ancient cities

attempt to summarize his brand of evolutionary
urbanism in a popular and accessible style. It must
be judged an unsatisfactory statement of Geddes’s
intellectual ambition for the study of the city. The
excessive recourse by Geddes to specialized concepts
derived from biology and the many neologisms
that he constructed could seem obscure and
bewildering. For instance, to better express the
development of vast city-regions devouring small
towns and boroughs Geddes minted a term that
would become part of the lexicon of urban studies,
conurbation. Geddes’s other neologisms included
megalopolis, geotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic,
and Kakotopia. Nevertheless, Cities in Evolution
contains insightful clues into urban modernity,
especially with regard to physical environment,
culture, spatial form, community, evolutionary
history, and civics that, with more careful elaboration
and illustration, continue to resonate.
Influenced by his own semirural childhood and
the regional perspective of the French geographer
and anarchist Élisée Reclus, Geddes came to favor
regionalism as a way to extend the heterogeneity
of cities to a broader, more diverse, and self-regulating
unit. In the image of a river flowing through
a valley, Geddes was attracted to Reclus’s idea of
the “regional valley section” as a coherent unit for
research-informed action. His favored example
was Glasgow. For Geddes, the incipient “buds” of
the future society based on the city-region model
were already emerging in Glasgow because its
river, the Clyde, combined the various facets of
advanced industrial and social organization, which
other cities like London dispersed onto geographically
specialized quarters of the city. For this reason,
Geddes claimed, Glasgow was also preeminent
intellectually in the applied sciences and political
economy.
Civic Modernism
Unlike many contemporary environmentalists,
Geddes’s civic modernism was far from hostile to
urban life and technological innovation. For
Geddes, the early modern centralization of industry
and government represented a Paleotechnic age
while the modern evolution toward more decentralized
economy and government could evolve
into the Neotechnic age. In its blind drive toward
industrialization and accumulation for its own
Geddes, Patrick
295
sake, the Paleotechnic age wasted natural resources,
material, and energy on a huge scale, only to create
mass physical and cultural impoverishment as well
as a catastrophic relationship to the environment.
Geddes called this situation a Kakotopia, in contrast
to the emerging utopia that was being made
possible by electric energy. Geddes positioned his
image of the utopian city at a point “like the mathematician’s
zero,” somewhere between the grim
reality of the industrial city as Dante’s inferno and
the wholly abstract conception of the utopian city.
The civic modernism of utopian cities like Glasgow
was rooted in social, technological, and natural
conditions, but its realization was dependent on
social action through the many-sided flourishing of
environmentally sensitized action.
Despite being identified with large-scale public
planning schemes, Geddes opposed the neat
orderliness of anti-urban town planning and
urged an active, reciprocal interaction with the
natural and built environment. Practical intervention
should be modest, small scale, and localized,
a process he called conservative surgery.
Urban improvement ought to develop along
the grain of local traditions. Only careful study,
sensitive to the environmental distinctiveness of
city-regions, would reveal which evolutionary
buds could be self-consciously nurtured for the
utopian future.
See also City Beautiful Movement; City Planning;
Mumford, Lewis; Urban Planning; Utopia
Further Readings
Alex Law
Geddes, P. 1904. A Study in City Development: Parks,
Gardens, and Culture Institutes. Dunfermline, UK:
Carnegie Dunfermline Trust.
———. [1915] 1968. Cities in Evolution: An
Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to
the Study of Civics. London: Benn.
———. 1979. “Civics: As Applied Sociology.” In The
Ideal City, edited by H. E. Meller. Leicester, UK:
Leicester University Press.
Meller, H. 1990. Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and
City Planner. London: Routledge.
Welter, V. M. 2002. Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the
City of Light. Cambridge: MIT Press.