Painting no. 1, Exhibit no. 1, ladies and gentlemen, is a graph. (fig.) The curve moves up and down, smooth as a baby's bum, periodically raising its head above and dipping below the straight line that is its tether, the two of them a mismatched couple where one likes to dance and the other does not know how to. The straight line, ramrodlike, unswayed, inexorable, incorruptible, proceeding from the bottom left corner of the painting to right upper one, is the graph of time: unidirectional, homogeneous. The swinging wave that moves at the tempo of simple harmonic motion, or a cosine curve y=(cos)x, (fig.) Vilfredo Pareto tells us, is religion, flowing and ebbing in history. "Keeping strictly to the facts, we see that the development in religion does not show a uniform progressive movement, ab, but follows an undulating line, pqrst, now rising and falling."
This diagram appears in Volume One of his four-volume Treatise of General Sociology, entitled "Non-Logical Conduct" - the effort throughout the treatise is to establish sociology as a scientific discipline that can map the quirks and deviations of social conduct under some generalizable rules. Thus we have other diagrams, a diagram of how religious classics are read, and then specifically how the Song of Solomon can be interpreted differently through history (fig.). The problem of norm and variation, the residue of residual behaviour, soon multiplies on itself, till the social map eventually loses the rectitude of the straight line - what we have is curve upon curve, amplitude wiggling upon amplitude (fig.).
Exhibit no. 2, dear listener, is a citation, a sentence burrowed deep in the war of words that is colonial India. This is Patrick Geddes in one of his fifty-odd town plans for different cities in India: "When an engineer rushes into town planning he too often adopts the simple expedient of drawing straight thoroughfares on the drawing board across the town plan and then sawing them through the town, regardless of cost and consequence."
What is central in my paper is the topic of organicism and its relationship to what I might call the hybrid genealogies of the "planner" (not just the urban one) as a new form of globalizing expert in modernity. What I have here is not a case study but something of a research program that spans a particular categorical impulse that haunts us even today from the very core of the European Enlightenment. And I have another list to offer, not of themes but of people, disparate in provenance, province, profession and predilection. However each, I will contend, all too telegrammatically in these few pages is haunted by this categorical impulse, a haunting that I call "organicism". The list is the following (fig.): Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Augustin Cournot, John Ruskin, William Whewell, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshall, William Stanley Jevons, Camillo Sitte, Vilfredo Pareto, John Maynard Keynes, Patrick Geddes, Rabindranath Tagore, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Nandalal Bose, Amartya Sen. This list may well terrify you, incite you to put down this book, and it certainly terrifies me. But what I have here is a rather simple eidolon (this is a lovely word, since it indicates both a phantom, an apparition, and the image of an ideal) that I plan to trace across the breadth of modern thought, and that eidolon is the "curve" as the diagram of the vagaries of human intention.
To the extent that I can establish my case without going into specifics, I will welcome questions since they will help me better formulate that program, but if you expect any real answers please leave me your e-mail, I will get back to you in a couple of years.
Organicism is colloquially thought of as the application of biological models to non-biological phenomena. I should point out that my understanding - a not entirely idiosyncratic one at that - of organicism is slightly different: I would argue that organicism is rather a formulation of categorical thought that affects biology as much as it does the non-biological sciences and arts.
To put it simply, organicism is a theory of movement - movement of ideas, time, history, atoms, social behaviour, plants, cells, physical matter, wallpaper patterns - when articulated in a curve that writhes and squirms between the formulaic oppositions of the line and the circle. I would also claim that the epitome of the authority of this form of categorical impulse that I am calling organicism is the planner. A profession that seamlessly encompasses the very different talents of artists, biologists, sociologists, lawyers, economists, architects, the planner is defined by the ability to draw determinate curves: in streets, graphs, temporal successions, consumption patterns, inflation graphs, broadband wiring, the effects of weather or the psychology of humans.
I take you then to the core of the Enlightenment where this categorical impulse may be said to have its most authoritative constitution, if only in order to both violate it and imbibe it to gather its strongest theoretical force. The material in question is Kant's chapter on the "Metaphysical Foundations of Phoronomy", the first in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sciences of 1786, written as a parallel tract during his revision of the First Critique which would be republished a year later. In the preface to this book, Kant cunningly invokes Newton's prefatory comments in The Principia to set up what he considers the primary task and character of metaphysics (fig.):
"Geometry is proud of the fact that with so little derived from without it is able to produce so much. But contrast, one can say of metaphysics: it is dismayed that with so much offered to it by pure mathematics it can still accomplish so little."
I think of this passage every time I compare my 800+ page, 8.5 lb. dissertation to the two-page submission that is rumoured to have been accepted as a doctoral thesis at MIT's math department. The thrust of Kant's intention should be clear from this aside: the attempt is to take philosophical critique outside its empirical environs to a categorical terrain, a transcendental deduction, from which it can discontinuously determine the manifold of phenomenality as such. That story is too complex to be recited here in this short space, however, what interests me - specifically in the context of this parallel, even parasitical, text written next to the First Critique, is that the transcendental deduction, the analytic as a model of progression, could have a shape, rather two shapes. This is what the discussion on phoronomy (an eighteenth century physics' term for the science of movement) suggests. Kant's astuteness here lies in separating the conceptual aspects of scientific propositions from its experiential elements.
Thus matter is described here as the "movable" in "pure" or "absolute" space, where movement can be abstracted into non-physical, even non-material quanta. "Rest", by contrast, is described as "perduring presence". Given this quantitative rather than qualitative characteristic, then, motion is described, following Newton, primarily in two forms: rotating, i.e. circular or oscillating, or progressive, i.e. linear. One stays in place, the other moves outward; of these the latter is phoronomic since its magnitude can be derived from pure spatiality - geometry here being the model - itself. Thus a principle of homogeneity is established from which the laws of Dynamics and Mechanics are derived as equally intuitive series of concepts, of divisibility and suffusion, of attraction and repulsion, that Kant rigorously separates from the sensible characteristics of matter. Kant is conscious that matter is here represented only as a form of appearance, and it is this radical separation of appearance and essence, of transcendent knowledge versus substantive matter, that he addresses in the last chapter, "The Metaphysical Foundations of Phenomenology".
It is also here that the curve, curvilinear motion - a category that Kant puts aside in his discussion on phoronomy - is finally addressed. It turns out that the curve is a very special kind of problem for Kant's theory of transcendental thought. Unlike linear motion, curvilinear motion represents the constant emergence of "new motions" that constantly change its direction; in other words, it cannot be accounted for by the abstract characteristics of pure space itself, one has to acknowledge the mass, the material, the body of the motion itself. The curve is therefore not just a geometrical diagram, it is the intersection of transcendental space with material matter. Kant gives this understanding a special name; he calls it a "disjunctive judgement".
And so it is that Kant will right away point out the curve - which everybody, including contemporary advocates of the formless will read as a sign of reconciliation - is a map of disjuncture between unlike, heterogeneous, frames of reference. Norm and variation are therefore for Kant heterogeneous entities; they belong to different species, one to dimensionality, the other to non-dimensionality, one to quantity, the other to quality. In today's terms, perhaps, then the linear belongs to "physics", while the curvilinear belongs to "biology". The biological and the heliotropic is the question left aside in the chapter on phoronomy: (fig.) "On what rests the inner difference of snails, which are otherwise similar and even equal, but among which one species is wound rightward, the other leftward; or the winding of the kidney bean and the hop, where the first runs around its pole like a corkscrew, or as sailors would express it, against the sun, whereas second runs with the sun?"
I have written elsewhere that both Hegel and Goethe cover over the Kantian disjunction of concept and material through the use of a single word used as a philosophical double entendre: that word is "sense". As in the two senses of sense in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, post-Kantian thought specifically took issue with the "idealist" component of Kant's disjunctive placement of transcendental critique, and sought to reconcile concept and materiality through an organicist paradigm that sought to reconcile inner, natural sense that emphasizes empirical encounter with an external, categorical sense that is able to conceptualise the "whole" natural diversity in all its phenomenal variety. Two expressions were brought into critical use by Goethe in his articulation of an "experimental" science that bridges this disjunction between inner and outer. The first is "morphology", a neologism coined by Goethe whose study "seek[s] to elucidate the processes governing achieved structure rather than describe the structure itself", process here is a mapping of governing intent without governing end. The second is "metamorphosis", which describes a principle that transcends the apparent randomness of natural phenomena to point the way to an underlying principle that orients change itself. The concept of a figuratively elusive but unifying motive, that maps transformations over time, as well as discontinuities within a comparative framework, will become a leitmotif of Romantic analysis. The commonality between transcendental science and sensible art is forged in their respective study of figure ("Gestalt") as it is transformed ("Bildung") from one changeable state to another. Nothing epitomizes this commonality more than Goethe's resolution of two vectors in the growth of plants: the vertical and heliotropic, which he describes as a "spiritual staff supporting the plant's existence and maintaining it over long periods of time", and the horizontal, which is the axis for auto-cultivation and "development". Both are resolved in, and this is important for my case, the spiral tendency in vegetation.
I have argued elsewhere that this commonality of science and art finds its way to the Victorian decorative surface elaborations by way of a figure such as Christopher Dresser, (fig.) doctorate in biology from the University of Jena and premier Victorian designer and ornamentist. (fig.) Dresser's dual interventions in the field of biology and ornamental art can be seen as a symptom of the unique hold of Goethe's morphological agenda (fig.) over nineteenth century thought, resulting in the making of what I have termed "organicist symmetry" (fig.) - the tendency to represent nature not as a realist imitation but as a diagram that exposes its structures of growth(fig.). The organicist wall-paper and carpet patterns of the Victorian interior are the thumb-print of this vast-ranging and, in my view, foundational sensibility of the modern. And if the fragmented productional logic of architecture in the interior, manifested in the wallpapers, tiles, carpets, curtain-designs of the late Victorian interior, is given aesthetic unity by the pattern, I would suggest that in Geddes' case, it is the diagram that offers a comparable unifying function for the architecture of the exterior. We note here that Geddes writes the entry on "Morphology" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (fig.)
I have suggested that the "curve" is the eidolon, the determining phantom, the machine in non-being, like Hamlet's ghost, that locates a crisis, a disjuncture between the transcendental and empirical frame; I would argue that this disjuncture enables both the fragmented specialization of the natural and social sciences in each of their disciplinary divagations, and the holistic claim to categorical authority put forward by each discipline.
I would argue here that Patrick Geddes interventions can be seen as the urbanist corollary to Dresser's interior space. Geddes' early training as a biologist in the company of Thomas Huxley and the casual acquaintance with Darwin are well known, as is the development of his ecological thought from his early commission for Andrew Carnegie's hometown of Dunfermline. But if matters were simply seen in that light, we will not have gone further than the tautological assertion of positing biology as a somehow active influence in the elaboration of the aesthetic and the articulation of growth, I will not have suggested anything original, most of you already know this as a truism of the nineteenth century.
Also, to leave things at this level would simply mean to reiterate the conventional view of organicism, biologism affecting the nascent social sciences. I point you again to my original thesis - that the organic is offered as a special instance of disjunctive judgment that suggests an entanglement of the transcendental with the phenomenological. One could argue that the biological in its preoccupation with genesis, growth and evolution is an epistemic product of this disjunction. The emphasis is to establish here is that the aesthetic and the biological are two instances of a much more comprehensive framework of analysis which permeates what Husserl would later term as the "Crisis of the European Sciences"; I have suggested earlier that the "curve" is the eidolon, the determining phantom, the machine in non-being, like Hamlet's ghost, of this crisis. To illustrate the comprehensive force of this disjuncture, I would quickly like to take you to quite another disciplinary field. The import here will be to reexamine the provenance of the almost felicitous convergence of very disparate disciplines in the interdisciplinary figure of the twentieth century, even post-colonial (UN and World Bank type) planner. The critical convergence named here would then perhaps then be better illustrated by Geddes' interactions with a Bengali statistician at the end of his career rather than his biologist beginnings in Scotland.
What is this other discipline that we are speaking about? Well, not the discipline per se but a particular turn in that discipline which can be seen as coterminous with the morphological impetus named above. In 1838, ten years after Goethe propounded his theory of the Spiral Tendency in Vegetation, the Frenchman Augustin Cournot published his Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth. Both Cournot and his immediate predecessor William Whewell can be seen as engaged in the general enterprise of the European nineteenth century to sift out a "pure science" from the contingencies of phenomenality. (fig.) One must point out here that while Cournot bases his claims on the authority of the laws of mechanics, both on the apparently transcendental validity of Newton (who is explicitly named) and the recent advances of Leibnizian (who is not named) calculus in framing random and contingent phenomena, so-called pure science itself in this period may be said to be equally reflective of a desire for the transcendent, precisely non-contingent authority of mathematics. What is more interesting, for me at least, is the emphasis that Cournot places in the first curve that he draws - and this is his innovation, he is the first to draw curves in economics and he sure draws many curves, and I don't have enough time to talk about why curves as opposed to straight lines - on "continuity" as economic phenomena slide from one steady state to another. If physics struggled to isolate itself from contingent phenomena into isolated conditions in order to frame general laws, economic principles, in order to realize themselves, inasmuch as they are deducible in the same way, also have the character of self-fulfilling prophecy in temporal terms. The disjunctive transitional points in the curve, subject to interruptions at every point by the insouciance of anti-market elements, will be smoothed out with the ubiquity of the general law as it accompanies the global spread of "commerce". This is Cournot in his chapter on the "Law of Demand":
(fig) "Let us not forget that, strictly speaking, the principle just enunciated admits of exceptions, because a continuous function may have interruptions of continuity in some points of its course; but just as friction wears down roughnesses and softens outlines, so the wear of commerce tends to suppress these exceptional cases, at the same time that commercial machinery moderates varations in prices and tends to maintain them between limits which facilitate the application of theory."
The transcendental law, inspite of being disjunctive with the phenomenal, has very quickly moved to regularize its irregularity: more importantly, the curve carries within itself predicative statements about future behaviour. Transcendence here has been replaced by rarefaction ("individual"). Nonetheless, thirty years into the future, when the by-then obscured work of Cournot was picked up by what is known as the Marginalist revolution - represented best by the triad of William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and Leon Walras - the schism between mathematical formation and social behaviour was hardly resolved. In fact, the principle efforts of Marginalism - from marginal, not margins, that is the ability to hypothesize changes in minimal increments along a given axis of change - can be said precisely to emphasize once again the normative predication of economic behaviour in the continuity of the curve. (fig. Jevons) For our purposes as architects and planners, Leon Walras' characterization of the distinction between pure economic "science" vs. mere political economy as analogical to the difference between geometers and architects or navigators is not unimportant here. (fig.) And there is this peculiar section where Adam Smith is described as closer to architecture than economics.
Nonetheless, in their emphasis on economics as a science, the Marginalists were hard put to address the all-too insouciant areas of sex, religion, family, population, (see, I said "sex" and "population", justifying the title) community, "culture", physiology in their persistent breach and interference with economic norms, even as imperial monopoly "commerce" established itself on an unprecedented global scale. And this is the problem which Vilfredo Pareto's curves address in his Treatise on General Sociology, with its particular emphasis on precisely the elements of "non-logical conduct" and "theory of residues". With Pareto, sociology undergoes a turn, and this is a turn which may be called an involution within organicism, in that attention is now concentrated on harnessing deviations from the norm of rational-economic behaviour (indeed, rational is by now described as some form of economic, self-conserving behaviour). For Pareto, there are not only curves of religion, but curves of sentiment, curves of mythology, curves of semiosis. Once curves have proliferated in every area of empirical cognition, the task of economic science will be less to establish transcendental laws than to map regulative efficiencies. Thus is established the so-called demand-supply diagram of Pareto efficiency. (fig.)
And it is precisely at the moment of imperial economic failure, with the experience of the Great Depression (note that this phrase suggests both a seriously bad psychological effect and an inordinate dip in a curve), that John Maynard Keynes is able to integrate the disaggregative and deviational factors of societal habits, the counter-intuitive relationship between traditional or conservative economic consumption and the macroeconomic generation of demand in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of 1936. And in his more wistful moments, we are not so far in the Keynesian maximization of social labour power to architectural propositions.
"If I had the power today, I would surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilization on the highest standards... convinced that what I could create I could afford - and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For with what we have spent on the dole in England since the war we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world."
In 1838, ten years after Goethe propounded his theory of the Spiral Tendency in Vegetation, the Frenchman Augustin Cournot published his Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth. If Goethe draws determinate curves in nature, for Cournot, the first to draw curves in economic thought, curves offer a way to map the psychological reductions of economic demand into the transcendental contours of a science. (fig.) In the transformation of Cournot's transcendental curves into the Marginalist revolution in economies exemplified by Alfred Marshall, Leon Walras, and William Stanley Jevons, we see an increasing focus - by way of a statistical framing of probability - on determining the vicissitudes of contingency, precisely the empirical event that Kant had removed from the sphere of science. Jevons is particularly interesting in this regard, trained first as a weatherman in Australia, he writes a paper on sunspots and their effect on the stock-market - thus offering the earliest encapsulation of climatic indeterminability within economic doctrine. Nonetheless, the Marginalists were hard put to address the all-too insouciant areas of sex, religion, family, population, community, "culture", physiology in their persistent breach and interference with economic norms, even as imperial monopoly "commerce" established itself on an unprecedented global scale. And this is the problem which Vilfredo Pareto's curves address in his Treatise on General Sociology, with its particular emphasis on precisely the elements of "non-logical conduct" and its "theory of residues". With Pareto, sociology undergoes a turn, and this is a turn which may be called an involution within organicism, in that attention is now concentrated on harnessing deviations from the norm of rational-economic behaviour (indeed, the rational is by now described as some form of economic, self-conserving behaviour). For Pareto, there are not only curves of religion, but curves of sentiment, curves of mythology, curves of semiosis. Once curves have proliferated in every area of empirical cognition, the task of economic science will be less to establish transcendental laws than to map regulative efficiencies. Thus is established the so-called demand-supply diagram of Pareto efficiency.
It is important that we locate this transformation in terms of a general epistemic transformation, occurring the entirety of the epistemic field, in the humanities, aesthetic thought, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. (fig./fig.) The diagram here is Geddes', not mine. Generally speaking, Geddes views on society and culture have conventionally been described as being influenced by his early training in biology. (fig.) And yet, if we examine his biological papers from the very beginning of his career in the late 1870s, what strikes one is the overwhelming suffusion of sociological terms in the biological treatises of this period. Geddes' 1889 treatise, co-written with J. A. Thomson, has an entire section, entitled Psychological and Ethical Aspects, where we find chapters on "Intellectual and Emotional differences between the sexes" (I remind you that he is talking here about cuttlefish and protoplasm) (fig.), another on "Love for Offspring", yet another on "The Criminal Habit of the Cuckoo", and lastly, one on "Egoism and altruism", these last sentiments, of course, being exemplified best in sea-cucumbers and sea-spiders (fig.). Geddes is not the only kook here, I would point out that you would find remarkably similar formulation in some of the principal biological heavyweights of his time, whether this be Geddes' own advisor, Thomas Henry Huxley, or Charles Darwin in the chapters on race in the Descent of Man, or his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals of 1872. (Marx may not have been a Marxist, but Darwin was certainly a Social Darwinist.) Nonetheless, what becomes clear here is that nature is the a-priori, phenomenal, condition for an organizational field that is attempting to reconcile the ever-evolving methodological structures of "science" with the ever-expanding scope of empirical enquiry (fig.). It is this proliferating field, of both the different disciplinary kinds of so-called sciences and the objects that they purport to study, that Geddes tabulates in the hundreds of tables that he scrawled on those little folded pieces of paper all his life; (fig. 1-8) this is not just Foucault's "classical" classificatory apparatus that tabulates by similitude and dissimilitude, but rather a statistical condition, if you can think of one without mathematics involved, that captures both contingencies on the ground and the disciplinary lens that yield them to the eye in the first place. It is in this probabilistic field of action spelt out in the nineteenth century that needs to be kept in mind when looking at Geddes' espousal of "conservative surgery" in his myriad town-plans for Scotland, Cyprus, India, or Tel Aviv-Jerusalem. (fig.) I have suggested elsewhere that colonialism in India and Africa, with its scrupulous attention to traditional frameworks of power, can be described as nothing else but conservative surgery. His much-touted and so-called contingent interventions and site-specific gestures point less to actual site-sensitivity, since the operations were repeated over and over again, as was their justification, but rather a new form of comprehensive organization of contingency in the field. (fig.) I will put aside the obvious opportunism in the man - what is more important here is his all-too-acute intuition about the inexorably fragmented, piecemeal, perfunctory character of colonial administration on the ground.
Our session today is called "Colonial Urbanism; Postcolonial Perspectives". What if we ignore the culturalist construction of colonialism, that whole bit about white boys and all that stuff, and concentrate instead on imperialism as a proposition for a division of labour where demand with regard to particular products can be concentrated in particular regions of the world. And what is post-coloniality after all?: that the distinction between concentrated industrialization in the metropole and managed raw resource production in the colony could no longer be maintained. Postcoloniality is the thesis that demand (and supply) must be globally redistributed. In that international scene of redistribution, which the lackadaisical colonial administrators knew in the pore of their practice, Geddes' merely regional "survey before plan" to mitigate the inequities wrought by industrial capital seems all too cute, it is his comprehensive tabulation of epistemic fields that must be examined more carefully in terms of the parallel nationalist project to constitute itself precisely by way of a thoroughgoing reworking of not just its people but the structure of disciplinarity itself. The nationalist desire for the state must be seen as precisely the desire for sociological comprehensiveness liberated from the piecemeal contingencies of colonial administration.
One more little connection, and then we're done: Geddes' relationship with Tagore and his abortive involvement in the planning of Santiniketan (fig.), but more importantly, his equally asymptotic interaction with a statistician. (And there are Santiniketan curves, as in Nandalal Bose's art textbook (fig.1-3), or the Santiniketan-trained Amartya Sen's Pareto curves, but we will leave that aside). I have mentioned Goethe in the same breadth as Cournot. It is perhaps now necessary to mention Rabindranath Tagore in the same breadth as Prashanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis (fig.), the sometime amanuensis of the Tagore, the founder of the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, and the first Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of independent India, the ex officio Chairman being, of course, the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (fig.). Given the thrust of my talk today, I think you can at least begin to delineate the dots, if not connect them, between Mahalanobis' multiple personas as mathematician, his relationship to the poet Tagore, his formulation of what is known as the "Mahalanobis Distance" in statistics (a mathematical formula to discern patterns in multivariate analysis), his research, through the ISI, on agrarian economics (can we leave the Santiniketan ruralist aesthetic out of that so-called "scientific" search), the 1963 book, The Approach of Operations Research to Planning in India, and the indisputable organicism embedded in his so-called anthropometric-somatological work for the Zoological Survey of India, the three-volume Anthropological Observations on the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta of 1922-1940 (fig.). If we were to understand the condition of cities in postcolonial parts of the world such as India, it is people like Mahalanobis that we should be studying rather than the Le Corbusiers - Geddes' biggest contribution, from within architectural theory, is to point us in that direction.
I hope that you can see my argument here - and this is not just a Marxist asking everybody to return to economics, rather it is a proposal to look again precisely at what constitutes the economic at any historical point.
Once decolonization is identified with the tabulatory and statistical reappraisal of social conditions that is not seen at odds with the transcendentalist aesthetic of the anti-colonial nationalist imagination, a whole other game -more logistical rather than formal, more about curves rather than shapes - has been set into place. Chandigarh or Brasilia are merely red-herrings in this much more throughgoing transformation instantiated by the tandem structure of the National Five Year Plans and the United Nations apparatus. In that sphere, we have to look closely at phenomena like the UN-technocrat Otto Koenigsberger's rejection of Patrick Geddes formula of "Survey before Plan" in favour of what he called "Action Planning", which he described as "like driving a car down a highway relying only on the rear-view mirror". Koenigsberger's formulation of planning is a partially blind decision-making process without reference to actual territory is not accidental; we have not perhaps noticed that for a while city plans and maps have increasingly become unavailable as active artifacts. Post-colonial, indeed postwar, planning is not about plans and maps, it's about curves: employment curves, infrastructure curves, dips in efficiency, socializing curves, the undulations of the future, aestheticizing curves.
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.UKFirst 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?
VolkerMany 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.UKHow does the book relate to your Doctorate? Was it difficult to disentangle the two, or were they quite separate projects?
VolkerThe 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.UKYou 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?
VolkerThis 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.UKYou 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?
VolkerFor 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.UKYou 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?
VolkerYes, 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.UKMany people in Scotland obsess about whether Geddes is, or isn't recognised. What's your view of this debate?
VolkerI 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.UKYou 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?
VolkerExasperated 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.UKCan you explain further why you choose the temple schemes as the focus of your test-bed for Geddes's "success" or "failure"?
VolkerActually, 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.UKYou'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?
VolkerWell, 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.
Helen Meller Routledge, London (1990) ISBN 0 415 10393 2 
