GEOG 346 Day 4

1
GEOG 346 Day 4

• Patrick Geddes and His Relevance to South
  Wellington

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• Patrick Geddes, was a practicing planner in
  Scotland, Palestine, and India. He also wrote on
  and made contributions to biology, sociology and
  geography, and created exhibitions and museums of
  urban and regional planning, such as Edinburgh's
  Outlook Tower.
• Geddes believed planners should have a strong
  grounding in, and work with, the unique
  attributes of the places they were planning for,
  which came to be expressed in his motto, Survey
  Before Plan.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• In addition to encouraging planners to walk the
  entirety of their regions, he advocated setting a
  context for planning through the use of regional
  surveys.
• As he wrote, As our surveys advance we become at
  home in our region, through-out its time and its
  space up to the present day. From thence, the
  past and the present cannot but open out into the
  possible. For our survey of things as they are
  that is, as they have become must ever suggest
  ideas as to their further becoming their
  further possibilities (Geddes 1915 1949, p.
  xxvi).

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• 'Local character' is no mere accidental
  old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and
  say. It is attained only in the course of
  adequate grasp and treatment of the whole
  environment, and in active sympathy with the
  essential and characteristic life of the place
  encountered (p. 157).
• Each place has a true personality and with this
  shows some unique elements a personality too
  much asleep it may be, but which it is the task
  of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken. And
  he can only do this who is in love and at home
  with his subject the love in which high
  intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his
  own fullest intensity of expression, to call
  forth the latent but not less vital possibilities
  before him (ibid.).

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• Geddes turned the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh into
  a museum of urban and regional planning, with
  exhibits that went from the neighbourhood to the
  whole globe.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• This incremental and respectful treatment of
  place contrasts sharply with the placeless
  planning that has characterized much of modernist
  practice over the past half century and more. It
  contrasts even more starkly with the clinical
  detachment of the planners responsible for urban
  renewal projects in the mid-20th century.
• As Eugene Walter observes, in the idiom of our
  urban renewal programs, urban therapy is a
  surgical metaphor. Healing, in this frame of
  mind, prescribes the excision of blighted
  neighborhoods. This kind of therapy requires
  objectivity. Objectivity means that the
  surgeon may view a place marked for amputation
  and think there is nothing of me in there.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• The quotations given from Geddes show the
  opposite frame of mind an attitude of active
  sympathy with a place, even when it is
  experiencing challenges. When Geddes lived in
  Edinburgh, he promoted and was personally
  involved in what he called conservative surgery
  remediation of slums through mobilizing
  residents to take matters in their own hands in
  rebuilding and improving their immediate living
  environments.