Patrick Geddes

Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, and civic and cultural activist. He sought to apply the ideas of Charles Darwin to human communities, promoting the concept of social development through cultural evolution. Geddes was an important influence on the early planning movement, adopting an approach to urban renewal which he described as "conservative surgery" and arguing that plans should be informed by civic and regional survey. He coined the terms "conurbation" and "Scots Renascence".

In 1880, Geddes was appointed Assistant in Practical Botany at the University of Edinburgh and took up residence in the city's Old Town. He was appalled at the conditions he found there. After the construction of the New Town beyond the Nor Loch, Edinburgh's middle classes had abandoned the high tenements and narrow closes of the Castle ridge, and the Old Town had rapidly degenerated into a noisome slum. Geddes responded by throwing himself into the promotion of an ambitious programme of civic and environmental renewal, involving local people in the rehabilitation of tenements, the improvement of open spaces, and the creation of gardens where the urban population could enjoy the restorative effects of contact with nature.

Geddes' biographical study, John Ruskin: Economist, was published in 1884. His The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose was published in 1920.

Geddes collaborated with J. Arthur Thomson, Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen, on The Evolution of Sex (1889). He was appointed Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee, in 1888.

Patrick Geddes and Colleagues published The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal in four volumes in 1895 and 1896. In the Spring volume, published shortly after the death of Professor John Stuart Blackie in March 1895, he contributed an essay entitled The Scots Renascence

The sociologist Victor Branford was actively involved in the summer schools Geddes held in Edinburgh between 1892 and 1895. Geddes presented a two-part paper on Civics as Applied Sociology to the British Sociological Society in 1904 and 1905. Geddes and Branford co-authored two books setting out their perspective on social renewal; The Coming Polity: A Study in Reconstruction (1917) and Our Social Inheritance (1919).

Geddes submitted a study of parks, gardens, and culture-institutes in Dunfermline to the Carnegie Dunferline Trust in 1904. His Civic Survey of Edinburgh was presented as an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in conjunction with the 1910 Town Planning Conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects and published by the Institute in the following year. His introduction to town planning and the study of civics, Cities in Evolution, was published in 1915.

Geddes prepared a number of planning reports for cities in India and Palestine. His Town Planning Towards City Development: A Report to the Durbar of Indore was published in 1918. He submitted a report on Jerusalem Actual and Possible to the Military Governor of Jerusalem in November 1919 and The Proposed Hebrew University of Jerusalem: A Preliminary Report to the Zionist Organisation in December 1919. He submitted his Town Planning Report: Jaffa and Tel Aviv to the Municipality of Tel Aviv in 1925.