Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 37–42

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Landscape and Urban Planning

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“Civics”: Patrick Geddes’s theory of city development MARK

a,⁎ b
Pierre Clavel , Robert Young
a
203 West Sibley Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, United States
b
310 Inner Campus Loop Drive, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78750, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In this paper, we explore Patrick Geddes concept of civics. Drawing primarily upon his early 20th century essays,
Patrick Geddes Civics as concrete sociology Parts I and II supplemented by additional primary works by Geddes and his co-authors
Planning theory as well as secondary literature, we propose Geddes used elements of these and other writings to frame out a
Civics theory of city development. The theory explored the transitional dynamics and institutions fundamental to urban
Valley section
transformation. We conclude by offering Geddes’s theory of city development as an incremental but deeply
Participatory planning
transformative alternative to mainstream modernist planning.
Planning history

1. Introduction 2. Purpose and method

All who write about Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) have had to search
for a concept of Geddes’ central idea. This has always been a problem.
Geddes left an ambiguous record. Many have noted his charisma and
praised his intellect and vision, and his reputed ability to dazzle lis-
teners with synthetic presentations, delivered orally.
But his vast written output notably failed to provide any one concise
central narrative. Writers who attempt to build on his work therefore
face problems: what was he? Was there focus to his interdisciplinary
approach? Above all, was there a theory? Attempts to characterize
Geddes’ thought are often replete with frustration. Michael Batty,
otherwise accepting of Geddes’ importance to the intellectual history of
town planning, notes that “his writings were so varied and wide ranging
that he singularly failed to spell out the kind of social evolutionism that
he clearly believed in” (Batty, 2009).
Lewis Mumford, whom Geddes had asked to provide the synthesis
he could not do himself, found it impossible for reasons of personality.
Recalling a 1925 visit to Geddes’ Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, he left a
record of his frustration: “Geddes showed me the dusty piles of unsorted
manuscripts. . that pointed to ideas, often brilliant, that had never been
transformed into more communicable discourses” (Mumford, 1982, pp.
400–401). But Mumford could not help. It was likely impossible at the
time. Perhaps a better conclusion for the absence of any final opus by
Geddes is, lacking any long-term institutional support, he lived from
project to project and found it more rewarding to hope for influence by
word of mouth, stoking the hopes of engaged listeners. It is up to us to
find a center.
We believe there is a center, a theory of city development evident in
the “Civics” lectures Geddes gave at the opening meetings of the
Sociological Society in London, in 1904, 1905 and 1906. We propose to
unearth Geddes’ theory within his account of “Civics,” while noting that
it lies within at least two layers that partly obscure it. In part, Geddes
used his lectures to demonstrate a diagrammatic method for seeing
multiple occurrences at the same time. We have ignored most of these
diagrams or, insofar as possible, deduced our own text from them.
Second, Geddes’ writing was replete with asides and examples, some
less to the point than others. While quoting Geddes, we have omitted
much in service of a hopefully tighter presentation. After preliminary
biographical notes, we harness such material and additional primary
and secondary sources in order to illuminate his theory of city devel-
opment, followed by a set of further reflections.
3. Geddes in context
It is well known that Geddes began in biology, reading Thomas
Huxley at home in Scotland, then as a student (often informally, i.e. not
always enrolled) with Huxley at the Royal School of Mines in London,
1874-79. He never received a formal degree, but Huxley cared for him,
secured him positions at marine experiment stations and recommended
him for the position of Lecturer and Demonstrator of Botany at the
University of Edinburgh in 1880 where he based himself through most
of that decade.
Commentators have differed in how much attention to give to the
substance of Geddes’ biology (Meller, 1990). His ideas on evolution

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: pc29@cornell.edu (P. Clavel), ryoung@utexas.edu (R. Young).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.06.017
Received 3 June 2017; Accepted 25 June 2017
Available online 18 September 2017
0169-2046/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.
P. Clavel, R. Young
departed from Darwin in certain important ways: he focused on me-
chanisms of species variation, not selection, and derived an argument
for a strong role for cooperation, as opposed to competition, in both
variation and selection. His field and laboratory work ended early, but
The Evolution of Sex (1889), co-authored with J. Arthur Thomson was an
important text, and Evolution (1911) was its restatement, and asserted
their arguments for cooperation antedated those of Kropotkin’s own
opus on the role of cooperation in evolution: Mutual aid: A factor in
evolution (1902). One could question some of this, but it may not
matter. Although he never let go his roots in biology, Geddes broadened
his focus throughout the 1880s so as to become a practitioner in social
affairs. He was mainly that, and his debates were less within biology,
than in the less organized city development field and in objection to the
prevalent social Darwinism. For the latter, he had ample evidence and
as we argue, a theory.
4. Civics as theory
During the 1880s, while Geddes was employed as a lecturer in
botany with no apparent complaints, he also had freedom to expand his
career and extracurricular activities. He and his social worker wife
Anna Morton moved into the working class “Old Town” section of the
city, began fixing up lodging houses, and created a cooperative student
living place. He lectured in “extension” courses on topics wider than his
officially sanctioned ones, and operated a summer program that he
broadened to cover social issues.
He had many followers, but also became overextended financially.
In the late 1880s he was passed over for several professorships but
found a supporter who endowed a part time chair at the University of
Dundee, which Geddes made his academic base starting in 1889. He
held it until 1919. As it required his attendance only during summers,
he was able to maintain residence in Edinburgh and continued to ex-
pand what he had increasingly been doing − a combination of aca-
demic and social promotion and advocacy. During the 1890s his main
activities included summer programs that attracted dozens, then hun-
dreds of paying students; and in 1892 he purchased a five-story struc-
ture that he named the Outlook Tower and promoted as a model urban
museum.
By the end of the 1890s Geddes, now in his 40s, was casting about
for opportunities outside academia and Edinburgh. In 1897 he secured
support to travel to Cyprus where an Armenian refugee crisis had at-
tracted attention. He prepared an exhibition to mount at the 1900 Paris
Worlds Fair; and travelled to the United States in 1899 and 1900,
making contacts and searching for support. At one time after 1900 he
hoped to establish a geographical society. In 1904 he received his first
major commission in “town planning” (or officially, landscape design)
in Dunfermline, Scotland. At the same time his friend Victor Branford
was active in the creation of the Sociological Society, and Geddes de-
livered papers at each of that organization’s first three meetings in
1904, 1905, and 1906. Each paper was published the following year:
“Civics as Applied Sociology,” Sociological Papers (1905), “Civics: As
Concrete and Applied Sociology (Part II),” Sociological Papers (1906),
and a third paper, elaborating the topic, “A Suggested Plan for a Civic
Museum and Its Associated Studies,” Sociological Papers (1907). These
received an uneven reception and Geddes lost all but a foothold in that
organization’s academic future.
But it is in these papers that one first finds the core of a Geddesian
urban theory, promoted within a field he named “Civics” to encompass
both its intellectual content and its connection to urban action, i.e.
specific steps toward reform. In brief, civics included a methodological
and activist superstructure in the regional survey and associated ex-
hibitions, dramatizations, and permanent museum; but these were built
around a theory − a set of propositions on city development: (1) a
material base in the prototypical region called the “Valley Section,” (2)
a set of occupations describing the work-life of region and center; (3)
the “Town” concentrating the occupations and their evolution; (4) the
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 37–42
“School” representing the collective memory created through occupa-
tions and associated craft knowledge; (5) the sometime development of
the “School” as a “Cloister,” for retreat and reflection, making possible
(6) the “ideal City.”
Around this developmental scheme, Geddes placed not only the
concept of the region, the survey, exhibition, and museum; but further
elaborated upon it through classifications and professional practice as
well as fragments and chapters appearing in planning reports and other
publications such as in Cities in Evolution − his best known book −
where he described the content of civic surveys, how to organize city
exhibitions, and the value of civic museums for educating the public in
advancing cities’ quality of life (Geddes, 1949, [1915]). This is the
theoretical scheme:
The Valley Section. Geddes begins with a picture of evolution from
the prototype region, the river valley he called the “Valley Section”
(Tyrwhitt, 1951, 1972). He cites, as inspiration, LePlay, the French
geographer Geddes discovered in Paris after a summer assignment
Huxley had arranged with the biologist Lacaze-Duthiers in 1878. (The
“marine station” Huxley offered was in Brittany, but the 24-year-old
Geddes also saw Paris, particularly when Lacaze-Duthiers took him on
as an assistant there at the end of the summer.) In “Civics,” Geddes
wrote:
I must insist on the services of LePlay as one of the main founders of
sociology; and this not only (a) on account of his monographic
surveys of modern industrial life…but yet more on account of his
vital reconstruction of anthropology… through his renewed in-
sistence upon the elemental rustic origins of industry, family types,
and social organization, from these simplest reactions of man in his
struggle for existence in varied and varying environment (Geddes,
1905, p. 61).
He then described the region, descending from the heights of the
watershed to the sea:
Beneath vast hunting desolations lie the pastoral hillsides, below
these again scattered arable crofts and sparsely dotted hamlets lead
us to the small upland village of the main glen: from this again one
descends to the large and prosperous village of the foothills and its
railway terminus, where lowland and highland meet. East or west,
each mountain valley has its analogous terminal and initial village,
upon its fertile and fan-shaped slope and with its corresponding
minor market; while central to the broad agricultural strath with its
slow meandering river, stands the prosperous market town, the road
and railway junction upon which all the various glen-villages con-
verge. A day's march further down and at the convergence of several
such valleys stands the larger country town… at the tidal limit of a
till lately navigable river. Finally, at the mouth of the estuary rises
the smoke of a great manufacturing city, a central world market in
its way (Geddes, 1905, p. 105).
Occupations. In the valley section, Geddes, inspired also by the
works of geographer Elisee Reclus and educationalist, Edmond
Demolins, saw human settlement as adapted to environment through
prototype occupations (Tyrwhitt, 1951). He suggested seven occupation
types: miner, woodman, hunter, shepherd, crofter, peasant and fish-
erman. Each of these could be seen as a form of direct adaptation to the
environment as it differed in the various parts of the valley section.
Thus the miner was concerned with the extraction of minerals from
their sources, usually in the hilly regions at the top of the watershed.
The woodman harvested the timber of the uplands area, while the
hunter sought the forest game. The shepherd, requiring grazing pas-
tures, was restricted to the area between the forest and the cultivated
lands lower down on the plain. The crofter, extracting a precarious
subsistence from the uplands, was the poorer counterpart of the peasant
who tilled the alluvial plain: Geddes saw the varying cultures derived
by each of these occupations such as the parsimony of the crofter, and
the advancing civilization of the peasant, as direct results of their
P. Clavel, R. Young
differing environmental conditions.
The Town. Perhaps there was a version of the “town” that reflected
the innocence of the valley section at its origin. In the primitive occu-
pations the environment had a profound and clear effect upon the
human organism − LePlay had used the phrase “place − work − folk.”
The clarity of this reduction to simple effects was analytic; Geddes was
careful to reserve a less deterministic position for later sections of the
paper.
Geddes described the “Town” as much more differentiated, but the
important point is that he still used the valley section scheme of seven
basic occupations, although evolving in the context of the town en-
vironment, as a classifying principle:
It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting,
pastoral and agricultural formations, as states preliminary to our
present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of
civilisation’ (Geddes 1906, p. 61).
Rather, he argued, they still existed, as [psychological] character-
izations, in the industrial city.
Geddes then differentiates, simple to complex, to the modern in-
dustrial town and society. In this changing context, the hunter remains
as a psychology in the soldier and policeman or economically in the
stockbroker or real estate developer in pursuit of “a killing;” the miner,
accustomed to exploitation, has his counterpart in other kinds of ex-
ploiters. Taken literally, this is far fetched, but Geddes was metapho-
rical. The interests of the miner were preserved in such institutions as
iron and steel works and aspects of the recycling industry; the wood-
man’s interest was still to be seen in timber and paper industries and
potential of green infrastructure, while the shepherd saw his work
evolved into the production and sale of meat, woolen goods and tex-
tiles. The farmer was still represented in the greengrocer, the baker, the
corn-chandler and the brewery where profits were cultivated more
slowly, while the fisherman’s trade had evolved into the modern mer-
chant marine and navy, as well as the port facility of the modern city.
Geddes saw
“the settlements of men, from small to great, as initially determined
by their immediate environment; and though thence extending into
larger and larger towns and cities, yet retaining profoundly, even if
obscurely, much of their initial character and activity, spirit and
type” (Geddes, 1949, p. 93)
Geddes then elaborates, the main point being the regionally varied
causal link between “place” and social organization; Geddes’ starting
point theoretically:
Nor does, such elementary recognition of these main social forma-
tions content us; their local differentiations must be noted and
compared—… Every tourist in this country is struck by the contrast
of Swiss towns and cities with our own, and notes too that on the
Swiss pasture he finds a horde of cattle, while in Scotland or
Yorkshire he left a flock of sheep… Again, not only Swiss wealth, but
Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially to the high
pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss cow-pasture
rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon com-
paratively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter
of geologist's detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete
foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and
population, and this not only in material and economic develop-
ment, but even in higher and subtler outcomes, aesthetic, in-
tellectual and moral.
… the fundamental—I do not say the supreme—question is: what
can be got out of limestone, and what can be got out of gneiss?
(Geddes, 1906, p. 61–62).
The School. Even in its rudimentary form the valley section set-
tlements − the original form of the town, Geddes posited mechanisms
39
Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 37–42
for preserving and transmitting its adaptations, such as the craft
knowledge generated by the occupations, across generations. Geddes
calls these the “School.”
… from the everyday life of action—the Town proper of our ter-
minology—there arises the corresponding subjective world—the
Schools of thought, which may express itself sooner or later in
schools of education. The types of people, their kinds and styles of
work, their whole environment, all become represented in the mind
of the community, and these react upon the individuals, their ac-
tivities, their place itself (Geddes, 1906, p. 72).
He introduces the “School” as an abstraction prefiguring and in-
dependent from the local, redbrick building the word evokes, but notes
eventually formally defined “schools” would appear expressing them-
selves in increasingly complex forms:
From the mother's knee and the dame's school of the smallest folk-
place, the townlet or hamlet, ton or home, up to the royal and
priestly school of the law of ancient capitals, or from the humanities
of a mediaeval university to the “Ecole de Droit” of a modern me-
tropolis, the series of essential evolutionary stages may be set down.
Or in our everyday present, the rise of schools of all kinds, primary,
secondary, higher, up to the current movement towards university
colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might
again be traced. The municipalisation of education is thus in fact
expressed (Geddes, 1906, p. 79).
But these concrete “schools” also suggested functions in the socio-
logical sense. They codified the “craft knowledge” and culture that was
generated by the occupations as they evolved. One of Geddes’ apt
characterizations is this:
Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the
evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic
process…which is…vitally important. For we cannot really under-
stand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or Lister
and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his tar-
box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking
smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as “ars vietrikc” and of
its origin from land-surveying (Geddes, 1906, p. 78).
As with the Town, the School varies by region, its pedagogy re-
flecting local practice:
… everywhere (and continually) there have. . arisen local turns of
thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades of accent and
idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there is a char-
acteristic variety, of occupational activity, “a style of workmanship,
a way of doing business.” There are distinctive manners and cus-
toms—there is, in short, a certain recognisable likeness, it may be an
indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and general one, which
may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and literature, in
courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in street and in
house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral. Thus it is that
every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town its own
school (Geddes, 1906, p. 72–73).
The notion is that there arises a collective consciousness, in which
occupation groups are represented and help build. The collective con-
sciousness in the School, Geddes calls ‘tradition’. He says “tradition is in
the life of the community, what memory is for the individual units”
(Geddes, 1906, p. 73).
Transition from Town to City: The Cloister. The school main-
tained tradition but its orientation toward past practice was also a brake
on further social evolution as:
From the very first the school is essentially one of memory. . Most
serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length
“custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death; and deep almost
P. Clavel, R. Young
as life.” This continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral
ones is thus a prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in
making his moral standard the fashionable one, and also, when his
doctrine has succeeded, of the loss of life and mummification' of
form which it so speedily undergoes (Geddes, 1906, p. 80–81).
Karl Marx shared Geddes’s materialist view on the evolution of so-
cial forms as well as his frustration at how to move society beyond the
obstacles of tradition:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brains of the living (Marx, 1852).
This was to be the focus, the key problem in formulating ‘cities in
evolution’: how to overcome the determinist view that ‘nothing could
be done’ in the face of a social Darwinism that pervaded late 19th
century thought. Geddes was searching for a sense of agency, and a
theory of how that could be achieved in practice. Thus he had in-
troduced “Civics” as a concept that could free city development from
the constraints of city environments, − i.e. the “valley section” − not
by the negation of ecology through a primitive modernity, but toward a
more progressive synthesis between humanity and the rest of nature.
Geddes saw this as, first, an issue in science, how should the social
scientist see the problem. The formulation of “Town” and “School” was
too limiting:
The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist. The due place
of ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the
function and the structure of the city, and even upon its material
environment, has next to be recognised. For where the town merely
makes and fixes its industry and makes its corresponding schools,
where its habits and customs become its laws, even its morality, the
community, as we have just seen, sinks into routine, and therefore
decay (Geddes, 1906, p. 83).
But town and school had the potential for better. The mechanism
was the “Cloister,” seen to emerge from the School, where
To prevent this [decay] a twofold process of thought is ever neces-
sary, critical and constructive. What are these? On the one hand, a
continual and critical selection among the ideas derived from ex-
perience, and the formulation of these as Ideals; and further, the
organisation of these into a larger and larger whole of thought; in
fact, a Synthesis of a new kind (Geddes, 1906, p. 83).
As the “School” emerged from the dialectical interplay between the
environment and occupations of the town (and region), which ulti-
mately made themselves formal as actual schools, schools of thought,
and their moral and legal codes; so the Cloister might emerge from the
schools.
But while Geddes suggested the School would “sooner or later”
emerge from the Town, the Cloister seemed more contingent, perhaps
more occasional. And it could easily decay into the passivity of the
School, perhaps even when it arose.
The City. When a new synthesis within the School, or a portion or
offshoot of it, made the transition to the Cloister, the result could be a
new creativity in public acts. This new situation Geddes calls the “City.”
He mentions
… the “need and use, beyond the fundamental claims of the material
life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the Schools…of a deeper
ethical insight than any rule or precedent can afford, for a fuller and
freer intellectual outlook than that which has been derived from any
technical experience or empiric skill, for an imagery which is no
mere review of the phantasmagoria of the senses…it is ever some
fresh combination of these threefold products of the cloister—idea,
theory and imagery − emotional, intellectual, sensuous,— which
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 37–42
transforms the thought-world of its time (Geddes, 1906, p. 84).
The key to ‘the City’ was the “freer intellectual outlook” of the
Cloister, but this thought was not to remain a new ideal but to result in
“acts,” and “deeds.”
“The further interest in the cloister and its history is that it sooner or
later projects its subjective world into reality. In each great civic
period, each new phase of civilisation, its three elements have ever
risen together; i.e., the moral ideal is revived [idea], the thought
system becomes reorganised [theory], the inward eye and ear re-
open [imagery]. Amid the rapid nutritive growth of the modern
town, at best but a larval city, even the more advanced individuals
as yet seldom fully escape the chrysalis, much less spread wings and
find scope. The social psychologist, however, may constantly dis-
cover them; notably among the ‘cranks’ and the ‘dreamers,’ the
outcasts, the ‘unbalanced,’ and indeed even among the criminals of
the conventional order (Geddes, 1907, p. 220).
Geddes now proposed the ‘City’ as the cumulative result of the de-
velopments from Valley Section to Town, to School and Cloister.
Now, “at long last, we are ready to enter the city proper. This is not
merely the Town of place and work and folk, even were this at their
economic best. It is not enough to add the School, even at its com-
pletest; nor the cloister, though with this a yet greater step towards
the city proper is made. For though this is not itself the City, its
ideals of human relations, its theory of the universe and man, its
artistic expression and portrayal of all these, ever sooner or later
react upon the general view and conduct of life. Hence the Academe
of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle, the mediaeval cloister and the
modern Research Institute, have been so fertile, so creative in their
influence upon the city's life, from which they seemed to be retired.
Hence it is ever some new combination of the threefold product of
the cloister—ideal, idea, and ‘image—which transforms the world,
which opens each new epoch (Geddes, 1906, p. 85).
Geddes tended to work out his thoughts in diagram form which cost
him some rigor but, on this topic, there is a useful diagram. He sepa-
rated those institutions concerned with “action” from those of
“thought,” and then created a second axis separating “rote” from
“creative” thought and action. This created four types of institutions:
This diagram does suggest a “synthesis of a new kind.” Geddes does
not comment as to the speed of such a synthesis − perhaps he would be
content with a sense of change over a “generation” as in some of his
references to the “decay” of the Cloister. As an evolutionary biologist,
he could be comfortable with such transformations. However, despite
critics who brand him as reformist or even reactionary, Geddes clearly
sought sweeping change and desired it in his own (or any) time.
Instability of Cloister, City. Even with its evolutionary capacity,
the city could backslide, because the Cloister-City relationship was
fragile. Again, Geddes points to the School, the conflict and lessons of
everyday life, as the point where change could originate. It was, he
wrote in “Civics”,
a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower and higher ideal-
isms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of these.
Indeed, in our own present cities, as they have come to be, is not
P. Clavel, R. Young
each of us finding his own Inferno, or it may be his paradise? Does
he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising hope of
others, the redemption also? (Geddes, 1905, p. 96).
For one thing, the vitality of thoughts came from the experience of
action and, through the Cloister, its development into higher thought
and eventually deeds. However, when the thinker retreated to the se-
curity of the Cloister without renewing this connection to the vitality of
daily necessity and change, the grist feeding such ideals and action was
eventually exhausted: “… the city of each day and generation subsides
or decays more or less completely into the mere town anew, as the
cloister into the schools” (Geddes, 1906, p. 91). Although initially the
circle was expanded it always faced the threat of losing creative mo-
mentum, subsequently becoming static and ossified in institutions,
bureaucracies, and increasingly empty moral codes.
Thus Geddes saw instability in city types. The ideal City and
Cloister, though for a time driving change could, and perhaps would
naturally, revert to the Town and School. Geddes presented the Town-
City relationship as cyclical over time, rooted in a parallel cycle in the
development and reversion of School and Cloister. Thus alongside the
narrative of city development, Geddes supplied a sub-narrative of city
stagnation or even decline. Decline came from the imbalance of occu-
pational development through overspecialization, with institutions that
might keep destructive forces in check losing relative power, influence,
or importance. Geddes saw the growing financial and imperial aspects
of society, ‘the Monotheism of Mars,” overpowering local community
and spiritual capacities as a prime example. “Eutopia” could alternate
with ”Kakotopia.”
5. “Civics” as political and movement program
These were the bare bones of a theory describing “city develop-
ment,” the course of evolution of the city as a living organism. It is
tempting, and certainly tempted Geddes, to add a program to the
theory: to provide recommended practice, political, and social move-
ment actions. But we propose it is better analysis to separate city de-
velopment as an underlying process from actions and even institutions
that can be seen as contingent, but intended to help that process along.
It is perhaps a fuzzy difference, but the following briefly discussed
below seem to fit that latter category:
City Planning and other applied projects. It is noteworthy that
Geddes embarked on city planning after other main initiatives that can
be seen as “city development.” He never saw “town planning” as other
than helping along a process that began in the valley section’s occu-
pations through those of the Town, codified through the School, and on
occasion evolved through Cloister and City. Survey, Exhibition, and
Museum were devices to help that development along by mobilizing
and advancing “citizenship” so that city development would occur
through popular demand.
Michael Batty and Stephen Marshall have emphasized how dis-
tinctive Geddes was as a planner in that he saw his subject as a living
organism (Batty and Marshall, 2009). This led him to resist centralized,
overly institutional interventions, including by governments − which
many planners and reformers intensely demanded − for fear they
might divert or destroy local abilities to solve problems in local ways.
Meller gives the example of Dublin, which Geddes visited with other
urban experts in 1916. In the face of a drastic shortage of housing for
the low-income population, and widespread demand for government
action, Geddes did not support such action for fear it would undermine
neighborhood-led development as a more sensitive and effective means
of meeting the crisis. He believed in the capacity of local inhabitants
and their ability to join with planners in (re)creating their own com-
munities. Geddes understood, as Meller notes quoting him, “that the
poor were not an inert mass waiting to be dealt with by local autho-
rities: ‘we talk about the work people and the submerged tenth as if
they were mere passive creatures to be housed like cattle. We must take
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 37–42
them with us, and we must realize that we are working for the civic
uplifting’ (Meller, 2000, p. 186).
In general, features of Geddes’ planning seem to follow from this
sense of precedence given to the city organism itself. What current
planners recognize as ‘participation,’ was to Geddes the effort to mo-
tivate citizenship to consciousness of the environment and of the city as
an organism that could be adapted into a more refined relationship. An
example was when Geddes organized mass participation in the surveys,
exhibitions, and civic museums at a time when the cult of the expert
disdained popular involvement. Another, equally prominent as an ex-
ample of Geddesian planning, was “conservative surgery.” This careful
means of working with local inhabitants to improve and augment the
quality of life in cities and neighborhoods may have been the most
dramatic innovation in that it can be posed in contrast to the primitive,
(paleo)modernity of massive slum clearances and city-building projects
often proposed by Imperial, and later, Soviet, Chinese, and American
planners.
Regionalism. Geddes had laid out a scheme describing the devel-
opment of the city but it was always connected to the region around it.
Geddes thought that “… regional life concentrates in the city and
functions through its activity” (Branford & Geddes, 1917, p. 156). Thus
“… a city’s spiritual organs need constant renewal of contacts with
rustic life and labour” (Branford & Geddes, 1917, p. 142). There needed
to be “… a sustained effort to bring into closer and more fertile union
the life of each man and the definite region (the city and its associated
rural environment) to which he belongs in his occupation, traditions,
and interests” (Geddes & Branford, 1919, p. 62). Only by nesting each of
these levels within each other: neighborhood, city, region, and globe,
Geddes argued, could the full evolutionary potential of human settle-
ments be realized.
City Evolution as Holistic? Thus Geddes also raises the question
whether social evolution is not best thought of consciously and col-
lectively as a property of the whole system − city, region − as opposed
to an accretion of small changes, less consciously and collectively, in
small parts of it. “Holistic” in Geddes’ case, is not to be confused with a
simple definition of “revolutionary” as was attributed to some urban
planning visionaries and as wielded by political and movement figures
at various times. Geddes’s was not the “big bang” of collective con-
sciousness proposed by some, though it did seem to include advances in
consciousness and also in collective action which could eventually lead
to the complete transformation of society.
This is the question of agency for a city − the whole point, perhaps,
of “Civics.” Geddes was able to conceive of small changes, but did not
relinquish the notion that society could exert control over its environ-
ment and thereby bring the two into a deeper synergy through a more
strategic comprehension. This was the point of the Cloister and City
relationship and was the means through which evolution from the in-
itial, violent stage of paleotechnic industrialism could be transformed
into neotechnic, geotechnic, and eventually biotechnic society.
Educational Reform. Often lost in the many labels attached to
Geddes, though the source of his eventual knighthood, was Geddes role
as an advocate and practitioner of educational reform. His goal in this
vein was to encourage communities to establish transdisciplinary edu-
cational initiatives where the social elements that give birth to the
Cloister could be nourished and sustained.
One of the terms Geddes used to describe the university relating to
− and refurbishing itself through its reciprocal relationship with the
“City,” was the “University Militant.” The term meant “engaged” with
the city and region, as opposed to ensconced and protected, and such
engagement would be demanded. The objective was an educational
process that would emerge from and support regional civics and the
eventual transition to a regenerative economy (Geddes & Tagore, n.d.;
Young, 2017).
This militant institution was to emerge from engaging the needs and
demands of community itself. In the Indore Report of 1918 Geddes
wrote: “no true University has ever been ‘founded’, either by statesmen
P. Clavel, R. Young
or by millionaires: they have all historically arisen from a preliminary
growth and demand of culture in their cities; and they can be at best but
watered and guarded by external wealth and power” (Geddes, 1918).
6. Assessing Geddes
This is about as much as we can get from Geddes' writings on “ci-
vics” directly. The writings are somewhat loose and unformed, the
thoughts unfinished, and we have purposely separated a civics “theory”
− valley section, Town, School, Cloister and City − from aspects of the
civics political and social movement program like planning (survey,
exhibition, museum), regionalism, and education.
These ideas did not make the impact Geddes sought on the first
meetings of the Sociological Society, nor did he succeed with further
elaborations afterwards. Perhaps it was the obscuring effect of his
diagrams as they evolved, ever more complex and difficult to interpret.
Meller, who gave the Civics papers central importance in Geddes’
works, suggests as much.
Our own reading of the “Civics” articles and associated work is more
optimistic, not as to impact, but about their underlying function as
theory. Geddes asserted that city development was a discontinuous
phenomenon, where many strands of “thought” and “action” occa-
sionally came together in a critical and constructive juncture around
the transition from “School” to “Cloister." The text of the papers − even
omitting most of the Diagrams − carries enough detail that he might
have staked out this position more clearly. He was (a) asserting the
holistic character of city development in contrast to the differentiation
hypotheses that were more popular; (b) using the dramatics, pageants,
and references to artistic revivals as ways of pointing out the occa-
sional, difficult to replicate, yet crucial role of social movements; and
(c) indicating the sorts of institutions that could set the stage and per-
haps trigger the civics movement in a positive evolutionary direction.
While this position clashes with demands for immediate, sweeping
change promulgated by some Marxists and other more orthodox mod-
ernist planners, its viability in the face of its critics’ repeated failures is
enticing (Katznelson, 1992).
The fundamental ideas of ‘Civics,’ seen more clearly as a theory of
city development, both clarifies Geddes’ thought centered on the
“School” and its occasional transformation toward and back from the
“Cloister,” and provides more context, direction, and force to the al-
ready intriguing planning and policy interventions he became famous
for later in his career.
And imbued with Civics, city planners might not remain as attached
to the possibilities of dramatic, elite urban designs and massive slum
clearance while treating Geddes’ suggestions for participation, con-
servative surgery, and education as benign, if ancillary side efforts.
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They would be less likely to see themselves as failing when the big
projects failed. Seeing the possibilities for self-generating solutions in
Geddes’ version of “cities in evolution” the more gradual achievements
in change-inducing movements and institutions featured in his planning
efforts would be good enough in themselves, offering perhaps a deeper
radicalism and more viable path toward the evolution of cities.
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Pierre Clavel is a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. Dr. Clavel’s research and
writing is on planning, administration, and politics — with particular application to re-
gionalism and nationalism in Appalachia and Wales, then applied to progressive cities like
Hartford, Cleveland, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Burlington, Chicago, and Boston, as well as
community development in Youngstown, Ohio, and Maine. Current projects include an
archived collection and webpages on progressive cities and neighborhood planning.
Robert Young works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the
fields of urban planning, sustainable economic development, and urban ecology. His
research centers on the planning, governance, and financing of metropolitan green in-
frastructure and on economic development initiatives for sustainable cities and regions.