Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner

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.