The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 January 2006
by Paddy Kitchen
City planning, like architecture, seems to be a profession given to fads. Presently, a hot topic is the New Urbanism, in which cities and towns are designed, almost from scratch, to express the best aspects of mixed use planning, like the old-fashioned American downtown. Older towns are often preserved with this in mind. Much of what results, however, has a corporate feel to it, as the new downtowns have such high rents that true small businesses are priced out of the market. Anyway, back in the middle of the 20th century, the fad was Urban Renewal, in which many vital neighborhoods in large cities were decimated to make way for broad empty and boring plazas of concrete. Boston's city hall is an example, a megablock that wiped out dirty but vibrant Scollay Square. Looking back further, there was a Garden City movement in the 1930s, and further than that, we come to the realm in which the very idea of modern large city planning was being born. That's where Sir Patrick Geddes comes in. A wiry and mercurial Scotsman, Geddes is here depicted as the father of modern city planning. Born in the middle of the 19th century, in a small Scottish city, Geddes began his education in the realm of botany and the then-nascent science of evolution. He adapted these disciplines, and their need for survey and statistics, to a broadly holistic view of man's interaction with his environment, his work and his living situation. Geddes had a quirky personality, given to impulsive decisions, terrible financial planning, and complex and obscure methods for conveying his ideas and ideals. His evolutionary diagrams put off the scientific establishment of the time, and he had repeated failure finding permanent employment in Scottish institutions. So, he built his own, the Outlook Tower, which still stands on Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Here, he expressed his ideal of designing our interconnected environment with the broad view in mind. He went out into that city's poorer streets and advocated civic pride and sanitation. His efforts met with mixed success, and financial troubles dogged his every step. With the town plan of Dunfermline, he attempted to put into action a broad program for one city. The plan failed to be adopted, but upon this Geddes built his career as a consultant to cities all over the world. It is hard to say, today, what Geddes's lasting influence would be in cities from Scotland to India, but his ideas were a generation or two before his time. He was an often frustrated but endlessly determined man. He drove his vision to his dying day, but failed to coherently express the innovative view he had of the world. A young Lewis Mumford carried on a correspondence with Geddes, whom he idolized until he finally met Geddes in the 1920s. That correspondence is published elsewhere, and is, perhaps, the most comprehensive encapsulation of Geddes's thought. Mumford went on to rebel against Geddes the man, and carried on a vibrant career of his own in urban theory and history. In this book, which dates from 1975, Paddy Kitchen gives a good overview of Geddes the man. She clearly struggled with how to summarize Geddes's ideas and his peculiar way of expressing them, but the book does manage to give a good sense of his sensitive view of urban and natural life. There have not been many good popular biographies of this key figure in architectural history, and that the only one is more than thirty years old calls for an update of Geddes's influence in the 21st century.