Background
The son of Janet Stevenson and soldier Alexander Geddes, Patrick Geddes was born in 1854 in Ballater, Aberdeenshire
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(This collection of seminal correspondences between Indian...)
This collection of seminal correspondences between Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Scottish polymath Robert Geddes are testimony to a great friendship and an even greater marriage between Eastern and Western schools of thought. This compilation uncovers a confluence of ideas on the environment, science, rural reconstruction and a holistic approach to education that resonates with the lived experiences of its students.
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biologist geographer philanthropist sociologist pioneering town planner
The son of Janet Stevenson and soldier Alexander Geddes, Patrick Geddes was born in 1854 in Ballater, Aberdeenshire
He studied at the Royal College of Mines in London under Thomas Henry Huxley between 1874 and 1877.
He graduated from Perth Academy at 16.
He lectured in Zoology at Edinburgh University from 1880 to 1888. In 1899 and 1900 he made lecture tours of the United States, organizing meanwhile the American Section of the International School at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
In Paris he launched a bold plan for preserving the best national pavilions of the "Rue des Nations" as permanent international museums and institutes—a UNESCO nearly 50 years ahead of its time!
Impossible of realization then, the project has since been termed the greatest of Geddes's "magnificent failures. "
Another of these was his epoch-making survey of Dunfermline in 1903-1904 for the Scottish trustees of Andrew Carnegie's $2, 500, 000 gift to his birthplace.
Rejected by them but published at Geddes's own expense, the resulting Study in City Development is today a classic of Geddesian thought and planning methods. The decade 1914-1924 took Geddes to India and Palestine.
He made diagnosis-and-treatment surveys of some 50 Indian urban areas.
Both works are seasoned with neologisms coined to express new concepts, such as "paleotechnics, " "neotechnics, " "biotechnics, " "conurbation, " "megalopolis, " "kakatopia, " and "eutopia. " In 1919 he gave his farewell address at Dundee, then accepted the chair of sociology and civics at the University of Bombay.
Geddes was the founder in 1924 of the Collège des Écossais (Scots College) an international teaching establishment in Montpellier. Geddes also influenced several British urban planners (notably Raymond Unwin and Frank Mears), the Indian social scientist Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Catalan architect Cebrià de Montoliu (1873–1923) as well as many other 20th century thinkers. Tel Aviv is the only city whose core is entirely laid out according to a plan by Geddes.
He coined the term "conurbation".
He was knighted in 1932, shortly before his death at the Scots College in Montpellier, France.
(This collection of seminal correspondences between Indian...)
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
Against a backdrop of extraordinary development of new technologies, industrialisation and urbanism, Geddes witnessed the substantial social consequences of crime, illness and poverty that developed as a result of modernisation. From Geddes' perspective, the purpose of his theory and understanding of relationships among the units of society was to find an equilibrium among people and the environment to improve such conditions.
Quotations: "Town Planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes, and interest, as we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish. To give people in fact the same care that we give when transplanting flowers, instead of harsh evictions and arbitrary instructions to 'move on', delivered in the manner of an officious policeman. "
The Geddes founded the Edinburgh Social Union. Moving into a workers' tenement, they cleaned up by example andpersonal labor many of the worst slum dwellings along the Royal Mile.
In 1886 Geddes married Anna Morton (the daughter of a wealthy merchant), a gifted musician. They had three children: Norah, Alasdair and Arthur. During a visit to India in 1917 Anna fell ill with typhoid fever and died, not knowing that their son Alasdair had been killed in action in France.
