Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 90–96

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Landscape and Urban Planning

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landurbplan

A transformative Outlook on the twenty-first century city: Patrick Geddes’ MARK

Outlook Tower revisited
⁎
Joshua F. Cerra ,a, Brook Weld Mullerb, Robert F. Youngc
a
Cornell University Department of Landscape Architecture, 444 Kennedy Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
b
University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts, 105 Lawrence Hall, Eugene, OR 97403, USA
c
The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, Community and Regional Planning Program, 310 Inner Campus Drive B7500, Austin, TX 7 8712-1009, USA

A B S T R A C T

As described in Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower embodies an approach to urban planning that
maintains currency in planning and design discourse today. Geddes' tower arranged the history of the city into a
vertical array of exhibition spaces while offering a broadened perspective of the city's condition amidst the
lateral spread of the region. In this interdisciplinary project, we speculate as to how the planning and design
community might draw inspiration from Geddes' work to devise an Outlook for our own times, one that helps
people appreciate the interrelated and rapidly evolving dynamics of climate change and urbanization and
motivates them to work collaboratively toward positive future outcomes.

Building from Geddes’ inspiring project and its underlying ideas, we
develop a vision for an Outlook for the 21st century that seeks to be
synoptic as well as evolutionary. It is both a symbol of and contributor
to social-ecological resilience that is at once a communicator of climate
impacts, a demonstrator of climate adaptation, and a facilitator of social
discourse and organization. In our proposal the contemporary Outlook
does not necessarily assume the form of a single commanding tower,
but instead occupies multiple dynamic places where landscape change
offers new possibilities for civic architectures and landscapes that
combine with one another. By offering an interdisciplinary perspective,
one that honors Geddes’ expansive vision, this paper seeks to position a
contemporary Outlook as an inspiration for communities to take a
leadership role in anticipating climate change while generating a new
set of mutually adaptive solutions for cities and their citizens.
1. Introduction
In Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes described his iconic Outlook
Tower project as a means to engender and combine “synoptic” con-
textual systems thinking and “city betterment” (Geddes, 1950; 326). In
this essay we assert that his approach, that is to say his outlook, is of
great currency for planning and design discourse today. We focus on
Geddes’ evolutionary views that guided the creation of his Outlook and
that may inform the creation of contemporary expressions of the Out-
look idea. What would Geddes make of the explosive growth of cities
today, the information revolution, and climate change? How might a
contemporary Geddes have incorporated these evolving factors into a
present-day Tower, or Towers? What elements of a twenty-first century
Outlook would enable deeper comprehension of the evolving and ex-
panding contemporary city?
In pursuing these questions we are motivated by queries Richard
Wakeford offered in his Sir Patrick Geddes commemorative lecture of
2007:
“Could the visionary approach of past planners such as Geddes or
Burnham have a modern parallel? Which modern planners will in-
spire people to change their mindsets and behaviours in ways that
will change the way we use our planet? After all, the systems ana-
lysis approach shows that such action will be more powerful than
rules, taxes and subsidies. What can planners do?” (Wakeford,
2007).
In this interdisciplinary undertaking, we ask about the interrelated
roles of planners as well as landscape architects, architects and others in
envisioning an Outlook for our times. We begin by offering a short
description of Geddes’ Outlook Tower and speculate on its possible
intellectual origins. We then describe underlying principles of the
Outlook that foreshadow current concerns and the circumstances that a
contemporary Outlook would be called to acknowledge, with particular
emphasis on the interrelated and rapidly evolving dynamics of climate
change and urban growth. Lastly, we consider how a contemporary
Outlook would have to adapt its role to adjust to these present-day
realities so that it can, in the catalytic and visionary spirit of Geddes’

⁎
Corresponding author at: Cornell University Department of Landscape Architecture, 444 Kennedy Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
E-mail addresses: jfc299@cornell.edu (J.F. Cerra), bmuller@uoregon.edu (B.W. Muller), ryoung@utexas.edu (R.F. Young).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.05.015
Received 1 July 2015; Received in revised form 23 May 2016; Accepted 20 May 2017
Available online 04 September 2017
0169-2046/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
original Tower, enable those who use it to better visualize the projected
impacts of climate change and accelerated urbanization in ways that
motivate them to work collaboratively toward positive future out-
comes.
2. Geddes’ Outlook Tower-background
In the 1890′s Patrick Geddes created the remarkable Outlook Tower
and related Civic Survey Exhibition out of and within a seven-story
disused observatory “capped by a small dome rising above close-packed
roofs” in the Castlehill section of the Royal Mile next to Edinburgh
Castle (Earley, 1991; 65). Through its layered verticality, the images,
artifacts, and documents hung upon its walls, and the culminating
rooftop promontory, the Outlook Tower mirrored, miniaturized, and
provided augmented connections to the city and its surroundings in-
cluding views of “the Highlands in the northwest, the valley of the Esk
to the south, the Royal Mile on the east and the city of Edinburgh on the
west” (Stalley, 1972; 26). It was a set of spaces and images intended to
assist the citizenry of Edinburgh and its visitors in appreciating re-
lationships between the city and its region, and to encourage dialogue
about cultural history, economic activity, environmental context, and
the evolution of cities over time.
Geddes stated the purpose of the Civic Survey housed within and
upon the walls of the Tower thus:
“For many years in progress at the Outlook Tower, a selection had
been made and developmentally arranged; so that here, more than
elsewhere before, the essential conditions and phases of a city’s
historic past were shown as determining its qualities and defects in
the present. Past and present were also shown as presenting the
problems of the city’s opening future, and as conditioning their
treatment also” (Geddes, 1968; 256).
The Outlook was organized as follows (from bottom level to the
top):
1. Ground floor, the World: exhibits of eastern civilizations and the
“general study of Man” (Geddes, 1968; 325)
2. Story devoted to European civilization and its cities with both an
historical introduction and records of current events (Geddes, 1968)
3. Story devoted to Greater Britain and “some representation of the
whole English speaking world” (Geddes, 1968; 325)
4. Story devoted to “Scotland, with its towns and cities” (Geddes,
1968; 325)
5. Story “devoted to the city” (Geddes, 1968; 323): geologic and
other maps, paintings, drawings, photographs, and other representa-
tions that bring together multiple aspects of the city of Edinburgh
through its history (Geddes, 1968)
6. “-Upon the main platform of the level roof, and in the open air-
the ‘prospect’ of the special sciences” (Geddes, 1968; 322) containing
analytic exhibits of “astronomic and topographical, geological and
meteorological, botanical and zoological, anthropologic and arche-
ologic, historical and economic” (Geddes, 1968; 323) significance with
respect to the outlook’s setting
7. Top Floor, Camera Obscura: a device by which a “helicopter view
of the city and the region could be projected onto the table and rotated”
(Earley, 1991; 65)
In the early chapters of Cities and Evolution, Patrick Geddes ex-
pressed concern about the emergence of ‘conurbations,’ their seemingly
unchecked expansion, the resulting impacts on social health and well-
being, and other liabilities (Geddes, 1950). With the Outlook Tower,
Geddes facilitated a view of the city of Edinburgh surveyed within its
historical and geographic context, so that visitors could comprehend it
as a synthesis of interrelated systems. It provided the construct through
which to reacquaint the visitor with her/his role as a citizen and to
advocate for social wellbeing and city betterment. This was Geddes’
expansive vision for the Outlook Tower “as incipient Civic Observatory
and Laboratory together—a type of institution needed (indeed
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 90–96
incipient) in every city, with its effort towards correlation of thought
and action, science and practice, sociology and morals, with its
watchword and endeavor of ‘Civic Survey for Civil Service’” (Geddes,
1968; 287).
The Outlook Tower, given its location and collated content, estab-
lished a vantage for all for observing a synthesis of features and pro-
cesses at first seemingly disparate:
“…it’s camera obscura, which harmonises the striking landscape,
near and far, and this with no small element of the characteristic
qualities of the best modern painting, has therefore been retained;
alike for its own sake and as an evidence of what is so often missed
by the scientific and philosophic minds, the synthetic vision to
which they aspire may be reached more simply from the aesthetic
and the emotional side, and thus be visual and concrete. In short,
here, as elsewhere, children and artists may see more than the wise.
For as there can be no nature study, no geography worth the name
apart from the love and the beauty of Nature, so it is with the study
of the City” (Geddes, 1968; 321).
3. Principles Underlying Geddes' Outlook that Anticipate
Contemporary Concerns
“To-day with gathering knowledge and incipient science, to-morrow
with rousing imagination and renewing art, a new great age of cities
is preparing” (Geddes, 1968; 277).
Geddes’ highly synoptic approach, one that bridges the natural
sciences, innovative planning principles and design speculation, and
one guiding the layout of the Survey Exhibition and the evaluation of
the city as a whole, holds tremendous contemporary relevancy.
Although the Civic Survey Exhibition component was never fully
completed, three specific concepts that inspired Geddes in his creation
of the Outlook Tower and Exhibition can guide our own thinking about
current circumstances and the design of an Outlook for our times. These
include: a) contextual layering and synthesis; b) exhibition of
temporal change; and c) facilitation of civic engagement.
3.1. Conceptual layering and synthesis
The ‘story’ that Geddes’ Outlook tells is a rich yet readily compre-
hensible one that plays out in a layered and ‘nested’ organization,
where (1) the smaller unit (Outlook) is determined by the larger unit
(city/region), and (2) the larger unit (city/region) is miniaturized in the
smaller unit (Outlook). From the Outlook, one looks out from on high
and sees the city of Edinburgh in relation to region. In other words, the
city/region relationship is something one could begin to comprehend
from one strategic vantage, and from there, reflect and react.
This idea of the Tower might owe its origins to the eminent evo-
lutionary biologist, Thomas Huxley − Geddes’ chosen teacher at
University College London. Huxley used the heights of London Bridge to
begin his Introduction to the Study of Nature (Huxley, 1877), placing the
observer atop the bridge looking down at the Thames River and then
tracing the dynamic processes driving its watershed as an introduction
to the workings of the universe as a whole. It is likely that as a young
scholar studying under Huxley near the time of the book’s publication,
Geddes would have been exposed to this means of conceptualizing a
region and its influences.
This same method provided the foundation for Benton MacKaye’s
The New Exploration (1928). MacKaye takes readers first to the top of
Times Square using this prospect as a means to make visible the local,
regional, continental, and global aspects of the metropolis, what he
terms the “mother of cities” or “mother of flows.” He then chooses New
Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock as the natural Outlook Tower of New
England: “the emblem of a unified homeland, and functions for a nat-
ural region as the scepter functions for a royal state. … the lofty pivot of
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
an indigenous region and culture” (MacKaye, 1928; 48). That such a
singular viewpoint is comparatively elusive in the contemporary
megalopolis should influence how we conceptualize and configure an
Outlook for our times, as we hope to demonstrate.
3.2. Exhibition of temporal change
Geddes’ systemic view allowed for the creation of the Outlook
Tower as an organization of spaces that exhibited relationships and
developments over time. As an evolutionary biologist, Geddes under-
stood change as fundamental to life and recognized outcomes were not
deterministic. His hope for the tower was that it would enable better
conceptualization of past trajectories and the speculative envisioning of
potential futures as embedded in the present moment. He endeavored
through the Outlook to facilitate understandings of the interacting in-
fluences of geographies, populations and economies as creative agents
of history. The Outlook Tower demonstrated Geddes’ faith in humanity
(and the future), that with the right tools, consciousness, and social
organization, the urban spaces and infrastructures that supported
peoples’ lives and livelihoods might be adapted in a manner that is
sensible and coherent relative to natural resources, landforms, and the
processes and functions of regional (watershed-scale) ecologies.
3.3. Facilitating civic engagement
This third factor, one pertaining to social organization, can be
overlooked in the workings of the Tower. While it was indeed im-
pressive both as a promontory and as a collection of images related to
regional development, its core purpose was to mobilize social action.
Geddes termed such action “civics” which he defined as public en-
gagement “raised beyond its too aldermanic associations” (Geddes,
1919; 367). This elevated engagement required illustration of “the
noblest past of human life: a past increasingly inspiring as we look back
through history” and the relating of this story of human social evolution
with contemporary vistas of the surrounding region (Geddes, 1919;
367). In this manner the Tower could serve as a means for communities
to define values and construct narratives, rooted in their social and
ecological history, of potential futures for their region.
So equipped, a regional polity could, Geddes hoped, develop a new
“practical politics” beyond party and nourished by place (Defries, 1927;
216). To achieve this, Geddes designed the Tower both as an educa-
tional tool to bring about this regional consciousness as well as a
meeting place where citizens could gather to devise the particular
strategies of an enhanced, participatory regional civics. Thus, Geddes
and his associates hoped, “instead of opposing parties threatening each
other with ruin, whether by reaction or by revolution, the best from
each will become aroused to Regionalism and civic service” and “in-
stead of continuing economic disputes…thence carried into politics, we
shall have real citizenship and thus social economy beyond these old
economic schools” (Defries, 1927; 221).
4. Contending with Emerging Concerns in Devising an Outlook for
Our Times
“But the general principle − the primacy of the civic and social
outlook, intensified into local details…yet all in contact with the
larger world, and these successively in enlarging social zones, from
that of the prospect outwards” (Geddes, 1968; 325).
We now consider dimensions of a contemporary Outlook. What are
the evolving aspects of the city and region that we wish to contend with
and ‘look out’ to today? What might an Outlook Tower for the twenty
first century city recognize and honor? In keeping with Geddes’ evo-
lutionary approach, how like an organism might it adapt to changing
circumstances? What factors would determine its organization, char-
acter and specific purpose(s)?
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 90–96
Geddes saw the Tower as a laboratory, a micro and macro scope that
could illuminate and enable the transition from “necropolis” (the city of
evolutionary demise) to “biopolis” (the city of life) (Welter, 2002). For
him, necropolis was the product of what he termed “war cities:” urban
conurbations reliant upon the unsustainable extraction and exhaustion
of natural and social wealth in the global hinterlands. The Outlook
Tower, along with the city and regional surveys that Geddes advocated
for, provided the means to develop an alternative, what he called
“culture cities.” Culture cities embodied what Geddes recognized to be
of critical importance: the behavior of the city in relation to its con-
text…and how the two operate interdependently (Branford & Geddes,
1919; Geddes, 1921; Young, 2017).
Our survey of contemporary influences centers on Geddes’ re-
cognition of the city as a global phenomenon that at the same time
delivers impacts with profound local and regional dimensions
(Clavel & Young, 2017). Now, with the largest rural-to-urban migration
in human history underway, most of the human population living in
cities, and the resultant concentration of activity and impacts in urban
environments, regional and global futures depend as much as ever on
the ongoing evolution of the city. Cities are constantly expanding,
densifying, generating wealth and waste, and commanding massive
inputs of resources to sustain the human condition. This has resulted in
changes in land use and land cover, and alteration of hydrologic sys-
tems, biogeochemical cycles, biodiversity and of course climate at
multiple scales (Grimm et al., 2008). Cities draw heavily from global
natural resources, with consequential impacts on biodiversity and
ecosystem services beyond cities themselves (Secretariat of the
Convention on Biological Diversity, 2012). Cities are thus major agents
of change for non-urban ecosystems. At the same time, given their lo-
cations and concentrations of populations, they are particularly sus-
ceptible to the impacts of climate change. As the Secretariat of the
Convention on Biological Diversity states:
“Efforts to mitigate CO2 emissions are urgently required. However,
even with concerted action, the planet will still experience more
frequent and intense heat waves, drought, storms and flooding, and
sea-level rise. Cities are poised to bear the brunt of these effects, as
they concentrate more than half of humanity in some of the Earth’s
most vulnerable locations along coasts and rivers. At the same time,
cities contribute 60–70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore cities − and urban biodiversity and ecosystem services in
particular − can play important roles in mitigating and adapting to
climate change” (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological
Diversity, 2012, 33).
While the world looks to the city for new perspectives in the face of
change, cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the direct and
indirect effects they generate. Grimm et al. argue: “Cities themselves
represent microcosms of the kinds of changes that are happening
globally, making them informative test cases for understanding socio-
ecological system dynamics and responses to change” (Grimm et al.,
2008; 756). And while they are indeed informative test cases, one must
remain mindful of associated and rapidly changing circumstances be-
yond the urban frame of reference. Echoing a central understanding
that Geddes articulated a century earlier, Seto and Satterthwaite re-
cognize: “One of the themes emerging from this rapidly growing re-
search community is that urbanization and global environmental
change are inextricably linked, with bi-directional interactions that are
complex, multifaceted, and often nuanced” (Seto & Satterthwaite, 2010;
127). Indeed, as tumultuous and seemingly unprecedented as current
processes of urbanization and ecosystem alteration are, Geddes would
have recognized a natural dynamism at work:
“Like the living being it is, a city reacts upon its environment, and in
ever-widening circles. It may transcend its limitations, here eco-
nomically and there educationally; or first in thought and next in
deed. Hence its character and aspect in each age; hence its varied
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
eminence and influence accordingly; until once more it changes,
with circumstances or with the times, outwardly, inwardly, or both”
(Geddes, 1968; 264).
Today the city as global actor is placed both acutely and chronically
at risk of climate change and its impacts. Could the contextual
grounding of the Outlook Tower once again assist the global urban ci-
tizenry in scoping their position and agency with respect to this pro-
blem, and possibly its solution?
To begin a process of adapting the Outlook to these contemporary
conditions and concerns, we could look to recent exhibits on climate
change that in several respects parallel the Outlook Tower in their in-
tentions, serving as “outlookesque” mechanisms for informing the
public about emerging issues at the intersection of urbanism and en-
vironmental change. Urban environmental experiments such as Denise
Hoffman Brandt’s “Public Utility: City Sink” carbon sink infrastructure
project in New York City, itself a means of surveying, representing, and
perceiving the city (Felson & Pollak, 2010), has affinities with the work
and ideas of Geddes and the Outlook Tower in particular at the same
time it takes a bold and evocative stance with respect to a changing
climate. The 2010 “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Water-
front” and the “Counterpart Cities: Climate Change Response by Hong
Kong and Shenzhen,” curated by Dorothy Tang and Jonathan Solomon,
are two recent exhibits that look even farther ahead by speculating
about new futures while referencing past and current urban conditions.
Although of a distinctively futuristic orientation, these examples are
in keeping with Geddes’ passion for regional exhibits, surveys, and
plans as a path to educate and motivate the “new polity” of renewed
city and regional engagement. As Pierre Clavel notes in his essay,
“Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes: Two approaches to city devel-
opment,”
“Geddes sought to create a social movement, which he called civics.
His concept of civics was an idea of how a fundamental change in
society might occur⋯Geddes sought to generate civic consciousness
first, through summer meetings, university extension courses, civic
exhibitions, mass-participation civic surveys, and civic museums.
Geddes endorsed city planning because it was a vehicle for creating
these institutions” (Clavel, 2002,51).
An Outlook centered on planning in response to overwhelming en-
vironmental and other pressures can catalyze a new polity to take ac-
tion today.
5. Basic Attributes of a Contemporary Outlook
“The general principle is the synoptic one, seeking as far may be to
recognize and utilise all points of view…. For this must include at
once the scientific and, as far as may be, the artistic presentment of
the city’s life: it must base upon these an interpretation of the city's
course of evolution in the present: it must increasingly forecast its
future possibilities; and thus it may arouse and educate citizenship,
by organizing endeavors towards realizing some of these worthy
ends” (Geddes, 1968; 320–321).
Like landscape processes, climate change is difficult to comprehend
as relevant to our daily lives without synthetic and harmonized per-
spective and presentation of knowledge. In addressing realities of cli-
mate change and the need for coordinated socio-ecological response,
we envision a contemporary Outlook pressed into service to deepen
understandings of the contemporary city and region while bringing into
view the impacts of climate change relative to population growth, in-
creased urban density, and environmental degradation. It profiles re-
gionally appropriate, adaptive responses to increasingly extreme
weather events and supports actions that minimize the worst of po-
tential outcomes while maximizing citizen wellbeing. Most critically
and as Geddes endeavored to accomplish with his own project, an
Outlook catalyzes civic engagement and demonstrates the potential for
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positive collective intervention. In sum, a contemporary Outlook
performs three roles that we will now explore: (1) it communicates
impacts (as such it includes a contemporary version of the camera
obscura), (2) it describes and demonstrates adaptive response (as
such it is a hybrid landscape/building), and (3) it is a dynamic
entity that invites active agency in its evolution over time (as such
it provides a forum for elevated civic discourse). While not pre-
determining the specific configuration, these specific principles and
associated attributes begin to position an Outlook in space and time and
form a basis from which its formal, functional and experiential qualities
may ultimately be derived.
The attributes described above allow it to become more than an
education center or location of quaint pilot projects. Rather, they en-
able it to become an active agent in performing critical duties for
evolving the city region both physically and socially (i.e. through both
technics and civics) toward adaptive outcomes. This new phase Geddes
described as “geotechnic”—a period of synthesis where “we must re-
gard the world not as something to be administered and exploited, but
as something to be cared for, as the gardener converts a waste patch
into an oasis of beauty and fertility” (Geddes & Slater, 1917, 192). This
geotechnic age “call it what we will,” Geddes comments, “in its turn
gives birth to a further advance—that concerned with human evolu-
tion” (Geddes, 1904; 108).
5.1. The Outlook Communicates Impacts
While there will be significant local and regional variation in cli-
mate change impacts, many impacts will be more commonly experi-
enced. Global surface temperature is projected to increase. In many
locations, it is very likely heat waves will become more common and
prolonged, and extreme precipitation events more frequent (IPCC,
2014). Global mean sea levels will also rise (IPCC, 2014). The 2014
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report reinforces
the pronounced vulnerability of cities to climate change: “In urban
areas climate change is projected to increase risks for people, assets,
economies and ecosystems, including risks from heat stress, storms and
extreme precipitation, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, air pol-
lution, drought, water scarcity, sea level rise and storm surges” (IPCC,
2014, 15)
Sheppard believes that social barriers and perceptual disconnections
prevent us from seeing climate change and what we can do about it, and
these barriers must be overcome before actions can be taken that are
commensurate with the challenge (Sheppard, 2012). He describes three
principles for making information about climate change more ap-
proachable and engaging to the public:
1) “Make it local” (Sheppard, 2012; 43). Relate climate change in-
formation to the local community and its landscape so that it can be
understood and explored in a familiar context (Sheppard, 2012).
2) “Make it visual” (Sheppard, 2012; 43). Visual information translates
across disciplines and communities, and is a major part of our cul-
ture. Access visual imagery to enhance interest in and perception of
climate change information (Sheppard, 2012).
3) “Make it connected” (Sheppard, 2012; 43). Share both the causes
and impacts of climate change as well as adaptation and mitigation
options to address them (Sheppard, 2012).
Make it local, visual, and connected: these principles bear striking
resemblance to those guiding Geddes’ projects a century ago. Geddes
sought the engagement of people with their region through civic and
regional exhibits in the Outlook Tower, municipal buildings and local
museums, or through engaging citizens in activities that would deepen
their understanding of place such as regional surveys and hikes.
Today, the importance of comprehending numerous climate change
impacts affecting the evolution of cities, some more directly perceptible
than others, speaks to the value of a diversity of means of visualization.
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
Sheppard (2005) identifies selected climate change impacts that can be
apparent when portrayed realistically, and other impacts that may re-
quire additional manipulation and enhancement to be visually legible.
Through a suite of strategies, a new Outlook in our current era must
make such impacts apparent.
Several climate change visualization initiatives underway can help
us imagine how this can be accomplished. Sheppard’s own Collaborative
for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of British Columbia
(http://calp.forestry.ubc.ca/) offers such an example, as does the
Coastal Sustainability Studio at Louisiana State University (http://css.lsu.
edu/). Real-time collection, gathering and analysis of data from sensors
deployed across the landscape add another potential functional layer to
such models. The Senseable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (http://senseable.mit.edu/) accesses a wide range of da-
tasets at the city scale to invite discovery by representing this in-
formation so it is visually accessible. Another example is the Federal
Emergency Management Agency flood warning system in New York
State that is composed of a network of interconnected stream and
precipitation gauges to enable communities access to close-to-real-time
information about flood events or risks (New York News, 2015).
These examples inspire thinking about a modernized camera ob-
scura in an Outlook for our times as one powerful means of visualizing
change. As an appliance that projects and mirrors to produce desired
optical effects, the camera would be introduced in direct recollection of
Geddes’ aspiration while linking people to urban climate challenges
through visual experience. Such a device would frame or bracket in-
formation through selective removal of content so people would then
see and understand critical relationships between global systems and
local vulnerabilities that they would not have otherwise. This in-
strumentation for example could overlay the impacts of extreme hy-
drological events on the urban watershed, and perhaps “scale up” these
local and regional processes so that global implications could be vi-
sualized and made more conscionable.
5.2. The Outlook describes and demonstrates adaptive response
An Outlook must show, through education and as a center to or-
ganize participatory activity, how adaptive responses to climatic im-
pacts are both necessary and achievable. In this rapidly changing en-
vironment, an Outlook not only calls attention to climate adaptation
measures currently in place on the landscape; it also offers ‘forecasts’ of
what may lie ahead should additional measures be taken. Much as
Sheppard describes − and demonstrates in his own Collaborative for
Advanced Landscape Planning − a “new climate change lens”
(Sheppard, 2012; 17) will enable us to better see impacts, interpret and
compare possible actions and their consequences, and provide insight
into alternatives (Sheppard, 2012).
A contemporary Outlook not only visualizes the impacts of climate
change and the benefits of possible climate adaptation measures, it also
demonstrates and assists in the mobilization of such measures. As a site-
level participant within these dynamic processes, a Tower as a dynamic,
physical entity modulates its environment for more effective adaptive
response while interpreting these moves for participants to observe and
learn from. As an approachable example, an Outlook could itself cap-
ture and store stormwater, thereby contributing to moderation of the
destructive effects of extreme precipitation events by reducing runoff,
and then registering the volume collected for all to see. In addition to
showcasing the technics of climate adaptation, an Outlook Tower can
act as a space where the civics necessary to achieve greener, more so-
cially just city-regions can be convened and explored. In acting in this
manner, it would exhibit the importance that every project contribute
to a broader set of solutions, and prompt discussion of the critical need
for collaborative action in response to global climate change threats.
In offering visualizations, demonstrations, and mobilizations ad-
dressing climate adaptation, an Outlook’s configuration could again be
imagined as a series of frames (conceptual and physical) for bracketing
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Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 90–96
and perceiving processes (hydrological, biological, ecological, social) at
multiple scales, and a configuration of ‘hinges’ that selectively create
links between these frames. Once again it shapes actual environmental
processes at the same time it makes them visually apparent; in this
sense, it is a form of “eco-relevatory” design for the twenty-first century
(Brown et al., 1998). In sum an Outlook in an era of climate change
becomes simultaneously a bellwether for today and a sentinel for a
better future.
Acknowledging the interrelationship of all things to their physical
and temporal context (in a manner characteristic of Geddes’ own per-
spective), a contemporary Outlook blurs the line between built and
open space. Customarily, landscape architects and ecologists look to the
outdoor spaces of the city in devising climate mitigation and adaptation
strategies. Meanwhile sustainable architects concentrate on building
envelopes and interiors in devising energy efficiency and resource
conservation strategies in a context of the need to reduce carbon
emissions. An Outlook in an era of climate change should exhibit design
innovation providing, as Geddes so often advocated, a synoptic per-
spective that overcomes the disjointedness of the urban environment
and the traditional gaps between architecture, landscape architecture,
and planning. By exploiting the interstitial spaces between these dis-
ciplines, an Outlook celebrates the ‘life between buildings’ as described
by Gehl and yet includes nonhuman species in the conversation (Gehl,
1987). Using the license afforded by its thematic focus on multiple
scales, an Outlook that combines building and landscape behaviours
enables new insights into how site-scale projects can adapt and con-
tribute to region-scale environmental quality.
One can look at as recent a project as Renzo Piano Workshop’s
California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in San Francisco, completed in
2008, as an undertaking exhibiting the kind of information layering,
conceptual development and integration of architecture and landscape
that might add to our thinking about an Outlook for today. The CAS
museum’s rain forest sphere and spiraling, exhibit-laced ramp within
symbolize and demonstrate the natural history of a bioregion in relation
to human activity. The exhibit is complemented by an observation deck
atop an undulating green roof that both mimics the forms and offers
views of the hills in the distance. This spatial sequence describes − and
educates people about − the physical world and culminates in direct
apprehension of it, providing multiple means to understand the local
and present in relation to broader biological and social systems.
Additionally, the undulating roof decelerates stormwater runoff, in-
duces thermal stratification and passive ventilation in the spaces below,
and contributes habitat benefits for urban ecosystems. As a work of
architecture, CAS is very Outlook-like given the inseparability of its
mission and physical configuration. It offers fresh perspective on Joyce
Earley’s explanation of influences informing Geddes’ Survey Exhibition
and Outlook: “The road to the Ideal City did not run straight through
the social sciences; apparently, it looped through natural science”
(Earley 1991; 67).
An Outlook as a seamlessly integrated architecture/landscape ar-
chitecture hybrid interacts with the systemic processes and flows that
comprise its setting. As suggested earlier, water could become a critical
medium for developing innovative correspondences between elements.
If the verticality of Geddes’ Outlook establishes a historical narrative
embedded in a spatial sequence that culminates in a vantage of the city,
the verticality of a contemporary Outlook could be enlisted for history
and view and hydrology, connecting the plentiful resources of sky to
forces and processes on the ground.
Many urban locations will experience different climate change im-
pacts requiring different adaptive demonstrations. It is therefore con-
ceivable that one metropolis contains multiple outlooks (depending on
the will of the community and the city’s size and geography, etc.) and,
certainly in keeping with Geddes’ vision, that every city has an outlook.
What is critical and what Geddes would have recognized is that each
contemporary Outlook would have to be distinct and responsive to its
particular social and ecological context, for example to the hydrologic
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
condition of its watershed. A vital function of each contemporary
Outlook Tower would therefore be that of locating and illustrating
critical aspects of each city-region’s unique dynamic and potentialities,
finding, as Geddes argued, the genius loci of each region. These char-
acteristics, once understood, Geddes contended, would point the way
toward eutopia, which, unlike “utopian proposals, however promising,
are without definite place, and therefore, are futile and fanciful; but
those that find place, (i. e. are regional,) are also realizable; and these
plannings and plantings, each in their right place for survival and
growth, we shall call Eutopian” (Geddes et al., 1917, 16). An Outlook in
this sense becomes itself a demonstration of adaptive and resilient
urban and regional design.
5.3. The Outlook is a dynamic entity that evolves over time
“That which at present makes the delay and difficulty of the civic
movement will become its strengthened appeal in the long run. For
at present the historian is in the library, in the museum, or the
university—in the past anyhow. The builder and architect are in the
active present, but in the present too much alone. The thinker is too
often a dreamer, occupied with the future indeed, but a future which
to others seems too remote for practical purposes. But a Congress of
Cities, a City and Town Planning Exhibition, stand for utilising all
three types of man and mind. These too seldom meet, and therefore
shrink from each other; but such programs reconcile and bring to-
gether not a few of the best of them” (Geddes, 1968; 261).
As noted in the previous section, a contemporary Outlook must, as
Geddes’ Tower did in his own time, provide a forum for citizens and
communities to re-conceptualize their roles as regional citizens. In Cities
in Evolution, Geddes discusses one of the purposes of the city ‘story’ of
the Outlook Tower was for providing a forum for fostering productive
exchange amongst the city’s citizens. While the purpose of this floor
pertained largely to the presentation of survey results and the exhibi-
tion of “facts of past and present,” it also housed a ‘Civic Business
Room’ set aside for the “main practical civic work of this tower—its
various endeavors towards city betterment” (Geddes, 1968; 326). It
seems Geddes intentionally positioned this civic business room amidst
influential exhibits of historical and physical context in order to situate
dialogue around the possibility of better future outcomes. We can look
to the recently completed Bullitt Center in Seattle (2012) or the Wa-
tershed Resource Center in Santa Barbara (2000) as contemporary
projects that similarly serve to foster more informed public discussion
about the city and environmental quality through such contextual
grounding.
Norton (2005) speaks about the effectiveness of communities in
contending with contemporary environmental problems and im-
peratives of sustainability as depending on willingness to engage
competing values and pragmatically adapt. Given this, how might a
new Outlook for the twenty first century inspire citizens and profes-
sionals to work together to take on forward thinking urban initiatives?
As Geddes frames it: “How, in short, is Civic Aspiration to be developed,
guided, applied to the needed Art of City-making, which has ever been
implied in Citizenship?” (Geddes, 1950; 287). Climate Change will have
broad impacts on landscape processes and systems, with compounded
effects that cross boundaries between public and private ownership,
and commercial, institutional, and residential land use types. Innova-
tion in the realm of urban climate adaptation however could begin with
Geddes own understanding that collaboration between multiple dis-
ciplines and leadership at all levels, from public agencies to citizen-
level support and engagement, is critical.
In keeping with Geddes’ vision for the “Civic Business Room,” a
Contemporary Outlook would provide a forum for discourse amongst
these communities. It would facilitate lateral relationships by nurturing
an “intimate combination of popular culture and of higher education,
and of that solidarity of civic and national spirit, with openness and
95
Landscape and Urban Planning 166 (2017) 90–96
hospitality to the larger world” (Geddes, 1950; 326). Such civic en-
gagement centered on questions of climate change is essential for
building community capacity as a complement to physical/ecological
adaptation. It also invites exploration of related questions such as
equity − framed not only by socio-ecological processes like climate
change but by the social and financial dynamics of what Patrick Geddes
labeled “the paleotechnic era.” Geddes defined this phase of industrial
development as particularly violent and wasteful, dominated by a quest
for financial rather than social or ecological wealth and a disregard for
the living systems, both ecological and social, which underlie all so-
cieties (Geddes, 1912). Geddes aspiration was for the Outlook Tower to
play a role, both in terms of education and mobilization, in promoting
the advancement of cities to higher evolutionary states that he termed
the “neotechnic”, “geotechnic”, and “biotechnic.” Each of these phases
reflected an ever-growing refinement in the handling of resource use,
design, and cooperative social relations (Geddes, 1927; Mumford,
1962).
Folke argues: “Resilience is not only about being persistent or robust
to disturbance. It is also about the opportunities that disturbance opens
up in terms of recombination of evolved structures and processes, re-
newal of the system and emergence of new trajectories” (Folke, 2006;
259). Folke et al. stress that “addressing only the social dimension of
resource management without an understanding of resource and eco-
system dynamics will not be sufficient to guide society toward sus-
tainable outcomes. Similarly, focusing only on the ecological side as a
basis for decision making for sustainability may lead to too narrow
conclusions” (Folke et al., 2005; 443). Contemporary Outlooks, like
their predecessor, therefore must generate perspective on the adaptive
benefits of ecological resilience to the city and society and provide a
forum that reinforces learning, self-organization and capacity for
adaptation and tolerance to disturbance described by Folke (Folke,
2006). In other words, by positioning a discussion around the resilience
benefits of such ecological systems, networks of human relationships
can be organized that catalyze complementary and supportive social
resilience, a most favorable condition in which communities learn from
past mistakes and successes and are better informed and prepared.
Perfectly in keeping with Geddes’ desire that the Outlook serve as
catalyst for discourse on ‘city betterment’, a contemporary Outlook as a
vehicle for working toward more resilient futures can both facilitate
collaboration of multiple disciplines and leadership at all levels as well
as serve as a physical symbol of adaptive change.
In this manner, the urban built environment could be reflected as an
ongoing experiment in ecological and climatic futures in which an
Outlook and those who occupy it play a critical and supportive role. An
Outlook as augmentation device is continually collecting and revising
information relative to the unfolding natural and social history of the
city. It is not only staggered in space; as a non-static entity that is
continually probing and reflecting, it is staggered in time as well. As
such it derives inspiration from Geddes’ interest in surveys:
“Such, then, is the vital purpose of all our surveys; and though their
completion must be left to others, fresh chapters for city after city –
indeed sometimes a volume for each – might here be added, with
their Surveys, of things as they are and as they change, passing…
towards things as they may be” (Geddes, 1968; 365).
With a contemporary Outlook these ‘reports’ are not bound so that
they occupy shelves, and instead are bound to the surfaces of the city
itself. Imagining multiple Outlooks as a flattened, network-like orga-
nization collated within unique regional contexts, such elements can lay
important figurative “groundwork” for collaborative and transdisci-
plinary discourse pertaining to the construction of new adaptive urban
futures. An Outlook networked for our times becomes an expanded
form of future-oriented and critically speculative design as described by
Dunne and Raby, where a shift takes place from “designing applications
to designing implications” (Dunne & Raby, 2013; 49). A designed im-
plication is a mechanism of survey of urban conditions that both shifts
J.F.,. Cerra et al.
and triggers broader shifts. As a visionary implication, its ‘moves’ in the
urban landscape are a form of gaming that plays with how we invest,
(re)construct, and act collectively to reconcile urban growth, changing
climates, and the functional integrity of economies and ecosystems.
6. Conclusion: crossing the Modern/postmodern divide
A comment by a reviewer of the first draft of this essay inspires our
concluding remarks: “This tension between employing and fostering a
multiplicity of perspectives and engendering a cohesive narrative for
the region seems to me to be a principal implication of the authors' new
conceptualization of the Tower.” Here we would suggest that the con-
temporary Tower is both partial/particular/postmodern and synoptic. It
is partial in that it is grounded to a localized set of environmental and
social conditions. It is partial in that it honors its own incompleteness. It
is synoptic in that it communicates impacts at local and regional scales
and makes apparent their interconnections and relationship to the
global. It is synoptic in that it demonstrates adaptation at local and
regional scales and the relation and interactions of those adaptations
within a constantly global context. And finally it is synoptic in that it
provides the vehicle for citizenry to devise more comprehensive nar-
ratives both of the forces that create their individual lives and of their
living ability to affect and co-create the locality, region and world
around them.
Overall it is this very strategic combination of scaled community
networks and physical interventions that forms the basis of a social-
ecological resilience framework in the face of urban environmental
change. Contemporary Outlook Towers can make these networks and
relationships come to life, directing and inviting the citizens of each
region to discover themselves, their place, and the work to be done “to
secure passage out of the Mechanical-Imperial-Financial Age into an
age…of a saner, nobler and happier human life” (Geddes & Slater, 1917,
188). An Outlook Tower, in its past form or contemporary expression,
embodies the ancient figure of a hilltop signal fire, a beacon lit to in-
form and guide people toward the “free cities and regions” that Geddes
sought to realize through social and ecological renewal. Responding to
the violence of the emerging Industrial Age about him, Geddes used the
Tower to reveal to the inhabitants of his city the past trajectories and
future possibilities of the living region of which they were knowingly or
unknowingly a part. Responding to a world facing endgames from cli-
mate change to biodiversity crash to unprecedented inequality, con-
temporary Towers can provide new means of creating consciousness
and mobilization toward a society premised on the successful evolution
of humanity and the rest of nature. “In this direction entirely lies a first
step towards the Great Renewal” (Geddes & Branford, 1917, 201).
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Further reading
Branford, V., & Geddes, P. (1917). The coming polity: A study in reconstruction. London:
Williams and Norgate.
Joshua F. Cerra is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at
Cornell University Department of Landscape Architecture in Ithaca, New York. Pr ior to
joining Cornell, Cerra practiced as a designer and an ecologist on projects in the Pacific
Northwest and China. His academic and professional work addresses relationships be-
tween urban ecosystems, communities and site development processes, and thei r im-
plications for urban ecological design and climate adaptation. He was the recipient of the
Cornell CALS Young Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2014 and the Council of
Educators in Landscape Architecture Excellence in Design Studio Teaching Junior Level
Award in 2015.
Brook Muller is Professor of Architecture and member of the core faculty in
Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Brook’s research bridges design
theory and ecologically responsive practice. From 1993–1996, he worked with Behnisch
Architects in Stuttgart, Germany, serving as co - project leader on the IBN Institute for
Nature Research, a European Union pilot project for human and environmentally friendly
building. In 2009, he was awarded the Campus Compact Award for Civic Eng agement in
Sustainability. Brook is the author of Ecology and the Architectural Imagination
(Routledge 2014).
Robert F. Young is an Assistant Professor in the Community and Regional Planning
Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Young works in the fields of urban
planning, sustainable economic development, and urban ecology