March 2005, I presented a paper at the European Academy of Design conference in Bremen,
Germany.  It introduced the concept of the ‘natural design movement’ and discussed the
relationship between eco-literacy, ethics, and aesthetics within the context of natural design. 
The paper proposed:  “Eco-literacy – a detailed understanding of nature as a complex
interacting, creative process in which humanity participates – results in a shift in perception
towards an ecological ethics and aesthetics of participation that considers cultural, social and
ecological, as well as economic value” (Wahl, 2005b, p.1).  Such an approach tries to optimise
human patterns of participation in natural process in such a way that it contributes to the health
and sustainability of the overall system.

The Natural Design Movement shares an ecological worldview.  The movement unites diverse disciplines
ranging from ecological design, industrial and urban ecology, sustainable architecture and bioregional
planning to ecological economics, eco-literate education and green politics.  Furthermore it considers the
philosophical, sociological and psychological implications of the ecological worldview.  Design in the 21st
century will be grounded in eco-literacy and aspire toward community-based designs that are adapted to the
specific conditions of a particular place and culture (Wahl, 2005b, p.1).

The Natural Design Movement encompasses such diverse fields as ecological product-, process-
and institutional design, sustainable architecture, community-, urban- and bioregional planning,
industrial ecology, and ecological engineering, but also political systems of governance,
ecological economics, education for sustainability, renewable resource based technologies and
energy production, as well as aspects of bionics, eco-technology, and green chemistry.  All of
which will be discussed in more detail in chapters four and five.  As I have already alluded to in
chapter two, the natural design movement is united through a salutogenic intentionality behind
design on all scales of the fundamentally interconnected whole in which we participate.

The perception, preservation and restoration of the condition of systemic health, or dynamic stability, are
the underlying strategies of all sustainable designs.  Salutogenesis, or health generation at the scale of local
and global ecosystems and social systems has to become the priority of design in the 21st Century if we
want to create a sustainable global civilization through diverse, locally adapted cultures of co-operation
(Wahl, 2005b, pp.15-16).

This chapter suggests that such a design response to the current crisis of unsustainability is
already emerging, represented by a diverse, international movement which is as yet not fully
integrated and conscious of its own existence.  This thesis hopes to facilitate the process of
networking that is necessary to unite this trans-disciplinary, scale-linking movement by
providing a generalised map of its various contributories.
This chapter begins with a brief history of ecologically conscious design and introduces
some of the key visionaries who have prepared the ground for its emergence.  It starts with an
acknowledgement of the important influence of traditional and indigenous knowledge on
appropriate design; and highlights the influence Sir Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford,
Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg and Victor Papanek on the natural design movement.
Subchapter two discusses the concept of natural design within the context of the shift in
perception facilitated by an ecological worldview.  It suggests that a participatory understanding
of humanity’s involvement in natural process dissolves the apparent paradox of natural design
which itself is simply the result of employing an epistemology of Cartesian dualism.
Subchapter three explores the relationship between ecological literacy, an expanded
horizon of empathy and self-identification, and ethical and aesthetic perception and judgement. 
It offers a more detailed exploration of how the emerging natural design movement also
engenders a fundamental reconsideration of our understanding of ethics and aesthetics.
Subchapter four describes how the various members of the natural design movement
have approached nature as a source of knowledge, wisdom and insight that deeply informs their
design process.  It discusses and exemplifies a new way of learning from nature.
And finally, subchapter five continues with the theme of responsible co-design of
humanity’s active participation in natural processes, by exploring the notion of co-design of
complex systems, which serves as a general introduction to the scales of sustainable design and
the complex scale-linking issues that are explored in much more detail in chapters four and five.
...

Tyrwhitt exerted her influence, often anonymously, through collective leadership, or as an intermediary or catalyst. This chapter illuminates how Tyrwhitt’s ideas emerged from her role in defining an expanded concept of planning as an activity integrating physical and social factors, and how those ideas in turn helped define a new field of activity, urban design.

ISBN-10: 9383243120
ISBN-13: 978-9383243129

20th Century Compulsions
Modern Indian Architecture from the MARG Archives
edited by Mustansir Dalvi

Published by MARG, 2016

The spirit of architecture completely transformed in the 20th century and MARG magazine, founded in 1946, was at the forefront of documenting that change. The leading lights of architecture in the world wrote significant short texts for MARG that set forth not just an agenda for architecture that would shape the new India, but the habitats of a new social order. This anthology comprises a selection of these essays, as relevant now as they were when they first appeared.

With writings by
Mulk Raj Anand
Durga Bajpai
Andrew Boyd
Le Corbusier
B V Doshi
Jane Drew
Patrick Geddes
Otto Koenigsberger
Percy Marshall
Eric Mendelsohn
Louis Mumford
Richard Neutra
Emily Polk
&
A B Schwarz

There are two images of Sir. Patrick Geddes that have been received by subsequent generations, Geddes the Liberal and Geddes the Mystic. This paper examines the ways in which revived sensitivity to the wisdom and limitations of Geddes the Mystic may help facilitate the process of transforming human-nature relations and staving off the cultural and ecological genocide of Modernity.

This article studies Sir Patrick Geddes' housing-based urban planning, pointing to a less-explored aspect of his groundbreaking work, while proposing ways to rethink the history and theory of modern urban planning towards a "housing builds cities" planning agenda. Focusing on Geddes' modern urban planning for Tel Aviv in 1925 as housing-based urban-ism, this article conceives urban structure and urban housing as one single problem rather than disconnected realms of planning. Based on new findings and revised study of available sources, we look into three planning processes by which policy makers, planners, and dwellers in Tel Aviv engaged in this housing-based urban vision: (1) The city as a housing problem; (2) the city as social utility for reform and reconstruction; and (3) housing-based urbanization as self-help. We show how Geddes' modern urban plan for Tel Aviv employed the city's pressing housing needs for urban workers to provoke planning by way of cooperative neighborhoods based on self-help dwellings. This approach was grounded on Geddes' survey of Tel Aviv's early premise on housing and extends beyond Geddes' period to the brutalist housing estates of the 1950s and 1960s. The result is a new historiographic perspective on Tel Aviv's UNESCO-declared modern urbanism vis-à-vis housing as the cell unit for urban living. Further, insights regarding Tel Aviv's housing-based planning are relevant beyond this city to other examples of the town planning movement. It proposes rethinking modern urban planning before the consolidation of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) principles, namely when planned settlements were explicitly experimental and involved diverse processes, scales, methods, practices and agents. Housing-a key arena for the modernization of the discipline of architecture, as well as for the consolidation of the discipline of urban planning-is studied here as the intersection of sociopolitical, formal, aesthetic, and structural elements of the city.

J.G. Ballard's The Concentration City and Billennium are both short stories that depict an utterly dystopian vision about the future of urban development. The Concentration City provides a glimpse of an overgrown, gigantic city with no limits whereas Billennium presents a perspective of the burden of living in an overpopulated society. Both stories are projections of the megalopolis as coined by philosophers Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. These thinkers have outlined the notion of megalopolis as the final stage of development before necropolis, city of the dead. This paper explores how and in what ways Ballard's vision of megalopolis is reflected in The Concentration City and Billennium. To that end, the effects of megalopolis on the individual, nature, society and government institutions are revealed. In addition, the paper also demonstrates that human liberty is restricted on all accounts as a consequence of the conditions created by the megalopolis. Finally, as put forward by Geddes and Mumford, regionalism is proposed as an alternative to prevent excessive urban development which is destined to lead to megalopolis and ultimately, collective downfall.

The argument developed in this article is for a reconsideration of the work of Patrick Geddes as providing the elements of a viable system of notation for the development of appropriate settings for urban governance and policy development which draw on a wider range of human and social science disciplines and knowledge frameworks than is currently the case. Geddes' work stands, eccentrically, at the intersection of a developing tradition of multidisciplinary nineteenth-century urbanism and a subsequent narrower and professionalised urban planning framework based on the cultural technology of the ‘masterplan’ which is not attentive to, or capable of providing, the 'lifestyle management' capacities which remain fundamental to urban governance. It is proposed that Geddes' attempts at the convergence of the disciplines of geography, economics and anthropology – place, work, folk - through his adaptations of Frédéric Le Play's work on the European family, provides a more adequate basis for both analysing and managing the contemporary imperatives of governance in rapidly transforming urban and civic domains and in the even more rapidly transforming digital cultural sphere. These imperatives include the understanding of urban lifestyle and cultural patterns; the nature of the city as an economic unit in post-industrial economies, of new forms of ‘ethopolitics’, and the need for strategic and integrated approaches to urban policy development and planning where ‘culture’ is seen as integral to planning, governance, development, and citizenship frameworks and in one sense, as Amartya Sen has put it, the ends.

Catterall's (2018) editorial note for issue 22.2 of CITY, like the final footnote in Barnesmoore's (2018a) editorial for the same issue, raises the question of 'what/whose order is to be asserted in the city'. This question leads us back to the age old question of authority in social, political, economic, religious, etc. systems—who or what has the authority to assert the order of things (in the city and beyond)? This question of authority, as noted by Springer (2014), is all too often understood in the banally hierarchical terms of the Artificial Worldview—which accepts the order of (human) nature as evil and views the production of social, political, economic, religious, etc. order as subsequently dependent upon hierarchical domination (Barnesmoore 2018b)—and the elite class, the state 1 , the legal system, the police, 'bigger scales' and other such edifices of the Artificial Worldview and its conception of order through hierarchical dominion are thus (oft unproblematically) accepted as the natural authority from which the order of things (in the city and beyond) is derived. I have been asked by a reviewer to " set up the critique of urban theory and develop it using examples " , and have done my best to fulfill this request, but, moving from Foucault's insightful and oft repeated observation that the power of what is said is often most clearly expressed in what is therefore not said, my critique of Urban and Geographical theory and the ontological-epistemological debates waged therein is rooted less in what has been said than in what has not been said. My critique is rooted in the lack of engagement with questions of worldview (of the nexus of cosmology and ontology) and the subsequent, unproblematic acceptance of the Colonial Modernist incarnation of the dominant, domineering Artificial Worldview (Four Arrows and Narvaez 2016; Barnesmoore 2018b) implied therein.

Introductory Note: this nomadic exploration was developed through the nomadic exploration of the first of three lists I am reading for my comprehensive examinations… I'm feeling a bit tense. That's the design. Oh the unhealthy nonsense of the University, the absurd assumptions about human nature that say pressure, stress, competition, hierarchical domination (in the form of grading) and other such artificial means of manufacturing 'need' and 'urgency' are necessary to make me work hard, the actual barrier to creative expression this paradigm forms—but here I sit, fingers playing the music of the English language across my keyboard, trying to simply ignore the absurdity of the disciplinary structure known as 'comps' (there is a certain sense of dread that flitters across many eyes when this term is raised) so that I can focus my attention on the research that I will be conducting in this artificially limited timeslot. This first of my three 'comps lists' seeks to answer four related questions: 1. How are human-nature relations and the attainment of virtue through human-nature relations understood in the classical urban theory of Geddes and Mumford? How is technology and technological power seen as mediating the relationship between humans and nature?; 2. What is the pedagogical function of cities as envisioned in the work of Geddes and Mumford?; 3. What is the function of Utopian thought in Geddes and Mumford's urban theory?; 4. What is the role of spirituality and mysticism in Geddes and Mumford's conceptions of cities and humanity's conscious-cultural evolution?

Opening paragraph, under the heading 'Questioning the “urban century” paradigm in the Indian context'

This twenty-first century is widely depicted as the “urban century”. To generalise, however, is misleading. Urbanisation is conditioned by multiple variables in place, time and cultural context. At the scale and diversity of India, the potential exists to leap-frog the received wisdom and historical patterns of urbanism that have led to the destruction of so much urban heritage elsewhere.

Concluding paragraph:

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic additionally serves to question the orthodox urban agglomeration model and to reinforce the rationale for distributed urbanisation. It is not clear, for example, that the recent exodus from cities such as Mumbai to the rural heartland will be reversed; cities such as Delhi have witnessed a remarkable upturn in air quality; and serious upscaling of the de-centrist initiatives and technologies outlined in this article would support a swift transition from concentrated to distributed urbanisation.

NOTE:

This article was due to be published in the magazine Explore Rural India in July 2020. Covid-19 has delayed the hard copy issue and the editor has kindly agreed to publish it online in advance on the website of the Indian Trust for Rural Heritage and Development (ITRHD): https://www.itrhd.com/magazine.asp

Patrick Kavanagh's poetry has often been studied in relation to questions of identity and sense of place both in response and reaction to the metanarrative of Irishness popularised during the Irish Literary Revival. New scholarship on Irish poetry, however, has moved beyond viewing Kavanagh's portrayal of the countryside as an antidote to the Yeatsian depiction of the peasant and rural landscape and has made possible a re-reading of Kavanagh's sense of place from an ecocritical perspective. Following the interdisciplinary trend in studying literature in relation to the environment, this paper focuses on the notion of place as a complex socio-environmental entity and addresses Kavanagh's depiction of rural Ireland in his early poetry and novels from the perspective of dwelling. The aim is to highlight the missing element of temporality in reference to the landscape and how Kavanagh's direct engagement with his local community and attention to detail offer a poetics of dwelling, wherein the dweller is an inseparable part of a dynamic and temporal environment. Resumen. La poesía de Patrick Kavanagh se estudia con frecuencia en conexión con cuestiones de identidad y sensación de pertenencia tanto a modo de respuesta como reacción a la metanarrativa de la identidad irlandesa popularizada durante el renacimiento literario irlandés. No obstante, los nuevos enfoques académicos sobre la poesía irlandesa han dejado atrás el Kavanagh de la representación de lo rural como antídoto a los retratos yeatsianos del campo irlandés y sus campesinos, haciendo posible de este modo una revisión del sentido de pertenencia en la poesía de Kavanagh desde el punto de vista de la ecocrítica. Este artículo analiza la noción de pertenencia como una entidad socio-medioambiental compleja y estudia la representación de la Irlanda rural en los primeros poemas y novelas de Kavanagh desde la idea de "habitar" siguiendo tendencias interdisciplinarias consistentes en estudiar la literatura en conexión con el medio ambiente. El objetivo es destacar el elemento perdido de la temporalidad en relación al paisaje y cómo el contacto directo de Kavanagh con su comunidad y su atención al detalle destapan una poética del "habitar", en la cual el habitante es una parte inseparable de un medio cambiante y temporal.

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. These four key Tyrwhitt texts illustrate how she forged and promoted a synthesis of Patrick Geddes’ bioregionalism and the utopian ideals of European modernist
urbanism, which influenced post-war academic discourse and professional practice in urban planning and design internationally, and United Nations community development policy specifically.
Tyrwhitt’s contributions to The Town and Country Planning Textbook – the preface and “Society and Environment: A Historical Review” – spelt out a Geddessian (as opposed to Corbusian) line of modern planning thought, providing a scientific humanist theoretical framework for the field: an evolutionary perspective on “the inter-relation of history and environment with man’s daily
life.” She paid particular attention to the urban core and noted the limitations of the Garden City ideal – and thus Britain’s New Town strategy – and called for a more creative approach to civic design, inspired by a love for existing places, considered as a whole, in their regional setting. In her subsequent papers “The Valley Section: Patrick Geddes’s World Image” (1951), “The Core and the City” (1953), and “The Village Centre” (1957) Tyrwhitt expanded on these themes to establish a cogent and coherent alternative to Corbusian CIAM norms.

When I first settled in Edinburgh in the late 1960s, working and living in the then ‘at risk’ New Town, the recently published The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840 provided an unrivalled understanding of this outstanding example of planned urban expansion. Written by the economic historian Alexander Youngson and complemented by Edwin Smith’s evocative black-and-white photographs, it remains in print – a classic in every sense.
When the nobility and emerging middle classes decanted from the Old to the New Town, they left a cultural and socio-economic void, with disastrous consequences for public health. Charles Dickens recounted in 1858: ‘In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place I am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are. We saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in a life.’
This new book’s co-authors, architect Jim Johnson, formerly director of the Edinburgh Old Town Committee for Conservation and Renewal (EOTCCR), and economist/town planner Lou Rosenburg, bring a wealth of professional commitment and personal knowledge to the daunting task of unravelling the complex history of 150 years of urban renewal at the heart of the Scottish capital.

The article presents the short urban history of Tel Aviv as a case-study for critical readings in urban planning. Focusing on Patrick Geddes’ celebrated plan for the city (1925) and its various interpretations along the years, the main claim made in the article is that when present planners are confronted with
a past which does not suit current needs, history is contested, or reinvented entirely. The appreciation of Geddes’ plan over the years always reflected the city’s contemporary image and its planners’ attitudes, which initially reflected the pioneering spirits of the city’s Zionist creation. The plan was later blamed for the city’s deterioration; and finally celebrated again, alongside the city’s new found architectural heritage and urban spirit.

The founders of Tel Aviv envisioned it in 1909 as an exemplary Garden City to ‘blossom in the sands’. In 1925, Patrick Geddes, a Scottish urban planner and the theorist of garden city ideas, was invited to plan the rapidly growing city. Among the key features of his plan were so-called ‘home-blocks’, i.e. residential structures with inner gardens, which are the subject of the present paper. There is no agreement whether or not Geddes’ Gardens of Tel Aviv should be considered as implemented. There has been no special research on this subject, especially in the art historical context. After archival research, studying the maps and exploring in situ, the author found approximately twenty sites which can be definitely connected with Geddes’ ideas. In this paper, the author briefly describes her conclusions on newly discovered ‘Geddes Gardens’ features such as shape, urban connection, pedestrian lanes, landscape, historical and art objects, as well as their connections with the history of urbanism, Garden City, and Modern
Movement ideas.

The paper offers a definition of "organicism" as a particular way of relating parts to the whole, rather than merely a biological metaphor. It argues that some kind of organicism is tacit both within the architectural or urban artifact and the historiography that would claim to recapitulate it for posterity.