Patrick geddes pdf

He held the Chair of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay between and before returning to Europe for good. This brief account of Geddes's time in India provides a sense of his restless energies and myriad commitments.

It was established as a princely state in when its rulers, Malwi Brahmins by the name of Rao, were authorized by the Mughal Empire to extract revenue from the local population Jones, Later, princely authority was consolidated under the Holkar dynasty, composed of a pastoral caste called Dhangars.

When the British gained power in central India after the Treaty of Mandsaur in , they took over the external affairs of Indore while leaving the internal affairs of the state to the remnants of the Holkar dynasty. By that time the state of Indore was already on its way to being industrialized, with the establishment of textile factories and market hubs within the capital city.

The British consolidated this trend by encouraging investment in railways, roads, a postal system, and modern educational facilities.

This brought entrepreneurs and laborers to the city of Indore, but the sharp increase in population was swiftly followed by plague epidemics. These epidemics had a drastic impact on the city with the population of 98 halved to 54 by Jones, In India Geddes quickly acquired a reputation as an independent-minded town planner whose suggestions did not run to the elaborate or expensive but provided practical and economical solutions to common problems. In the aftermath of an outbreak of plague, the Maharaja of Indore commissioned Geddes to improve public health in Indore Meller, Geddes's report showed a clear preoccupation with alleviating disease conditions in the city.

Among the topics dealt with in the report were the direct relations of diseases to different aspects of the city, specifically polluting local industries, such as cotton mills, congested living quarters, nonexistent sanitation and 1 Alist of the town plans that Geddes undertook in India alone stand as testimony to his energy: Balram , Baroda , Calcutta the Barabazar Improvement Scheme, , Dacca , Indore , Kapurthala , Lahore , Lucknow ; , Nagpur , and Patiala Town planning, plant sentience, and cooperative evolution water supplies, faulty drainage schemes and polluted river systems.

Instead, it read like a philosophical treatise with the narrative weaving an unlikely thread through defecation, sewage, drains, gardens, festivals, and universities to propose a holistic vision for making the city habitable. At the time that Geddes was commissioned to secure Indore from plagues, the usual recourse of architects, civil engineers, hygienists, and health inspectors was to make the city sanitary Ballhachet and Harrison, ; Briggs, ; Dossal, ; Harrison, Through their ministrations, town planning had taken on a formulaic cast, most notably clearing neighborhoods to create wide streets, putting up functional buildings in place of precolonial ones, and enforcing a regimen of sanitary practices through the placement of latrines and sewage channels.

Geddes marked his difference from these experts by declaring his commitment to civic over public health. He identified a deep-rooted ambivalence within contemporary town-planning practices toward the modern city, in which the city was seen as the unfortunate byproduct of industrialization. From such a perspective one could only secure a city by reconstitut- ing it, as Haussman did for Paris.

Instead, Geddes advocated accepting a city as it was, as the best possible expression of historical forces and biological needs. Within such a perspective, a city did not need a radical makeover as much as select interventions to allow it to better serve the needs for which it had evolved. In other words, town planning should not be the panacea for the ills of city life but an amplification of all that was good within it. And in line with his longstanding thinking on evolution, his criterion for what was good within a city was that which fostered better coordination and cooperation within and between different segments of the city population.

Consequently, in the first volume of Town Planning Towards City Development Geddes took the reader for a walk through the city of Indore. Writing about the modern perspective, Erwin Panofsky emphasizes the Western inclination to view from above, to place humans and objects within a space that was infinite yet homogeneous and, most importantly, entirely graspable by sight from at least one vantage point Geddes took a somewhat different approach to viewing from above.

As the layout of the Outlook Tower which he designed for Edinburgh indicated Welter, , the effort of seeing from above, of descending from an individual point into a milieu in which one was a point among others, was to learn to locate oneself within the order of things and grasp the structure of relations. This approach was one of Geddes's most enduring prods to habits of the mind and later in this paper we see it actualized in Geddes's plans for the spatial layout of gardens in Indore.

But Geddes's walk through the city of Indore was also an exercise in developing a vantage point on the city. It sought a view of the city from the perspective of the perambulating viewer whose sight radiated from a moving point.

Such a perspective emphasized a constantly changing field of vision, bringing different subjects and activities in and out of focus, helping to see how the city served microneeds, such as the desire for congregation or individual seclusion. It also allowed an insightful viewer, such as an enlightened town planner, to acquire a bodily sense of the movements and blockages imposed by the city. If seeing from above was a matter of developing an outlook on the world at large, such walking was the practice of penetrating the surface 2 The first volume went into great detail on the topics of drainage, water supply, suburb planning, sanitary problems, garden designs, city quarters, and various problems according to specific settlement type from factories, to housing, to railways, etc.

The second volume treated the topics of a university, library, museum, research institutes, school of music, water and drainage plans, new housing, an industrial town, housing and cleansing in the Old City, plague measures, civic associations, and private and public enterprise.

This technique evinced sensitivity towards the history and functions of cities but also drew attention to human biology. The language of diagnosis did not render the city analogous to a human body but brought the human body that produced and inhabited it into focus.

While a typical town planner would hone in on solutions to the question of why there were so many plagues in Indore, Geddes was much more vexed by the question why were so many people prone to the plague in a city of their own making? While he was not averse to making concrete recommendations to prevent the plague, such as ensuring that there were no mice in cotton mills or that living quarters were better aerated, for him the problem of the plague lay elsewhere.

Neurasthenia, according to Geddes, was depression brought on by the deprivation of things beautiful and inspirational as much as by malnutrition and fatigue. Before I consider further Geddes's understanding of neurasthenia, let me briefly pause to differentiate his representation of Indians from more official and scholarly representa- tions of the day.

Thomas Trautmann has detailed for us the perhaps contingent convergence of orientalist scholarship on India with racialized thinking in producing the representation of India as a once great civilization, reduced to a mere shadow of its past glories Within this picture, Indians were represented as fallen from the status of proud subjects to superstitious folk, as much weakened by racial degener- ation as by societal and religious strictures.

While reform was often institutionalized as a means to correct wrongs in Indian society, Partha Chatterjee and Uday Mehta have pointed out that racial difference was considered indelible.

While Geddes was informed by racialized biology, most notably Galton's eugenics Welter, , his writings on India and elsewhere were refreshingly free of racial categories and assumptions. Consequently, his understanding that the people of Indore likely suffered from neurasthenia has to be understood as a diagnosis specific to a moment and milieu in the life course of a species and not as a description of a permanent predilection of Indians.

This lack called up gardens of a dizzying variety: garden suburbs, garden villages, public gardens, avenue trees, fuel trees, sacred parks, palace parks, park farms, zoological parks, vegetable gardens, pleasure gardens, fruit gardens, outdoor mazes, rock gardens, sports parks, arboretum and botanic gardens, key gardens, gardens of the phases of life, gardens of evolution, herb gardens, wild gardens, working gardens, silk gardens, palace gardens, and Japanese gardens , volume 1.

It is noteworthy that, although Geddes was strongly influenced by the Garden City Movement spearheaded by Ebenezer Howard in the late 19th century, he was not simply prescribing from its tenets.

These were to be surrounded by greenbelts to serve as sites of toil, places of leisure, and bands of containment. Yet this picture of the garden city assumed the abandonment of dense areas of the city and new development at its outlying areas. While Geddes advocated the creation of such suburbs for the toilers of Indore city, he put greatest weight on the creation of gardens within the existing city infrastructure.

Nor did he imagine these gardens as merely places of education and entertainment for the masses, as witnessed by the growth and popularity of public gardens and zoos by the end of the 19th century Hoage and Deiss, As he had done in Scotland, Geddes proposed gardens as crucial aids to health, which would enable the city as an evolutionary form to breathe and provide its sick inhabitants places for convalescence.

If Geddes's call for gardens felt intuitive insofar as one could imagine how gardens would aid health, his second move in curing Indians of neurasthenia felt less so. In the cities this waste was viewed as disease carrying and promptly collected as a sanitary measure.

But what good did such hasty action achieve? Water-borne drainage schemes currently in use in the West were anathema for Geddes because their construction would destroy India's cities, sacrificing their past and present for a sanitized future. Instead he advocated a change of perspective on waste by proposing that it be viewed as an incipient fertilizer for the gardens he proposed. And he gathered strength from the field of bacteriology to support his call for a change of perspective on sewage.

By the middle of the 19th century bacteriology had established itself in fighting diseases and enhancing agriculture. There was tremendous effort in Victorian England to tap the potential of bacteriology in transforming sewage into fertilizer Goddard, ; Sheail, Manuals of the time speak of sewage farming as a widely successful venture, although later evaluations of that period of experimentation suggest that the content of sewage was too variable to ensure predictable outcomes.

For instance, the unexpected presence of seeds in sewage could produce weeds that choked gardens. Moreover, these studies also raised worries about the possible transmission of toxins and other effluents into garden products. Performance completed the triangulation privileged in Geddes's town planning. He did not think that it was possible to bring about a change in people's attitudes and behavior by means of rational discourse alone. For any idea to take hold it required the infusion of emotion.

In Scotland Geddes had relied upon vast perfor- mances called masques by which to present his ideas and visions to a broad public, even writing books on how the dramatization of history elicited people's participa- tion in change Geddes, Historically, masques were theatrical shows performed mainly in Britain in which masked and costumed actors staged elaborate perfor- mances rich in reference to myths, allegories, or symbolism Outland, They were initially designed to be complimentary of the host of the gathering, most often kingly courts, gaining literary and aesthetic force under the influence of Ben Johnson in the 17th century.

They had acquired an imperialist edge by the lateth century, communicating a sense of pride in a nation's position in the divine and natural hierarchy. Yet consistent throughout was the emphasis on the sumptuousness of display Laskowski, Laskowski writes that the entirety of the performance, the sounds, the sights, the colors, the music, the movement all taken together, challenged a single narrative or the singular focus on speech.

The criterion by which the success of a masque was to be judged was that it induced pleasure in its viewers. Geddes relied on display in the form of exhibitions, such as the Outlook Tower in Scotland and the towns and cities exhibition which he attempted to transport to India, to communicate his ideas. Pleasure experienced from viewing masques gave flight to his ideas. But how was the pleasure of the inhabitants of Indore to be ensured? In Geddes's earlier writings he had attempted to organize different types of available statistical information to bring economics into conversation with ethics, indicating his enduring interest in cooperation informing both evolutionary processes and species sociality Geddes, In these writings we find an informative discussion on the categories of pleasure and pain.

Geddes noted that it was often participation in the familiar that gave pleasure, while learning something new was experienced as painful. In Indore he turned to religious performance as being most familiar and likely to give pleasure to its people, as a substitute for masques.

Consequently, we can imagine Geddes's delight in being granted his wish to be Maharaja of Indore for one day. To be given the privilege to design the procession for the Diwali festival to be celebrated in Indore during the time of his visit meant the opportunity to enthuse the population with his plans for their city 3 : 3 Sandra Freitag and Nita Kumar have both written how public festivals and processions, a constant in Indian life, acquired new force in the earlyth century as the means by which upwardly mobile individuals and communities sought to be included in regional and national-level politics.

These festivals became sites of competition for visibility and recognition by the colonial authorities. Both scholars note innovation within longstanding rituals, in which political symbols were freely mobilized.

Hence, beyond the Diwali cleansing, and even the recent vigorous State and Municipal aid to it, the further experiment of the Diwali Procession with its fuller appeals'' , volume 1, page The circular that Geddes distributed ahead of the day sketched his design for the procession and was later appended to the first volume of the Indore town planning report.

In the circular Geddes advertised a routing of the procession through only those parts of the city considered best cleaned, thus setting off a flurry of activity of clearing streets and whitewashing buildings Ahmed Ali, ; Boardman, , Kitchen, ; Meller, The procession was heralded by the usual assortment of regal paraphernalia: bands, cavalry, and royal elephants and horses.

In deference to the rural origins of Diwali, the first few floats portrayed agriculture and its harvest. Next to come were tigers and demons of frightful shapes indicating various and sundry germs. Housewives and sweepers beat at these ghastly apparitions with their brooms, suggesting the unending enterprise to rid one's environment of these nuisances.

The procession then shifted to the future of Indore, beginning with the sweepers in new turbans, which gestured to their elevated status as gardeners in Geddes's plan. The new goddess, Indore City, was borne aloft, carrying a banner outlining the new city plan. In her wake came floats on which were modeled the proposals laid out in Geddes's plan, including new homes for workers, and gardens. The procession con- cluded with floats representing the crafts of Indore.

By evening the procession had wound its way to the public park where the giant figures of Ravana and the Plague Rat were burned amid great fanfare. The festival was not unlike a modern-day parade. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology Maggie Studholme Abstract On the basis of a close reading of two early articles by Patrick Geddes, which form the basis of his later approach to sociology, it is argued that Geddes should be reclaimed by sociologists from the geographers and the town planners, as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology in Britain at around the turn of the last century.

Introduction Interest in the work of Patrick Geddes continues. Yet in spite of a number of books and articles dedicated to his life and work, there seems to be no universal agreement on where he belongs, in an intellectual sense.

Hobhouse in late Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc. Maggie Studholme term. In spite of this, the breadth of his contribution to sociology is only rarely acknowledged in Britain by sociologists. This is especially surprising since the emergence, in the last thirty years or so, of environmental sociology. Indeed, it has been suggested on at least two separate occasions that Patrick Geddes deserves to be re-instated as an early founder of environmental sociology Martinez-Alier, 98; Meller, — This is an unfair assessment, for the following reasons.

First, to say that Geddes ought to have addressed the work of particular contemporaries is to impose on early 20th Century sociology a degree of cohesiveness and a shape that it simply did not have. Of the sociologists Law cites, only Durkheim was formally recognised, internationally, as a professional sociologist. Where are the last of these now?

The earliest work in English appears to have been a essay by H. Robertson, although this was not cited even by the LSE academic J. Secondly, if commitment to an evolutionary sociology amounts to criteria for contemporary irrelevance, there are many whom we should now similarly abandon, including Marx, Durkheim and Weber themselves, since each retained some commitment to a more or less sophisticated evolutionary worldview.

This paper, therefore, is a call to reclaim Geddes as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology — and not just in Britain. He travelled widely throughout his life and inspired and influenced many people. In fact, Geddes probably took his own ideas to Chicago, since he gave a course of lectures there in Meller, Moreover, Chicago sociology was demonstrably social Darwinist in orientation, using biological and ecological concepts and terminology as metaphors Miley, ; Gaziano, Park was acquainted, however, with the work of Radhakamal Mukerjee Mukerjee, ; Park, Geddes was born in , which makes him of the same generation as Durkheim born It is almost impossible to read about Geddes in a way that does not mix, inextricably, his personal life with his work see Meller, ; Boardman, ; Mairet, This rural and scientific background contrasted sharply with his experience of the wider world, when he later found himself in London with time on his hands to observe the city around him.

It was probably this experience, in combination with his early reading of Carlyle, Ruskin, Spencer and Comte, and via his teacher, T. Huxley , with the work of the French sociologist Le Play, that sparked his interest in the social as well as the natural sciences. From the early s, Geddes made increasing incursions into a nascent sociology, even while he was employed as a teacher and demonstrator of botany at Edinburgh.

Given his background, not only is it not surprising that he began from biology, it was also not particularly unusual for a sociologist of this era to have done so. Durkheim himself, in The Division of Labour, explained the mechanics of social change in a way that drew directly on Darwin Hawkins, 12; Lukes, ; Durkheim, []: The success of Darwinian biology in drawing a wide range of diverse subjects under its theoretical umbrella meant that sociologists of the late nineteenth century could not avoid engaging with its arguments as they struggled to mark out their own intellectual territory.

Geddes was a holistic thinker, although the term itself was not coined until , near the end of his life. But Geddes, in common with the other classical sociologists, was concerned not only with an understanding of society and social change, but with social amelioration. His difficulty or one of them lay in getting people to understand his vision, which — though it differed only in certain respects from more conventional world- views — was incomprehensible to many of his contemporaries.

Two early papers give the best indication of the subsequent direction of his thought. They form the basis of his subsequent sociology, and in spite of being his earliest works are often more lucid than his later writing, which became increasingly tangled, making his intentions harder to decipher. The classification of statistics The paper was an ambitious attempt, heavily influenced by his reading of Comte, to devise a system of classification for the increasing number of social statistics.

The system he went on to outline was based on a set of axiomatic statements about societies in their relationship with nature: First. Secondly it consists of a number of living organisms. Thirdly, these modify surrounding nature, primarily by seizing part of its matter and energy. Fourthly, they apply this matter and energy to the maintenance of their life, i. A society may be much more than all this. These will therefore henceforth be termed sociological axioms.

He used it, in different contexts, to refer to every aspect of human existence — natural, cultural, and built and even to the internal environment of the body , although he was not always careful to specify which sense of the term he was using at any given moment. Beginning from territory, or physical environment, Geddes wanted to classify and count the quality and quantity of land, water and other natural resources, plants, and minerals, and whether and how they were used, wasted, or undisturbed by human agency.

Energy was equally important, so its natural sources the sun, tidal energy, hot springs and volcanic energy should also be logged. But this is to miss the point. Geddes realised that his scheme was over-ambitious, but he believed pas- sionately that all this data was necessary for practical social amelioration Geddes, Yet it was by no means immediately clear, how all this information, once collected, could be collated and made commensurable.

Yet all these statistics would prove to be necessary to his subsequent account of economics. The principles of economics: physical The paper was long, and was presented to the Royal Society of Edin- burgh in three parts.

Economics, he believed could be seen to have three analytically separable but inter-related levels — physical, biological and psychological.

He believed that if energy was used as the unit of measurement it would also be possible to work out how much fuel food for the workers as well as coal for machines was wasted by inefficient production methods.

This would highlight the fact that often more energy was wasted in production than was contained in the finished product, he said, showing just how inefficient manufacturing processes were Geddes, His refusal of monetary calculation at this stage allowed him to focus on what Marx only partially grasped.

For Marx, the owners of capital derived their profit from the surplus value of the labour expended by the worker in production. Yet to the extent that the exchange value of an item is produced by the energy expended in human labour, which, according to Geddes, had to be considered in the same terms as the rest of the natural world, but which is not generally calculated as part of the cost of production, the surplus appropriated by the capitalist can be equated with the increased quantity of resources and especially food required to keep the worker working beyond the time required to reproduce the necessities of his own life.

Geddes argued that if the quantity of finished goods per unit time as man- hour, man-day or man-year were calculated, it would be possible to work out the amount of wealth collectively owned by the community, and consequently the details of appropriate distribution Geddes, This would highlight the importance of conservation, by showing the vast quantities of resources and energy used up by human activity Geddes, Yet, if conservation was of key importance, some types of consumption were more desirable than others.

Here, rather than attempting to minimise all production in order to conserve resources, Geddes believed that the maximisation of permanent goods was a better alternative Geddes, This implied that it would be better to concentrate on producing beautiful buildings and works of art to stimulate the sense organs than to waste resources on the production of luxury food and clothing, which might have the same effect but which did not last long. Beyond this, conservation demanded a reorganisation of produc- tion in the interests of efficiency, including waste reduction, the minimisation of friction in transport, and the simplification of trade Given the appalling environmental conditions in many urban areas during this period, what is surprising is perhaps not that Geddes should calculate wealth in this way, but the refusal of so many others to do so, a point he reiterated in later writings for example, —6.

Noor Afrin D. At the same time people act, through economic processes such as farming and construction, on a place and thus shape it. Thus both place and folk are linked and through work are in constant transition. In this theory, the family is viewed as the central "biological unit of human society "from which all else develops. In reality the commercial factors resulted in few of these central squares being captured for public use.

Geddes recognised that the majority of the population he was designing for would be immigrants from Europe and other parts of the world.

Interestingly Geddes provide little more that this style recommendations in his planning report. A low standard of construction and of housing units apartment buildings has largely been blamed for this, citing that the buildings developed were ugly and akin to stacks of packing cases with shoeboxes for balconies.