Reviews: November 2002 Archives

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with the chosen themes, there is a slightly dull tone to the whole debate, as if class, race and gender issues had been withdrawn, leaving the whole dish flavourless.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.

Other related reading:

Brian Doherty - Green parties, Nonviolence and Political Obligation

John Barry - Sustainability, Political Judgement and Citizenship: Connecting Green Politics and Democracy

Andrew Dobson - Democratising Green Theory: Preconditions and Principles

Peter Christoff - Ecological Citizens and Ecologically Guided Democracy

Wouter Achterberg - Sustainability, Community and Democracy

Marius deGeus - The Ecological Restructuring of the State

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

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. 

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.