See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/290334248

Patrick Geddes and cities in evolution: The writing and the readings of an
intempestive classic

Article · January 2012

CITATIONS READS

0 10,181

1 author:

Pierre Chabard
Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris La Villette
53 PUBLICATIONS   33 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

criticat View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Pierre Chabard on 23 February 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Chapter 7

Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution:

The Writing and the Readings of an Intempestive Classic

Pierre Chabard

In [Cities in Evolution] Patrick Geddes displayed his comprehensive grasp

of the urban scene and showed how town planning might be seen as some-
thing more than technological or aesthetic expertise. Geddes established a
tradition in planning which has repeatedly come to the fore over the last 60
years: that of the synthesis in the age of the specialist, bringing harmony
and understanding to a physical, economic and social complex which is the
city.1

There is probably no other man whose writings have been so little read who
has so greatly influenced thought and action in our time as Patrick Geddes.2

Introduction

Cities in Evolution is a singular work in the field of urban theory. During the
twentieth century, it gradually acquired the status of a classic. Since its first
publication at the beginning 19153, no less than six different editions4, and
four translations (in Spanish5, Italian6, French7 and Portuguese8) have been
published, which is very rare for a book of this type. More than any other
written work by Patrick Geddes, this one receives a broad recognition in
the academic and professional domains whose concern is the city: mainly
town planning and its history, urban sociology and urban geography, but
also ecology, environmentalism, and theories of participation. The genea-
Manifestoes and Transfomations 170

logical importance of this book in these different traditions appears in the

intensity of its editorial uses. Cities in Evolution may be found in fac simile
in documentary collections of important academic editors9, as fragments in
the readers10, as quotations in texts, or as simple title in erudite bibliogra-
phies11.

The book’s “fortune critique” is surprising as its contents were difficult to ac-
cess and its literary form was atypical. All its successive editors noted this.
Marshall Stalley admitted that “Geddes’s writing style may strike the mod-
ern reader as ornate and unduly discursive.”12 Often described as victorian,
as “carlylean”13, or even as “sub-carlylean,”14 it indeed constituted one of
the principal obstacles to the reading of the book, even in 1915. Concerning
the contents, JaquelineTyrwhitt recognized that “much of the book was ‘out
of date’ almost as soon as it was written.”15 Pierre Clavel who evoked “the
difficult work of a difficult man,” warned the reader that “the book itself,
like the tip of an iceberg, rests on a great deal of substance, elucidating only
a part.”16 This labyrinthian book didn’t really constitute a synthesis of the
heterogeneous work of Patrick Geddes, in turn naturalist, geographer, re-
former, philosopher, gardener, “social evolutionnist and city planner ”17, “re-
educator and peace warrior”18. As Volker Welter suggests, “Cities in Evolu-
tion, Geddes’s best-known book on the subject, is not his opus magnum.”19

If this book enjoys such a posterity, it is neither for its clearness, nor for its
capacity to elucidate the complexity of the thought of its author, but it is
undoubtedly for its fundamental strangeness. As Geddes explained in his
preface: “This book is neither a technical treatise for the town-planner or
city councillor, nor a manual of civics for the sociologist or teacher.”20 At a
time of professional standardization and academic institutionalization of
town planning, it was an editorial exception in the domain of urban litera-
ture, dominated by practical handbooks such as Raymond Unwin’s21, by
propaganda publications, such as those of the Garden City Association or
the Co-Partneship Tenants Ltd, by surveys of social reformers like Charles
Booth22 or Benjamin Seebhom Rowntree23, or by purely historical or even
archaeological studies.

But if Cities in Evolution didn’t resemble any other contemporary book, it’s
also perhaps because it reflected the singular trajectory of its author in the
field of the British Town Planning Movement of the 1910’s. Neither an ar-
chitect, nor an engineer, nor even a surveyor, Geddes was not quite a soci-
ologist24 and his implication in geography remained marginal. Botanist and
biologist, he was trained in the natural sciences during the second half of
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 171

the 1870’s, first in Edinburgh under Sir Charles Wyville Thompson and then
in London under Thomas Henry Huxley. While the doctrines of evolution
constituted the basis of his scientific culture, Geddes, was unable to submit
himself to academic standards and criteria, and failed to establish an endur-
ing true university career. His concern for the city, similar to that of many
other personalities at the time, rose from his engagement in social works. It
was initially within what Christian Topalov called the “nébuleuse réforma-
trice,”25 of which Geddes was an epicentre in Edinburgh, from the end of
the 1880s26, that he became an actor of the Town Planning Movement. Nei-
ther completely a practitioner, nor merely a theorist, he was distinct among
this context not only by the way in which he theorized the evolution of ur-
ban organisms but also by the modes of concrete action that he advocated.

A spoken book

Let us now consider the history of the book itself. Following repeated of-
fers from Geddes to write a book for them on “The Evolution of Cities,”
the London publishers Williams and Norgate asked him to prepare the
manuscript for their new collection “Home University Library of Modern
Knowledge”. Directed by Herbert Fisher, Gilbert Murray and John Arthur
Thomson (close collaborator of Geddes27), this collection offered, since
1911, small scientific books intended for the general public, on various top-
ics (from mathematics to literature, passing by polar explorations or history
of religion). For this series, Geddes and Thomson wrote altogether three
volumes: Evolution (n°14, 1911), Sex (n°85, 1914) and Biology (n°111, 1925).
However, the manuscript submitted by Geddes in winter 1912, in spite of
the support of his old friend, was categorically rejected by the editors and
the publishers of the collection given its too personal contents, its deviation
from the axis of the collection and especially its inadequacy for popular
readership28. Despite this refusal, Mr. Williams, conscious of the emergence
of this new concern for town planning and of the relative editorial vacuum
on the matter, immediately offered to publish Geddes’s work, out of the
collection, in a widened and illustrated version. While the manuscript was
ready in summer 1914, Cities in Evolution finally went out in January 1915,
nearly five years after the first negotiations.

One of the principal difficulties of its publication undoubtedly owed to the

fact that Cities in Evolution was never written as a book. The first manuscript
was elaborated during the year 1911 while Geddes was almost entirely ab-
sorbed by the preparation, the promotion, and the successive installations
of his “Cities and Town Planning Exhibition”29 (in Chelsea (February 6th
- 25th), Edinburgh (5th March - 1st April), Dublin (May 25th - June 6th, and
August 15th - 21st) and Belfast (July 24th -August 2d)) and by the edition
Manifestoes and Transfomations 172

of its catalogue-guide. Moreover, Geddes’s editorial agenda was then par-

ticularly full. At the turn of the 1910s, when he left his position of honorary
secretary of the Sociological Society Council, Victor V. Branford launched
the project of a collection of sociological books in association with his old
friends Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson. He envisaged 16 titles
in five years at the rhythm of 3 per year (4 in 1911). September 25th, 1910,
Branford sent Geddes a list of the 5 books that he invited him to write for
this collection30. The first was entitled Civics and was supposed to be an an-
thology of his various writings on the subject, scattered in the publications
of the Sociological Society, the Scottish Geographical Society, the Utopian
Society, etc. On their side,the editors of the Home University Library, more
interested in Geddes’s contribution in the field of natural sciences than of
civics, pressed him to finish the book on Evolution for the middle of April
191131 and planned to release the book on Sex for the end of 191232. For Ged-
des, who always spoke easier than he wrote, not enough time was avail-
able to realize his opus syntheticum on the evolution of the cities. And what
Geddes submitted at the end of the winter 1912 to the “Home University
Library” was a compilation of his multiple contributions to the Town Plan-
ning Movement since the middle of the 1900s.

The Second Chapter, for instance, included Geddes’s lecture at the Birken-
head Congress, organized by Lord Leverhulme and the Royal Institute of
Public Health, in July 191033. Chapter IV reissued an article for the Town
Planning Review34. Part of Chapter VI was an article written for a small
Edinburgh civic review, The Blue Blanket35. Chapter IX was the synthe-
sis of various accounts of “town-planning tours in Germany,” organized
in particular by the National Housing and Town Planning Council36. In
Chapter XVI, we find a working paper prepared by the Cities Commit-
tee of the Sociological Society, describing the method of “City Survey”37.
Founded and directed by Geddes, this committee constituted his principal
institutional anchoring in the first years of the Town Planning Movement.
From this London base he militated for the “Civics as applied sociology”
and he carried out some surveys, in particular that of Chelsea (1908), whose
public presentation is transcribed in chapter XVII of Cities in Evolution38.
Chapters VII, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV, which did not appear in the 1912
manuscript, supplement the book with various texts showing the princi-
pal concern of Geddes in this first half of the 1910s: town planning exhibi-
tions and civic museums. We thus find a lecture given to the University of
Dundee in 1907 on the “Museum and the City”39, a lecture before the Cit-
ies Committee on the London Town Planning Exhibition of the R.I.B.A. in
October 191040, as well as the catalogue-guide of Geddes’s and Paul Otlet’s
“
Exposition comparée des villes” at Ghent, in 191341.
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 173

As we can clearly see, this book was less written than spoken. It was as
if Geddes sought to record the flux of his speech, his lectures or his long
guided tours of the Cities Exhibition or the Outlook Tower. The book was
made of a succession of transcribed talks, a succession of texts by which the
lecturer exposes himself to the reader. We could say that Cities in Evolution
is less a book than an exposition, an auto-exposition of its author-speaker
who tried the typographical translation of his living words. Editorial chi-
mera, this more or less organized montage didn’t aim for the theorization
of a thought but rather for the perpetuation of a presence. In this almost
autobiographical collection, Geddes capitalized on his multiple activities,
many projects and few achievements in the incipient field of town planning
(exhibitions, surveys, Outlook Towers, University Settlements, little town
planning endeavours, etc). Finishing a cycle, this book physically embod-
ied Geddes at the very instant when he was to disappear from the Euro-
pean scene, when, turning 60, he engaged himself in a new life as a prophet
of city-planning in India. Tragically conscious of a fundamental competi-
tion between his life and his work, Geddes confided to his wife, in a letter, a
few months before its publication, his “great relief ” because “best of all that
weary book (Cities in Evolution) [had been] at last fully sent off.”42

This rapid analysis of the reasons for and the conditions of the publication
of Cities in Evolution, on the eve of the First World War, reveals several
noteworthy things. First, this heteroclite and disjointed compilation was
not really a book. Secondly, it was a strange object in Geddes’s bibliography
primarily composed of short texts, often drawn from lectures, or more or
less large surveys, which dominated in particular his Indian years (1914-
1924)43. Lastly, far from constituting a key theoretical moment for the town
planning discipline, it almost told the heroic life of its author within this
sphere; a singular and marginal life, that he wanted to show as “exem-
plary”.

The evolution of cities

How then could this complex book be understood, this book described by
Geddes, in his Preface, as having a “frankly introductory character,”44 and
whose contents would prove to be so stimulating? The iconography of the
book, relatively abundant, was as unspecialized as possible. Among the
58 illustrations, more than half were accessible to the largest public : pho-
tographs (24) and pictures (6). And although we find 15 maps and plans
as well as ten specifically urbanistic documents, the properly geddesian
imagery, which was to abound in his post-war publications45, were almost
absent from the book. Except the famous schematic elevation of the Out-
look Tower (fig.50, p.324)46, Geddes saved the reader from his innumer-
Manifestoes and Transfomations 174

able diagrams, tables, charts, symbolic representations, all this graphic ma-
terial that he produced daily and named his Thinking Machines, that he
detailed during his long lectures (in particular those before the Sociological
Society47) and of which his exegetes abundantly interpreted the signifi-
cance. In this book, we find neither the four-fold diagram which presented
his socio-spatial typology (distinguishing People, Chiefs, Intellectuals and
Emotionals, and respectively Town, School, Cloister and City)48, nor his lin-
ear history charts, that he named sometimes Arbor Saeculorum and which
synthesized the evolution of civilization; nor do we find his famous “Valley
Section” which expresses the principle of an evolutionary interaction be-
tween geographical milieux and human and urban occupations.49

Although these graphic syntheses were not visually inculded in the book,
they underpin the organization of its discourse, of which one of the fun-
damental keys was the concept of evolution. The evolutionary culture of
Geddes was above all of a scientific nature, very aware of the Darwinian
transformist doxa. But very early on he incorporated other references and
other dimensions. First, he capitalized on the criticism of the bourgeois,
urban-industrial society formulated by the former generations (J. Ruskin,
Th. Carlyle, etc.) ; he was thus haunted by the acute awarness of the crisis of
Western civilization. Secondly, he was nourished by the writings of many
authors who, sometimes under the influence of the evolutionary natural
sciences, renewed the discourse on man, society, history, geography (A.
Comte, F. Play, E Demolins, H. Spencer, E. Reclus, etc.) ; he thus migrated
towards other fields and other scales, in particular that of the city, crucial
site of the main social problems of industrial civilization.

Consequently, the first five chapters of the 1915 book were less about town-
planning proper than about the urbanization of large industrial towns,
treated as an evolutionary process, considered in space as well as in time.
Like his friend Elisee Reclus in his article on “The Evolution of Cities,”50
Geddes tried to define the city as an object of scientific investigation or, at
least, of systematic observation. Confronting, for example, the population
maps and the geological surveys (locating the coalfields in particular) of
the United Kingdom, he highlighted not only a link between geographical
conditions and urban phenomenon but, inspired by discussions animating
the world of geographers, he proposed a regional definition of the city, ex-
tending well beyond the strict limits of urbanized space.

But Geddes’s evolutionary approach to understanding the city was not

merely descriptive. Including a fundamental critical dimension it was
structured by a historic dialectic which opposed two successive states of
the industrial civilization: one disastrous and out-of-date, the other ideal
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 175

and incipient; two states which shared the same present in evolution. To
qualify them, he used two neologism inspired by archeological vocabulary:
the “Paleotechnic” era, marked by industrial capitalism, steam machines,
growth and densification of cities, and the “Neotechnic” era that Geddes be-
lieved to foresee in the most optimistic aspects of reality: invention of elec-
tricity by Kelvin, renewal of educational doctrines, preoccupation for rural
and natural territories in town planning, etc. Geddes’s vision of the city was
not only marked by this binary polarization of reality but conditioned by
it: his conception of a better and desirable state of the city is not dissociable
from his precise awarness of its worst evils. We may compare this vision
with that which clinical medicine had of the sick body in the nineteenth
century. Michel Foucault showed the dialectical nature of this clinical vi-
sion, for which the visible can only occur at the frontier between the normal
and the pathological51. In the same way, referring to the metaphysical ge-
ography of Dante, Geddes considered the present as a purgatory, strained
between two extreme and opposite states: “Absolutely, then, as zero and
infinity are indispensable for the mathematician, so hell and heaven are the
“necessary stereoscopic device” of the social thinker.”52

An evolutionary eutopia

What, then, were, for Geddes, the “ways to the neotechnic city”? Town plan-
ning, whose Geddes presented in the book the main components of the
time, constituted, for him, an undeniable progress. His description of it was
not only detailed and informed, but with a transnational scope (U.K., Ger-
many, USA, France, etc.). However, he also presented it as a limited instru-
ment, contingent to a transient and unfinished present, and, above all, in-
capable of addressing alone the full extent of paleotechnic civic problems.
According to him, the Great City is the site of a profound rupture in the
creative interaction between an individual and his geographical urban and
social environment. The large industrial metropolis plunged people into an
alienating universe where they were more subjected to forces in play than
able to influence them. To restore this link, which implied the individual
as well as the civic community, architectural and urban planning was not
enough: “ Such regeneration is not merely nor ultimately geographic alone :
it is human and social.”53 Or, as he wrote elsewhere, town planning should
be “the product of Town Thinking, Town Feeling, and is no mere mate-
rial resultant of geographical situation and occupation, of government or
defence.”54

For Geddes, the point was not less than to inflect the course of evolution,
to channel slow and massive movements, to regulate the heavy mechanics
that engaged a multitude of individuals. And, for that, he was convinced
Manifestoes and Transfomations 176

that it was useless and inefficient to impose a priori, and from above, an
ideal and rational model, as is the case, for instance, in utopian thought.
Here, his scientific culture was again decisive: he didn’t advocate a Revolu-
tion but an Evolution (to borrow Elisee Reclus’s distinction55). The formula
of the neotechnic city should not be heteronomous but deciphered in the
specific conditions of a particular situation in perpetual evolution. “Here
or nowhere is our Utopia,”56 as he said in the book. More than an Utopia,
i.e. the dream of an ideal nowhere, he claimed for an “eutopia,” i.e. the
comprehension and the projection of the better that a situation potentially
carries: “ In matters civic, as in simpler fields of science, it is from facts
surveyed and interpreted that we gain our general ideas of the direction of
Evolution, and even see how to further this.”57

Geddes thus devoted several chapters of Cities in Evolution to the “survey,”

which constituted the principal subject of his contributions to the field of
town planning in the 1910’s: his survey of Edinburgh, presented at the 1910
R.I.B.A. Town Planning Exhibition58, or his various lectures and papers on
the subject59. The aim of the survey was not only to observe and to delin-
eate urban territory but to constitute a systematic and synoptic knowledge
which included geographical, historical, social and economic dimensions
of the city. This first side of Geddes reforming action stemmed from his
scientific, generalist, and encyclopedic culture. The other side was more
positivist: the making of a local exhibition of this knowledge with the aim
of stimulating the civic mood of the city:
In this threefold Exhibition, then – of their Borough or City, Past, Pres-
ent and Possible – the municipality and the public would practically have
the main outlines of the inquiry needful before the preparation of the Town
Planning Scheme clearly before them ; and the education of the public, and
of their representatives and officials alike, may thus – and so far as yet sug-
gested, thus only – be arranged for.60

As a result, an important part of the book was devoted to the description

and visit of various kinds of civic exhibitions implemented by Geddes :
his Outlook Tower (pp.321-328) that he first developped in Edinburgh but
that he advocated for every city; his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition
(pp.246-294) that was addressed to a much larger public than just town-
planning experts. We could say finally that the whole book, subtitled “ an
introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the study of civics “
may be read as an introductory exposition, as an instrument of Geddes’s
propaganda for his evolutionary and neotechnical urban eutopia.

Uses of the book

Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 177

The reception of Cities in Evolution by the contemporary British town plan-

ning milieu was quite limited, whereas its author was gone in the Far East.
It seems that the recognition of Geddes in this field was due less to this book
than to his other undertakings. In 1927, describing “Geddes as a town-plan-
ner”, Patrick Abercrombie evoked instead the “nightmare complexity [of]
the Edinburgh Room at the great Town Planning Exhibition of 1910,”61 or
his lectures and writings on the Civic Survey. In 1932, in the necrologi-
cal issue of the Sociological Review, it was again the survey method, and its
regional scale, which was celebrated by George L. Pepler, while Henry V.
Lanchester relativized the scope of the book:
Those who have read his Cities in Evolution will be aware of his meth-
od of approach to the subject, but even with this guidance there re-
mains much that could only be gathered by one who had the good for-
tune to be in actual collaboration with him in a number of instances.62

The lukewarm reception of Cities in Evolution can be explained by the diver-

gence between Geddes extensive eutopic aims and the specific and prag-
matic concerns of the town-planners of this time: standardization, legitima-
tion and institutionalization of their professional domain. Their interest in
City Survey itself was ambiguous and hid a deep contradiction. Whereas
it was presented in Cities in Evolution as a way to constitute a shared en-
cyclopaedic knowledge, it was mainly used by planners to strenghten the
domain of their expertise. As early as 1909, Raymond Unwin devoted a
chapter of his book to the need “of the city survey,”63 of which he allotted
paternity to Geddes, but of which he limited the use alone to the town-
planner, in a preparatory phase of his work. Once the survey was done,
this is the time for his designing genius to seize upon the ductile mass of re-
quirements, conditions, and necessities, and, anchoring itself to the few ab-
solutely fixed points, brushing aside minor obstacles or considerations
where necessary, modifying or bowing to the major ones as each case seems
to require, to mould the whole into some orderly and beautiful design.64

The crucial and decisive moment in the history of Cities in Evolution oc-
curred in the Forties, when it was reedited under the auspices of two con-
current spheres of the geddesian nebula: the Outlook Tower Association
in Edinburgh, directed by Geddes’s son Arthur,65 and the Association for
Planning and Regional Reconstruction in London, directed by Jaqueline
Tyrwhitt66. This “new and revised” edition of the book didn’t bear, for the
A.P.R.R., a patrimonial or documentary purpose (as for the Outlook Tower
Association), but rather a resolutely instrumental one. It responded di-
rectly to the agenda of the association in two ways. First, it presented an
alternative, already existing methodological model. Second, it legitimized
Manifestoes and Transfomations 178

the A.P.R.R.’s endeavors by making reference to a historical figure. “Now,

however, that the 1947 Act has come into full operation and widebased de-
velopment and redevelopment plan are in active preparation throughout
the British Isles, this book – the source of all the most fertile streams of
planning practice – makes a timely re-appearance,” announced the pro-
motional flyer. Rather than treating the book as a historical document that
was cautiously exhumed from the past, the A.P.R.R. proposed it as a guide
for the present. This updating of the book which was published under a
simplified title required significant editing work that resulted in a succes-
sion of additions and subtractions67 which made the book “both greater and
less than the original text”68 as Lewis Mumford once remarked. In addition
to these multiple adjustments and additions, Tyrwhitt operated, under the
control of Arthur Geddes and George Pepler, amputations, sometimes only
of few lines, sometimes of several pages, but occasionally even of entire
chapters: of the 406 original pages, not less than 160 were removed. The
success of this edition of Cities in Evolution – undoubtedly the most read
of all – was due to this simplification of the knotty original text but also
to the addition of an important set of appendices.69 Moreover, Jaqueline
Tyrwhitt stripped the text of the totality of its original illustrations. In or-
der to update this book, to make it readable in another time, it was as if it
had to be extracted from its own time. Stripped of its temporal anchorings,
what remains of Geddes’ thinking was its inactual or anachronic idealism,
which often isolated him from his contemporaries, and which makes him,
perhaps, available to any later use. 70

The next three editions of Cities in Evolution confirmed this instrumental

use of the book in the field of planning. In 1968, Percy Johnson-Marshall
published a respectful fac simile of the book timed to coincide with the
founding, by Robert Matthew, of the School of the Built Environment, at
Edinburgh University, joining the departments of Landscape architecture,
of Geography and of Urban Design and Regional Planning (directed by
Johnson-Marshall). In 1971, Pierre Clavel issued a pocket version of the
book. Economist, author of a Masters in Regional Planning on Geddes, and
of a PhD on participative planning, Clavel presented, in his introduction,
a socio-politic aspect of the Scottish polygraph, as a sociologist engaged in
the city, as a forefather of the theories of participation. Through Geddes,
he legitimated the civic engagement of social sciences, which he himself
intended to embody. In 1972, an abridged version of Cities in Evolution was
available within an anthology edited by Marshall Stalley. Practicing envi-
ronmental planning during fifteen years, this sociologist began an academ-
ic career at the Urban Center Studies of Rutgers University in 1961. While
he was preparing the book, he was working on the creation of Cook College
uniting, since 1973, departments of science, agronomy and environmental
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 179

studies.

How can one explain this late and renewed interest in Cities in Evolution ?
The main hypothesis relates to a recurring constant concerning how Ged-
des is regarded in the world of the town planning; evolutionary biologist in
the world of planners, man of science in a milieu dominated by architects
and engineers, Geddes was always both present on and absent from the
official scene of the town planning. His recognition was always marginal;
his influence was always peripheral. Geddes will eternally embody this in-
stitutional marginality, this lateral triumph, this chimerical heroism about
which Philip Boardman once employed the beautiful expression of “mag-
nificent failures.”71 This heroic, subversive and critical dimension of Ged-
des’s personality seems to have been more determining in the perpetuation
of his work than the precise comprehension of his ideas. This rapid histori-
ography of Cities in Evolution shows that the moments when the book was
mobilized were often critical moments of institutional, professional or aca-
demic redefinition in the field of planning; and that those who claimed the
geddesian tradition were always those who occupied minority, emerging,
reforming and transdisciplinary (thus fragile) positions in these debates.
Manifestoes and Transfomations 180

Notes

1 Gordon E. Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning, London : Leonard Hill
Books, 1974, p.51-52.
2 Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment, New
Brunswick (NJ) : Rutgers University Press, 1972, p.ix.
3 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement
and to the Study of Civics, London : Williams & Norgate, 1915, xv+409p.
4 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (new and revised edition by the Outlook Tower
Association, Edinburgh, and the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruc-
tion, London), London : Williams & Norgate, 1949 / New York : Oxford University
Press, 1950, xxxi+241p; Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, an Introduction to the Town
Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics, (introd. Percy Johnson-Marshall), Lon-
don : Ernest Benn, 1968 / New York : Howard Fertig, 1969, xxxv+409p. ; Patrick Ged-
des, Cities in Evolution, an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study
of Civics (pocket edition, introd. Pierre Clavel), London : Harper Torchbooks / New
York : Dover, 1971, xxxiii+409p. ; Patrick Geddes, “Cities in Evolution”, in Marshall
Stalley (ed.), Patrick Geddes : Spokesman for Man and the Environment, op.cit., pp.105-
285 ; Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement
and to the Study of Civics, London / New York : Routledge /Thoemmes Press, collec-
tion “Social theories of the City” (Bryan S. Turner, ed.), vol. V, 1997, xv+409p. ; Patrick
Geddes, Cities in Evolution, an Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the
Study of Civics, London / New York : Routledge /Thoemmes Press, collection “Early
Urban Theory” (Richard T. Legates, Frederic Stout, eds.), vol. IV, 1998, xv+409p.
5 Patrick Geddes, Ciudades en Evolucion (trad. E.L. Revol), Buenos Aires : Thornton
Butterworth, 1934, 256p.
6 Patrick Geddes, Città in Evoluzione (pref. Carlo Carozzi, trad. Laura Nicolini), Mi-
lan : Il Saggiatore, 1970, 455p.
7 Patrick Geddes, L’évolution des villes, une introduction au mouvement de l’urbanisme
et à l’étude de l’instruction civique (trad. Brigitte Ayramdjan), Paris : Editions Teme-
nos, 1994, 379p.
8 Patrick Geddes, Citades em evolução (trad. Maria José Ferreira de Castilho, from
1949 edition), Campinas, S.P. (Brésil) : Papirus, (Coleçao Officio de Arte e Forma”),
1994, 274p.
9 In 1997, Cities in Evolution constituted the fourth volume of the collection “Social
Theory of the City”, directed by Bryan S. Turner, for the London publisher Rout-
ledge.
10 Chapter XVI of the book in Richard T.Legates, Frederic Stout (eds.), The city
reader, London / New York : Routledge, 1996, pp.360-366; or Chapter XVII in John
Abrams (ed.), The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914, Chicago / Londres : The
University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp.265-273.
11 Cf. bibliography in Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow. An Intellectual History of Urban
Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Oxford : Blackwell Publishers, 1996
(1988), p.441.
12 Marshall Stalley, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment, op.cit.,
1972, p.109.
13 Lewis Mumford, “Introduction”, in Philip L. Boardman, Patrick Geddes : Maker of
the Future, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1944, p.ix
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 181

14 Robert Grieve, Grieve on Geddes, Edinburgh: The Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial
Trust, n.d.[1991], p.43.
15 Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “Introduction”, in Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit.,
1949, p.ix.
16 Pierre Clavel, “Introduction to the Torchbook Edition”, in Patrick Geddes, Cities
in Evolution, op.cit., 1971, p.vii
17 Cf. Helen E. Meller, Patrick Geddes : Social Evolutionist and City Planner, London /
New York : Routledge, 1990, xvi+359p.
18 Cf. Philip L. Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes : biologist, town planner, re-
educator, peace warrior, London / Henley / Boston : Routledge & Kegan, 1978, 528p.
19 Volker M. Welter, Biopolis : Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, Cambridge (MA) :
M.I.T. Press, 2002, p.251.
20 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit., p.iv.
21 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice. An introduction to the art of designing
cities and suburbs, London: T Fisher Unwin, 1909, xxxii+415pp.
22 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, London: Macmillan and Co.,
1902-1903, 17 vol.
23 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: a study of town life, London: Nelson, 1900, 496p.
24 For an analysis of Geddes’s marginality in the field of British Sociology, see chap-
ter 4 (“Maverick in Social Science”) of: Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes. Social Evolution-
ist and City Planner, op. cit., pp.121-155.
25 Cf. Christian Topalov (dir.), Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice
et ses réseaux en France, 1880-1914, Paris : Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S., 1999, 574p.
26 Cf. Lou Rosenburg & Jim Johnson, “’Conservative surgery’ in Old Edinburgh,
1880-1940”, in Brian Edwards & Paul Jenkins (dir.), Edinburgh. The Making of a Capital
City, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp.131-149.
27 Sir John Arthur Thomson (1861-1933) was a scottish biologist. He held the chair of
Natural History at Aberdeen University (1900-1930). He was co-author of the main
scientific publications of Geddes : The Evolution of Sex (1889), Evolution (1911), Prob-
lem of Sex (1912), Sex (1914), Biology (1925), Life : Outlines of General Biology (1931).
28 Cf. Letter from G.H. Perris (assistant editor of the Home University Library) to
Geddes (Marsh 18th 1912), quoted in Paddy Kitchen, Patrick Geddes : A Most Unset-
tling Person, London: Gollancz,1975, p.240.
29 Cf. Volker M. Welter, Collecting Cities, images from Patrick Geddes’ Cities and Town
Planning Exhibition, Glasgow : Collins Gallery, 1999, 56p.; Volker M. Welter, “Stages
of an Exhibition, the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition of Patrick Geddes”, Plan-
ning History, vol. 20, n°1,1998, pp.25-35; Volker M. Welter, “Penser, Classer: Cata-
loguing Patrick Geddes’s Cities and Town Planning Exhibition”, Newsletter of the
Society of Architectural Historian, n°60, summer 1997, pp.1-3.
30 Cf. Letter from Victor V. Branford to Patrick Geddes, September 20th 1910 (NLS,
Ms 10556 f.192).
31 Cf. Letter from G.H. Perris to Patrick Geddes, March 20th 1911 (NLS, Ms10542
f.109).
32 Cf. Letter from Patrick Geddes to Victor V. Branford, December 20th 1911 (NLS,
Ms10556 f.222).
33 Patrick Geddes, “City Survey for Town Planning”, Journal of the Royal Insititute of
Public Health, February 1911, pp.79-90.
34 Patrick Geddes, “The two-fold aspect of Industrial Age”, Town Planning Review,
Manifestoes and Transfomations 182

n°3, October 1912 , pp.176-187.

35 Patrick Geddes, “Cinderella”, The Blue Blanket, vol.I, n°4, October 1912, pp.327-
331.
36 Patrick Geddes, “Town Planning Impressions”, Municipal Journal (London), May
14th 1909, p.409 ; “Town planning in Germany and town betterment at home”, The
New Age, May 6th 1909 ; “Town planners in Germany”, The Herald (Glasgow), April
15th, 16th, 20th & 23rd 1909 ; “The latest Town Planning Tour ”, Sociological Review, vol.
III, n°3, July 1910, p.240.
37 Patrick Geddes, City Survey preparatory to Town Planning, London : Sociological
Society, Cities Committee, 1911, 8p.
38 Patrick Geddes, “Chelsea, Past and Possible”, Sociological Review, vol.I, n°4, Octo-
ber 1908, pp.357-363.
39 Patrick Geddes, “The Museum and the City: a practical proposal”, The Museum
Journal, May 1908, pp.371-382.
40 October 18th 1910, Patrick Geddes lectured on  : “The lessons of the Town Plan-
ning Conference and Exhibition,” at the Hall of the Royal Society of Arts, before the
Sociological Society ; the lecture was transcripted in “Sociological Notes”, Sociologi-
cal Review, vol.IV, n°1, January 1911, pp.53-55.
41 Patrick Geddes, Two Steps in Civics : “Cities and Town Planning Exhibition” and the
“
International Congress of Cities, “ Ghent International Exhibition, 1913, Liverpool: the
University Press, 1913, 16p. (reprinted from Town Planning Review, n°4, July 1913,
pp.1-16).
42 Cf. Letter from Patrick Geddes to Anna Morton (October 1st 1914), quoted in
G. Ferraro, Reiducazione alla speranza : Patrick Geddes in India, 1914-1924, Milan:
Jaca Book, 1998, p.16. (NLS, Ms. n°10504, f.78-90).
43 From 1914 to 1919, he published around fifteen reports of Indian cities (Cf.
Giovanni Ferraro, op.cit.). The most important was : Patrick Geddes, Town Planning
Toward City Development : a Report to the Durbar of Indore, Indore : Holkan State Press,
1918, 2 vol., 203 p. et 205 p.
44 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit., p.iv
45 Especially “The Making of the Future Series”, co-edited with Victor V. Branford
since 1917 at Le Play House.
46 Social settlement, civic museum and laboratory, the Outlook Tower was set up
by Geddes in an old building of Old Edinburgh, that he bought in 1892. Cf. Pierre
Chabard, “L’Outlook Tower , anamorphose du monde”, Le Visiteur, n°7, Autumn
2001, pp.64-89 (english version in Journal of Generalism & Civics (Glasgow), n°4,
printemps 2004, http://www.patrickgeddes.co.uk.
47 Cf. Sociological Papers, vol.I (1904), pp.103-118, vol.II (1905), pp.57-119, vol.III
(1906), pp.197-237.
48 For an analysis of it see: Volker M. Welter, Biopolis, op.cit., pp.31-53.
49 Cf. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, “The Valley Section: Patrick Geddes’s World Image”, Jour-
nal of the Town Planning Institute, n°37, janvier 1951, pp.61-66
50 Elisée Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities”, The Contemporary Review, vol.67, Febru-
ary 1895, pp.246-264; the same year, Reclus took part to the Geddes’s Summer Meet-
ing at Edinburgh and gave four lecture on this topic.
51 Cf. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique : une archéologie du regard médical,
Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
52 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit., p.87.
Patrick Geddes and Cities in Evolution 183

53 Ibidem, p.400.
54 Patrick Geddes, Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, Edinburgh 13th March - 1st
April 1911 : Explanatory Guide Book and Outline Catalogue, Edinburgh : A.T.
Hutchinson, 1911, p.26.
55 Cf. Elisée Reclus, L’évolution et la révolution, l’idéal anarchiste, Paris : P.V. Stock,
1898.
56 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit., p.87.
57 Ibidem, p.ix.
58 Patrick Geddes, “The Civic Survey of Edinburgh”, in Transactions of the Town Plan-
ning Conference, 10-15 october 1910, London : RIBA, 1911, pp.537-574.
59 Patrick Geddes, “The Survey of Cities”, Sociological Review, vol. I, n°1, January 1908,
pp.74-79; “City Deterioration and the Need of City Survey”, Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, n° 24, July 1909, pp.54-67; City Surveys and City
Reports : Their Method and their Uses,, London : The Sociological Society, November
1909, 2p.; City Surveys for Town Planning and the Greater Cities, Edinburgh : Patrick
Geddes and colleagues, 1911, 12p.; “The City Survey”, Garden Cities & Town Planning
Magazine, vol.I, n°1/2/3, February/March/April 1911, p.18-19/31-32/56-58; etc.
60 Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution, op.cit., p.354.
61 Patrick Abercrombie, “Geddes as town-planner ”, in Amelia Defries, The inter-
preter Geddes : The Man and His Gospel, London : Routledge / New York : Boni &
Liveright, 1927, p.323.
62 Henry V. Lanchester, “Town Planning in India”, Sociological Review, n°24, October
1932, p.370.
63 Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice, op.cit., 1909, p.140-153.
64 Ibidem, p.153.
65 Founded in 1905, the Outlook Tower Association became after Geddes’ death the
legitimate heir of his heritage. In the 1940s, the association was chaired by Geddes’s
son Arthur (1895-1968). After the Second World War, the program of the association
was very ambitious: to perpetuate the work of Geddes, to gather and to sort his
dispersed archives, to edit and publish both his books and his many unpublished
manuscripts.
66 Founded at the dawn of the second world war the A.P.R.R. was presented in
1941 as a professional organisation able to direct and co-ordinate “factual investiga-
tions into post-war problems.” First, in order to flesh out the legislative texts which
were to govern post-war planning, for example the Town and Country Planning
Act 1947, the APRR aspired to be a place of study and research where tools and
methods were developed, and where civic surveys were undertaken. Second, ac-
commodating since 1940 the School of Planning and Research for Regional Devel-
opment, the association also had the pedagogical goal of training professionals for
the coming reconstruction, of publishing handbooks, atlases, and broadsheets.
67 It indeed was subjected to multiple corrections, updates, typographical enrich-
ments, etc; some information was inserted in brackets (biographical and historical
dates); lexical nuances were introduced ( a must became a could, a primarily
became a largely, etc.) ; the titles of chapters were shortened; the little synopses
which introduced each chapter in 1915 were split up and redistributed, as subtitles,
in the body text; the rhythm of reading is also modified by the establishment of new
paragraph breaks.
68 L. Mumford, “Mumford one Geddes”, The Architectural Review, n°644, August
 Manifestoes and Transfomations 184

1950, p.82.
69 A new introduction of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, which preceded Geddes’ own preface;
a new thematic index; a biographical note; an explanatory analyses of the think-
ing machines of Geddes69 by the young John Turner. The most detailed appendix
related to Geddes’ Cities & Town Planning Exhibition, whose possible sale to the
A.P.R.R. inaugurated, in 1946, the collaboration of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and George
Pepler with Arthur Geddes
70 For a detailed analysis of this re-edition see: Pierre Chabard, “Comment un livre
change : Cities in Evolution et les usages de Patrick Geddes (1912-1972)”, Genèses.
Sciences sociales et histoire, n°60, septembre 2005, pp.76-97.
71
Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future, Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1944, p.304.

View publication stats