Career
Geddes' earliest studies were in the field of zoology, in which he worked under Thomas Henry Huxley and Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, and later in the field of botany. After teaching botany in Edinburgh, he held the chair in that subject at University College, Dundee, from 1889 to 1919. A growing interest in the social and economic problems of his time led him to extend his inquiries to the fields of economics, sociology, and civics, combining theoretic studies with practical efforts toward slum clearance and urban rehabilitation in Edinburgh. In 1892, he acquired the Outlook Tower on Castle Hill and transformed it into the world's first sociological laboratory. The Outlook Tower became the scene of a series of summer educational meetings, instituted in 1887, the first of their kind in Europe. They were gatherings to which pioneer thinkers such as Pyotr Kropotkin and Jean Jacques ÉliséeElisee Reclus made their contributions. In 1894, Geddes organized a publishing house to promote the new Gaelic revival.Geddes' first contribution to city planning was his report to the Carnegie Trust at Dunfermline in 1904, City Development. After making a civic survey of Dublin in 1914, he accepted a call to serve as town planning consultant on the development of Indian cities, and in the course of the next ten years made reports on some 50 Indian cities; the most notable of these reports was Town Planning Toward City Development (1918), a two-volume study of Indore. Geddes devoted the last years of his life to the building of a group of student hostels and colleges for the furtherance of intellectual synthesis and international cultural collaboration.