November 2002 Archives

We talked to Volker Welter, author of Biopolis, Patrick Geddes and the City of Life

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 10:04 PM | Permalink

Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian, who has studied and worked in Berlin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Currently, he teaches architectural history and theory at the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Reading. From 1995-1998 he was assistant archivist at Strathclyde University Archives, Glasgow, where he was in charge of completing the catalogue of The Papers of Sir Patrick Geddes (6 vols., Glasgow, 1999). From 1998-2000 he was, at the University of Edinburgh, a co-recipient of a Senior Research Grant of the Getty Grant Program, Los Angeles, for a research project entitled The Spirit of the City in Modernity. At the same time he was the Director of the Patrick Geddes Centre, Edinburgh University. His most recent books are The City after Patrick Geddes (co-editor, Peter Lang, 2000) and Biopolis - Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (MIT Press, 2002).

PGCO.UK
First of all, congratulations on such a provocative and interesting piece of work on Geddes. A fine achievement and a beautiful publication. Are you happy with the finished book? And, what are you working on now - where has this research taken you?

Volker
Many thanks for the compliments on the book which I wish to share with my publisher, the MIT Press, and its staff who have done an amazing job. Obviously, I am extremely pleased with the outcome and hope that readers will enjoy the book. The publication of "Biopolis" almost marks the end of my work on Geddes, although I am currently completing one more book on Geddes, viz. on his work for the Zionist movement in Palestine, especially his design of the masterplan for Tel Aviv (1925, realised) and his design for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1919, unrealised). Beyond this, I am now working on different projects, amongst them an academic study on Ernst Freud (1892-1970), an architect son of Sigmund Freud. Interestingly, Freud briefly collaborated with Geddes and his son-in-law, Frank Mears, on a small aspect of the master plan for the Hebrew University. But as Ernst Freud was a modern architect, his suggestion did not find much favour with the two Scotsmen. However, the engagement with Geddesian theory will continue to have some influence on my further work. For example, I have begun a new project on the phenomenology of cities, on the way architects have visually analysed and planned the city in the twentieth century, an interest that can be traced back, in parts at least, to Geddes's "Cities and Town Planning Exhibition" and his diagrams, for example the "Notation of Life".

PGCO.UK
How does the book relate to your Doctorate? Was it difficult to disentangle the two, or were they quite separate projects?

Volker
The PhD dissertation forms the basis for "Biopolis", and actually, the book follows the doctorate closely regarding structure and contents. Omitted from the book are some sections on Geddes's work in Edinburgh, which are of lesser interest for a theoretical understanding of his theory of the city. Furthermore, although I researched various of Geddes's urban intervention in Edinburgh, this whole area of his work remains basically under-researched. In order to fully understand Geddes's influence in Edinburgh and Scotland, detailed studies would be required, for example a history and analysis of Geddes's masterplan for Edinburgh Zoo which Geddes conceived as a "valley section". Equally fascinating would be a study of the redistribution and separation of the social classes—with the lower classes mainly at the Holyrood end and the middle classes at the Lawn Market end of the Royal Mile—Geddes intended with his various housing projects in Edinburgh's Old Town. Even the Outlook Tower, although having been subject of various master theses, invites further research, for example a reconstruction of its contents, floor by floor, room by room. But there are other researchers working on Geddes—one of the most interesting ones is currently the architect and architectural historian Pierre Chabard in Paris—and so hopefully further academic publications about Geddes will be published.

PG.CO.UK
You focus on a much ignored or belittled area of Geddes's work, the City as and Spirituality. You hint that this area has been seen as an eccentricity but is in fact central to understanding Patrick Geddes. These twin themes of evolution and spirituality (or ethics) seem to be the bridge between the world of fin de siècle Europe and our own post-modern biotechnological world. Would you agree?

Volker
This question requires a longer answer in several steps. First, I don't agree that evolution and spirituality, or ethics as you say, are twin themes. They may have been for Geddes who, in accordance with thinking of his time, wished to find some ethical principle in evolution. However, at their most basic, Darwinian understanding, natural selection and evolution are totally arbitrary processes that do not lead to, or even require, any teleological goal.

That Geddes never accepted that shows how much he was a man of the nineteenth century, the century that had dethroned God and traditional religions, but then could not face the void at the centre of society and in personal lives. Second, Geddes was not an exception in occupying himself with such architectural realisations of ideas of spirituality as his various temple schemes represent. All over continental Europe we can find similar ideas between the late 1880s and the 1920s; some architectural historians would even argue to include the 1930s, for example National-socialist designs for urban centres and their mis-en-scène for mass rallies and other party festivities. Thus put into a contemporary context wider than Scottish and/or British, Geddes's temples for Greek Gods and gardens for Greek Muses are not eccentric, but a sign of their time. Third, these schemes are central to my analysis of Geddes's theory of the city not only because of their architecture but because they are important to the understanding of the middle class way of negotiating reality of modern society especially if - as Geddes has done that bourgeois mind rejects notions of class and class conflict.

As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno emphasise in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." Fourth, I disagree with your suggestion that Geddes's interest in evolution and spirituality (or ethics) can be seen as a bridge between the fin-de-siècle Europe and, as you write, "our own post-modern biotechnological world". Such connection implies that there is a lasting Geddesian legacy or even that he may have something to teach us today. I am afraid, I don't subscribe to the notion that human beings can be ahead-of-their-time. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have analysed with great wit in The German Ideology (1845-46) human beings usually respond in both deeds and thoughts to issues raised by their own time and contemporary circumstances.

PG.CO.UK
You also focus on, the City as an Ideal - and the utopian and eutopian aspect of Geddes's thinking. Do you believe that Geddes's practical works (conservation, town planning etc) have overshadowed his theoretical vision?

Volker
For Geddes, theory and practice went hand in hand; for many of Geddes's followers and/or biographers it did not necessarily. Instead, at different times since his death, the interest in Geddes's work and thought was inspired by varying contemporary issues. Compare, for example, the emphasis many mid-twentieth-century modern architects put on Geddes as a "father" of modern post-war town planning with the Geddes the environmental movement discovered in the 1970s and 1980s as one of its predecessors figures. Thus two almost diametrically opposed approaches to humankind's engagement with the environment refer to Geddes. Obviously, the points of references differ, but in either case they are isolated from the larger body of theory Geddes aimed to formulate. It is this kind of purposefully selective approach to Geddes that I tried to avoid in my book on his theory of the city—the readers' reactions will tell me how well I have succeeded.

PG.CO.UK
You touch on Geddes's involvement with William James ("From Individual to Communal Psychology") - do you wish you had more time to explore Geddes's work with James and Bergson? Or, put another way, isn't the rise of psychology during this period a key aspect of Geddes's modernism?

Volker
Yes, Geddes's modernism draws strongly on contemporary psychology which, in turn, was a common theme since intellectuals began debating the relation between psychology, modernism and modernity during the 19th century. Recall Baudelaire's idea about the modern as the fleeing, ever changing, or the essay "The Metropolis and the Mental Life" (1903) by the German sociologist Georg Simmel; an essay Geddes seems not to have known. Likewise, the concept of memory and the recovery of a past of which sight had been lost in the turbulences of modern, hectic life was a sign of the times, witness Sigmund Freud, but also the French urbanist Marcel Poëte and others. It was urban thinkers such as Poëte and Geddes's who aimed at transferring some of these contemporary psychological ideas into the debate about the city, into urban planning and architectural design.

PG.CO.UK
Many people in Scotland obsess about whether Geddes is, or isn't recognised. What's your view of this debate?

Volker
I would like to ask you back to please explain what is actually meant by Geddes being recognised or not? By whom and, more important, what for? Within architectural and urban planning circles Geddes finds as much and as varied interest as many other figure of the early twentieth century. If at all and why this should be different amongst historians of Scottish culture, art, and history I really cannot answer. Judged by the number of academic publications and references to Geddes's ideas and work, and such more popular activities as memorial plaques and events, I don't think that there is a significant neglect of Geddes as a fascinating historical figure and thinker of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

PG.CO.UK
You seem to be at times, as many of his colleagues and friends were, exasperated with Geddes, writing: "In retrospect, his many repetitive temple schemes reveal themselves as an optimistic but at the same time desperate - series of attempts to realise at least once, somewhere, somehow, a built manifestation of an idea of life he had conceived, which was a utopian idea despite all his efforts to derive it from social, regional and scientific realities." (p.232 Biopolis) Can you say any more about your evaluation of his contribution to planning, architecture and other disciplines?

Volker
Exasperated does not quite seem to be the right word. However, I find it amazing that Geddes appears to have had so little self-doubt, so little questioning of his own ideas and plans—at least as far as architecture and urban design was concerned. If you write planning report after planning report, and they hardly ever seem to be implemented, or at least what is central to most of his planning schemes, the cultural-educational complex, seems to never have been realised, well, then I think it is justified to ask what is all this about? Even more, to ask how far Geddes was actually in touch with his contemporaries and their needs, problems, and dreams? Was he just pursuing an idée fix or was he answering contemporary needs and questions? To assess in greater detail Geddes's contribution to planning and architecture would require further study. Very little is actually known about Geddes's work in India and what is today Pakistan; the late Giovanni Ferraro's most important study barely manages to scratch the surface of this immensely important area of Geddes's work. His work in Palestine is better researched, but what about Paris and Montpellier? His influence in the 1940s and 1950s the Patrick Geddes Centre at Edinburgh University aimed at assessing with the 1998 conference The City after Patrick Geddes and the subsequent publication of the conference papers under the same title in 2000. However, on a more theoretical level I hope my own study will allow for a better assessment of Geddes's position within the history of the emergence of modern planning and the debate about the city. Geddes is a very important figure in this field because he defies the simplistic assumption that the debate about the modern city was all about rationality, efficiency and utilitarian concepts of organising urban space and society.

PG.CO.UK
Can you explain further why you choose the temple schemes as the focus of your test-bed for Geddes's "success" or "failure"?

Volker
Actually, it is Geddes who has made the temple schemes to a gauge of failure or success. As I quote on pages 175-176, Geddes once wrote that "the social & political reformer has always to state and re-state his ideas, long before he forms that resolute minority, which by restating these ideas more widely still - persuades a sufficient majority to [adopt] them." Thus it is Geddes himself who declares his temple schemes - because they are the ideas he refers to in above quote—to be a central point around which his theory of the city revolves. And considering that to my knowledge none of his temples was ever realised, his ideas were more failure than success. Nevertheless, that of course leaves his ideas intact and thus open to discussion. My interest in his temple schemes was initially determined by my own architectural historical training in Germany where there was a movement immediately after the First World War which is called Expressionism in architecture. One characteristic of this movement were utopian temple schemes at the heart of future cities, and you can imagine my excitement when I began to understand that Geddes had proposed something similar 30 years earlier, even though less sophisticated in architectural form. Suddenly, Geddes opened up a way to comprehend a phenomenon we can find in German and Dutch and other continental European countries, not because he was a genius, but because he was deeply involved with his contemporaries all over Europe.

PG.CO.UK
You've remarked on the fact that the lack of a defining written work by Geddes has left his legacy to invite regular rediscovery. You've said that: "Attempts to cast him as an early forerunner of late twentieth century concerns such as regionalism, environmentalism, or conservation of historic architecture not only tend to obscure the contents of his ideas but to turn them into their very opposite." While it is clear that Geddes's conservation ethic has been exaggerated in preservation, it's not so clear in what ways he was not an early forerunner of regionalism or of environmentalism? I'm thinking in particular of his relationship to the work of Elisee Reclus' work "The History of a Brook" and of his thinking on technology and so on? In other words, its interesting to ask why Geddes is so misunderstood. Is this because a modern audience conflates "civic renascence" with the garden city movement? Is it because of a partial interpretation by Boardman? Is it a collective projection on behalf of those drawn to Geddes, or is it that he is just not what he appears to be?

Volker
Well, if Geddes would have written a manual for town planning, a hand book for urban design as many of his German and Continental European contemporaries for example have done, he probably would have been forgotten by today. But he did not and this, I think, is in retrospect his "advantage". Because his ideas are not laid down in a single book they are open to interpretation, both new and creative ones as well as misinterpretations such as the valley section that is so often reduced to a single valley bereft of any human settlements except the metropolitan city at the foot of the valley.

Or the conurbation which Geddes saw potentially as a positive development while today the term usually denotes human development of the earth gone wrong. My point is not to say that some of Geddes's ideas are not of possible interest today. But before the relevance of any idea or concept can be considered a painstaking factual reconstruction of such ideas is required. And that reconstruction of Geddes's thoughts appears to me to be often neglected - especially as Geddes does not offer a few well-written books, but a large heap of notes and papers and publications—in favour of rather simplistic claims that Geddes is a forerunner of all sorts of ideas of our own time. However, as mentioned before, as a historian I do not consider a continuous relevance of his ideas a necessary precondition to justify my own interest in Geddes or any other historical figure.

I would not say that Geddes is misunderstood, but would rather ask if he is understood in the first instance, especially if his ideas are looked at not within their own context of the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and only then within the circumstances of our age, but solely within the parameters set by our time.

Democracy and Green Political Thought - Sustainabilty, Rights and Citizenship

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 10:01 PM | Permalink

Edited by Brian Doherty and Marius de Geus, Routledge, London (1996) ISBN 0 415 14412 4

Though often stimulating and critical, this book ultimately stops short of fulfilling its potential as a serious study of contemporary problems in ecology and democracy. The guest writers are a vegetable stew of ecodemia, and while they valiantly struggle with the chosen themes, there is a slightly dull tone to the whole debate, as if class, race and gender issues had been withdrawn, leaving the whole dish flavourless. In short, power is a subject left untouched. This is radical liberalism at its most well conceived but disappointing. This is a rather sweeping analysis, so perhaps it would be productive to look at each of the more interesting chapters individually. Michael Kenny - Paradoxes of Community Challenging green assumptions about the nature, desirability and paths to 'community' Michael Kenny is both provokative and insightful, focusing on one of the key issues to eco-anarchists - the potential and limitations of the concept and realities of 'community'. On 'community' as a subject of consensus, Kenny argues: 'Its repeated usage in some green circles encourages the belief that power relationships can be transcended once humans are operating harmoniously; the idea that networks of power operate throughout society, at all levels of community life, remains alien to many greens, though not because they possess a coherent alternative theory...indeed the absence of a distinctively ecological theory of power may constitute one of the central weaknesses of political ecology.' (p.23) This highlights one of the central weaknesses of this book, the reference to 'greens' as a generic and encompassing term has becme meaningless. Social Ecology, for example is clearly a political ecology which has as its centre precisely what Kenny argues for - a distinctively ecological theory of power.

Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 9:58 PM | Permalink

Helen Meller Routledge, London (1990) ISBN 0 415 10393 2

Helen Meller's Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner offers more analysis of the Geddesian legacy, and is perhaps the most authoritative study yet published. This is a comprehensive survey of Geddes career and development beautifully illustrated and conceived. Significantly, it covers previously underemphasised work that Geddes undertook in social reconstruction in India and Palestine. Meller, who has devoted many years to the study of Geddes, manages to capture in a readable narrative a complex development of thought. Despite this, there is much that Meller misses, and the holes in the analysis are obvious.

Meller has little or no sense of the cultural context in which her subject resides. She appears both patronising and ignorant of any Scottish history or context. This means that whilst she acknowledges a Scottish tradition of generalist philosophy, she has no references to relate it to. This blind spot also means that she remains silent on Geddes sponsorship and involvement with artists and craftsmen, his multi-disciplinary publishing and building efforts and his central position in the Celtic Renaissance. She manages only a couple of pages on the painter John Duncan, who was clearly a key influence and collaborator with Geddes, and this does seem inadequate. This is not just a marginal point, for Geddes' involvment in civic paegantry and art are central to his efforts towards a fuller more rounded conception of social life. Meller continuosly refers to Geddes apolitical nature, then draws attention to his interaction with Kropotkin and Reclus, and his inspiration by the Paris Commune of 1871. Geddes, who offered sanctuary to dissidents and revolutionary emigres such as Paul Reclus, is, according to Meller a figure with no interest in politics. This is the same Geddes who pioneered radical environmental education, and collected around him thinkers in an intellectual affinity group at Ramsay Garden and the Outlook Tower. Clearly Geddes has no interest in parliamentary politics, but Geddes's true interest lies in the polis, the politics of the city and the of the citizen. Meller seems oblivious to this, and the possibility that one can be interested in politics, but not in parliament.

The convergence of regionalism, participatory democracy and anarchism are key elements of Geddes thinking. His eutopianism, and his attempt to combine praxis with the 'literature of locality' are all related to his civics. Finally, Geddes is virtually ignored by Meller as an ecologist when his observations on the subject during the heart of the industrial revolution, seem quite visionary. Geddes interaction with Ernst Haeckel (who coined the word 'ecology') at Jena University are most significant, yet go unmentioned by Meller. An early biographer, Marshall Stalley stated, 'Geddes is significant today because with an obsession with the gadgets and tangibles of 'material progress', he saw a steadily deteriorating public environment - air, water, and land pollution - and a decay in the quality of urban living. The private environment is expanding while the public environment goes steadily downhill. Geddes understood there is only one environment, and that, without a meaningful public environment, the creation and maintenance of a self-contained environment is an illusion which will destroy mankind.' In this then, we can see that Geddes' interest in art/culture, politics and ecology are co-joined by his interest in civics and the public space. To miss out on these aspects then, adds up to a glaring oversight, which all of the methodical research can't overcome. This is clearly an excellent book about Patrick Geddes as city planner and social evolutionist. But Geddes was much more than that, and whilst the book deserves much praise, it is surely not the definitive writing on the subject.

Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes - The Correspondence

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 9:54 PM | Permalink

Edited and introduced by Frank G Novak, Routledge, London (1995)

ISBN 0 415 11906-5 hardback

Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a vitalistic philosopher of catholic interests - the 'professor of things in general' - Lewis Mumford was his pupil, friend and ultimately his successor. Their relationship, and the nature of the succession is of more importance than might first appear, for they have resonance today in arguments around bioregionalism and the history of eco-anarchism. For Mumford, Geddes was a 'systematic thinker comparable to Leibnitz, Aristotle or Pythagoras' , a claim which deserves some serious scrutiny. Geddes' recent re-emergence from what some have referred to as 'mislaid history' reflects the contemporary relevance of his socio-ecological analysis,and a growing trend of Scottish cultural renewal.

Frank Novak's immaculately researched book is a healthy contribution to the growing debate on the Geddesian legacy. By collating and deciphering seventeen years of correspondence between these prodigious and undervalued figures, Novak has done much to present their work in an international context. Mumford and Geddes's unifying idea was the need for holistic, evolutionary analysis of the city in the region. Analysing their own evolution, we see that Geddes brought radical ideas from Continental Europe and combined them with traditions of Scottish philosophy. He applied them in Edinburgh, Bombay, Jerusalem, Dublin, and elsewhere, and Mumford took them, moulded them and, arguably, influenced Roosevelt's New Deal. To a great extent this is the story of ideas being shared across the globe, and being misapplied and dilluted en route. Geddes himself wrote that 'the central and vital tradition of Scottish culture have always been wedded with that of France'. He was deeply impressed by the founding fathers of French geography, Elisee Reclus (1830-1905) and Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918), as well as the conservative sociologist, Frederic Le Play (1806-82) and his student Edward Demolins.

From Le Play, Geddes developed the ideas of folk, work and place as tools of social geography, whilst Reclus inspired his Valley Section method of analysis (a prototype bioregionalism). Peter Hall, in his classic Cities of Tomorrow (1988) first elucidated the importance of this anarchist tradition in Regional Planning. Hall recognised that Proudhon, Reclus and Kropotkin had been the dominant influences on Geddes, who had in turn come to inspire Lewis Mumford's Regional Planning Association in America. But Hall, like Novak, also recognised that 'the truly radical quality of the message got muffled and more than half lost; nowhere on the ground today do we see the true and remarkable vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, distilled via Geddes from Proudhon, Bakunin, Reclus and Kropotkin'. The task then, is to discover how the elan vital of Geddes became dilluted into the brackish liquid of contemporary town planning. A key to this, suggests Novak, is the strange relationship between Geddes and Mumford, the restlessness of Geddes' mind and the indecision of Mumfords. This is classic biographical material, set in the history of ideas, rather than social history viewed through biography. It marks the disintegration of the master-pupil relationship and the rigidification of Geddesian thinking after the death of his son and his first wife. First hand we see Mumford struggle with the demands of the irrepresible Geddes - that he join him in India, Palestine, France or Scotland.

As Novak comments: "Sophia Mumford succinctly formulated the essential difference between Geddes and Mumford as she saw it: 'Geddes spent the latter part of his life codifying the insights he had between 1880 and 1890. Lewis spent the latter part of his life developing and enlarging the intuitions he had in his youth'." But, as Novak suggests, "Mumford's youthful 'intuitions' were, of course, in large measure inspired and nurtured by Geddes." What is the reason for the unfullfilled promise of the collaboration between Geddes and Mumford? Novak suggests: "Another reason for Mumford's early skepticism about the possibility of effective collaboration with Geddes was his observation of how Geddes' associates, particularly Victor Branford, insisted upon a rigid and unquestioning application of certain tenets of Geddesian thought, rather than building upon those original and liberating aspects of the outlook Mumford found so stimulating.' 'Branford and others' claims Novak, 'reduced it to what Mumford viewed as an arbitrary and ossified sytem, to something purportedly complete, authoritative, even sacred'.

Yet Geddes cried out for constructive criticism and debate throughout his correspondence with Mumford, who did not always hold his tongue. In a letter dated 9 May 1921 Mumford writes: 'The weakness of the Edinburgh School so far has been the weakness of the Aristotelian school after Aristotle: the work of the founder has been so comprehensive and magnificent and inspiring that it has in appearance left nothing for scholars to do except to go over and annotate and dilute the master's work'. Perhaps this is the danger of theory unrelated to social or political movement, or visionaries surrounded by acolytes mesmerised by their masters brilliance. Ultimately, it was the calm and organised Mumford, rather than the chaotic and inspiring Geddes who influenced regional planning. Perhaps, as Novak hints, the two together would have been more than the sum of their parts, and the truly radical elements of Geddes work survived intact. But the fact remains that Geddes constructive-generalism was too broad to fit into 'planning' alone. A third explanation as to why Geddes and Mumford's relationship was not more fruitful, comes from Murdo Macdonald. Writing recently in the Edinburgh Review he notes: 'Mumford always asserted that much of the tension between Geddes and himself was because Geddes had the unreasonable expectation that he, Mumford, should replace Geddes's dead son.' As Macdonald goes on to explain, not only was Geddes looking for a son, but Mumford, whose mother had been effectively twice-widowed, was searching for a father. This confusing psychological relationship explains much about both the energy and barreness of the relationship. A final possibility explaining the dissolution of Geddes radicalism is that regional planning was not a large enough field for Geddes to influence.

Geddes has been hijacked by the planning fraternity, who have, in preserving his name from oblivion, also narrowed it into a space in which it cannot breath. Gone is the pioneering ecology, the arguments for self-management, mutual aid and decentralisation, and in its place an insipid and technocratic paternalism. The glaring contradiction between the crimes that have been done by planners, who still claim Geddes as their inspiration is breathtaking. But two final points emerge from Novak's compelling collection. First, that whilst planning has cocooned Geddes essence for posterity, his ideas are now thawing out, ready for re-examination. They arrive, relatively intact and remarkably resonant for the 21st Century. Second, that whilst Geddes and Mumford's relationship remained unfulfilled both personally and theoretically, the energy they exchange is incredible and pours off the pages of their letters in great waves. Now it is possible to reconstruct the lineage of ideas from Elisee and Paul Reclus and Peter Kropotkin through Geddes and Mumford to social ecologists today. This is a rich and fecund history of urban ecology of immense importance today with over half the worlds population living in cities for the first time.

As Novak himself acknowledges, both Geddes and Mumford have expectations above and beyond mere policy and planning, and are stretching towards a concept of a rounded self, a citizen, which anarchists can draw inspiration from. Lest this be considered an artificial construction, there is a further element which demands a mention, connecting, as it appears to do the ideas of Geddes with the organicist Murray Bookchin. Mumford writes that 'Geddes made an important contribution in restoring the Aristotelian concept of potentiality and purpose, as necessary categories in the interpretation of life-processes'. Novak explains that '...for Geddes such "potentiality and purpose" are represented in man's capacity for "insurgence". To which Mumford adds: 'Man for him (Geddes) was not just an adaptive organism...but increasingly the shaper and molder of his own world.'

Keith Wheeler has suggested that 'It can be argued then, that it is possible to trace a line of descent from the morphological thinking of Goethe, through Humboldt, Reclus, and Haeckel to Geddes, which represents an alternative tradition in Western European thought deriving inspiration from the paradigm of geography and ecology.'

This may well be true, but it now seems clear that Geddes should be seen as also a part of three further traditions: the utopian tradition from Charles Fourier to Ernst Bloch; the Scottish tradition of generalism, and the organicist tradition from Aristotle to Hans Jonas and Murray Bookchin today. Frank Novak's book touches on these emerging debates. In doing so he lays an important foundation for the arguments over the history of eco-anarchism/social ecology, and highlights Geddes as more than a piece of mislaid history.

Mike Small

Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Gard

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 9:01 PM | Permalink

ALLAN ANTLIFF, The University of Chicago Press, 2001 289 pages, 4 colour and 84 b&w illustrations; £31.50, cloth ISBN 0 226 02103 3.

In Anarchist Modernism Allan Antliff tells a tale which at first sight seems to be no more than an interesting gloss on the early twentieth-century avant-garde in America. On further reading one begins to note that this is no gloss, it seems to be the main text, or at least a key part of it. Fascinating light is shed on figures such as Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz and Rockwell Kent, all in the context of the small magazine, bookshop and gallery culture of New York. Camera Work was, of course, one of these small magazines, another which is given considerable attention by Antliff was The Modern School, edited by a number of anarchist thinkers including Carl Zigrosser. Rockwell Kent was the cover designer, and contributors included the artist Walter Pach.

The contrast between Kent, inspired by Blake, Nietzsche and the Alaskan wilderness, and Pach the cubist-urbanist, gives a sense of the breadth of debate in this radical and creative culture. But this current of activity to all intents and purposes ceased to exist in the aftermath of the USA entering the First World War. The pressures on this cultural anarchism were twofold. On the one hand, there was an active 'patriotic', government-sponsored, anti-anarchist drive. This campaign employed a use of language we are more likely to associate with Germany in the 1930s, for example in 1917 Man Ray's Invention-Dance was described as a 'degenerate work of art' an example of 'the spirit of anarchistic monstrosity'. The other threat came, paradoxically, from the left, namely the success of a Bolshevic model of communism as the main representative of the radical left, throughout the West. The former demanded the self-censorship of the radical artist within a conservative state, the latter demanded the self-denial of the artist in the interests of crudely-construed radical politics. What Antliff does in this study is to bring alive the period immediately before this cultural loss in the USA, years which had at their heart the epoch-marking Armory show in New York in 1913.

Allan Antliff's work might at first sight seem to have little link with Volker Welter's book except in so far as it is another exploration of still unexplored aspects of modernism. Yet in fact one of its key figures is Patrick Geddes's good friend, the Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy. Just as Welter's work has limited direct interest to art historians but great indirect interest, one can say of Antliff's book that it has no direct relevance to Scottish art, but is of major indirect relevance. This can be encapsulated, for example, in the fact that Antliff points out that Coomaraswamy's favourite haunt in New York was a bookshop with the enchanting name of Sunwise Turn. This bookshop published one of Coomaraswamy's most important collections of essays, The Dance of Shiva, but the name of the shop is redolent not of India but of the rituals of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. On consultation of Antliff's bibliography and a little further digging, so it transpires, for the name has its origin in the visit of the American Amy Murray to Father Allan Macdonald of Eriskay in 1905 (incidentally, at a time when Geddes's colleague, the artist John Duncan, was also on the island).

Later, when Geddes set up his new department of Civics and Sociology at the University of Bombay, Sunwise Turn provided the American books needed for the library. Antliff doesn't mention these links and there is, of course, no reason why he should. What is significant here is that these are the kind of intriguing trails that this excellent book impels you to start following. Antliff gives Anarchist Modernism an overall context by quoting an interview with Peter Blume in which he recalls his early career as an artist in Greenwich Village in 1920: 'the residue of radicalism in the Village was anarchism' says Blume. Alan Antliff has successfully performed the task of discovering what and who left that radical residue behind. His book is an outstanding contribution to the history of early twentieth-century ideas.

Reviewed by Murdo MacDonald, this article first published in the Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, volume 7, 2002.

Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life

By hodgers on November 25, 2002 8:55 PM | Permalink

OLKER M. WELTER, The MIT Press, 2002 355 pages, 74 b&w illustrations; £27.50, cloth ISBN 0 262 23211 1

Volker Welter illuminates the work of Patrick Geddes from the perspective of an architectural historian. Biopolis is based on the author's PhD work at the University of Edinburgh and has also benefited from his work as an archivist cataloguing the visual material of the University of Strathclyde Geddes papers. Because I write here in a journal of art history, it must be stressed that the visual art side of Geddes's endeavours per se is not addressed here. From an art-historical point of view this is a little disappointing, but it is made up for by Welter's emphasis on Geddes's wider importance as a visual thinker. As the title makes clear, the focus is on Geddes's idea of the city, and if any idea can be regarded as central to Geddes's thinking, it is of course that one. But what distinguishes Welter's work is that he understands that Geddes's idea of the city is just that, namely an idea, and further, that it is to a large extent this idea that drives Geddes's practical achievements.

For Welter, diagrams which some commentators on Geddes have preferred to avoid, such as the 'Notation of Life', with its interdependent four-part division into Town, School, Cloister, and City, become central to the understanding of his thought. Thus Welter makes the move that needs to be made: he begins by taking seriously Geddes's interest in the city as a conceptual entity that can be expressed both philosophically and diagrammatically. For Welter, to understand Geddes we must revisit the first principles of his thinking. Furthermore, historical origins also must be revisited, and Welter argues that insight can be given to Geddes through a consideration of the writings of that pioneer of the theory of the European city state, Plato. Welter develops this comparison of Geddes's thinking and that of Plato's Republic in a way that is both stimulating and elegant, and such thinking characterises the entire book. As with any work on a polymath such as Geddes there are areas where one would have preferred more analysis, but any such quibbles are vastly outweighed by the overall interest of this book. Rather than side-stepping Geddes's ideas because some of them became tangential to architectural and planning practice as it developed, Welter gives them the attention they deserve. He is thus able to conclude his work with three chapters that give an analysis of one of Geddes's key concerns, namely the idea and actuality of the temple. Welter ranges through Geddes's commitment to secular temples of art and science, to the temple as a guiding core-presence in the city. But instead of noting this as some kind of maverick concern unique to Geddes, we find instead that Geddes is operating firmly within a current of European architectural thought, indeed a chart is devoted to 'secular and quasi-religious temple projects, 1880s to 1920s', which includes work by, among others, Olbrich, Lutyens, Ashbee and Taut. Welter is able to fimly situate Geddes's thinking with respect to this tradition.

One should, however, note that while the European dimension is well stated, Geddes's debt to the intellectual and religious traditions of his own background is not really addressed. For example, coming from a Free Church family, Geddes would have taken the necessity of the building of new 'temples' for granted throughout his childhood, simply because he was part of a new church which inherited no buildings. But any such weak points in Welter's analysis are compensated for by wonderfully suggestive European links such as an analogy drawn between Geddes's proposed geographical institute and Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg. The fact that Welter is able to appreciate Geddes as a key thinker in the European modernist tradition, rather than as a kind of northern adjunct to an Anglo-Saxon modernist cul-de-sac, gives this book a major role in any contemporary effort not only to understand Geddes, but also to understand the unrealised aspects of the modernist project. This is an illuminating study and an excellent addition to the literature, both of Geddes and of modernism.

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