Patrick Geddes saved Edinburgh from demolition. We’re still learning from him after 100 years

Edinburgh celebrates its 900th anniversary this year. Over the centuries it became one of the most influential centres of civilisation. One of its many famous sons was Sir Patrick Geddes, whose urban planning ideas are the kind we need to rediscover.

Patrick Geddes lived from 1854 to 1932. He is called the father of town planning and of conservation, but that just scratches the surface.   

Though Geddes worked across the world in India, Palestine, France and North America, Edinburgh was his home and his focus for real-life action and experiment. In this 900th anniversary of Edinburgh as an official town, it’s right to tap again into his future thinking. Tired of seeing the specialisms of engineering, architecture, gardening and sanitation working independently, Geddes looked to a more cohesive approach, inspired by ecology and the interconnectedness of natural systems – a view another Scot, John Muir, espoused at the same time in the United States. 

Let’s start with the buildings. At a time when the Victorians were flattening much of old Edinburgh, Geddes saved the character and identity of the Old Town.  

If this seems a big boast think of just one area at the top of the Royal Mile. Geddes personally led the charge to save the Outlook Tower, Allan Ramsay’s ‘Goose-pie’ Lodge, Riddle’s Court and Mylnes Court. He raised the money to do this without official support, bankrupting himself in the process till friends and supporters rallied round to help, founding what would now be called a housing association. But there is a big misunderstanding about all this that persists even today.

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Geddes did NOT save those buildings in order to preserve the past, like a museum. He did it to create a better future. In each case Geddes had a social or cultural purpose. He founded the Outlook Tower with its Camera Obscura as a living museum. The tenements he saved in Mylnes Court were used for fair rent social housing, and in due course for residences so that students could live in a community as well as study together.

And this ‘restorative surgery’, as Geddes described it, went beyond different buildings. The places you live in, he argued, affect your mental and physical wellbeing. Everyone accepts that now but that was new thinking then. ‘Place, Work, Folk,’ said Geddes, had to support each other.  

Living in contact with others led, according to Geddes, to greater social cohesion and equality. People looked out for each other and support services could be nearby. So in that same area of the Royal Mile Dr Guthrie’s Ragged School housed and educated homeless street kids, while Elsie Inglis worked on a medical dispensary with a special focus on women’s health. 

And of course, open spaces could be greened with flowers and vegetables. Good social spaces would also allow culture and creativity to thrive. Geddes promoted art, dance, drama and music as the imaginative lifeblood of thriving communities. 

Yet today, private developers, often fanned by the flames of politic expediency, ignore these basic human requirements. Housing is built without social or green spaces or support services or cultural facilities, often at such a distance from work and cultural provision that life becomes one of constant commuting, a fertile ground for isolation, poor social cohesion and inequalities. 

Geddes has long been criticised for not having a cohesive theoretical context for his ideas, when it really appears it is the simplicity of his theory that unmasks those critics. Geddes proved that everything is connected, for good or ill. While we insist on thinking in dysfunctional boxes, setting for example economic growth against environmental sustainability or jobs against a fulfilling environment, we undermine our collective wellbeing, and threaten long-term interest of people and planet.

Geddes began his working life as a botanist and all of his social ideas were underpinned by a two-way dynamic relationship between human being and nature. “By leaves we live,” he said, while pointing out that human settlement was part of valley systems which, like the River Forth, connect mountains with the sea so providing water and clean air. If those systems are not sustained then all living things will be damaged. Here Geddes proved a prophet.

Yet he offered solutions as well. Brought up when evolution was becoming accepted as the origin and development of life, he went one better, arguing that cultural evolution was also vital. As conscious beings, Geddes believed, people could work together through social action and culture to change the future. 

Perhaps that is Geddes’s most important legacy. As our present environmental crisis combined with injustice foments tyranny, war and climate breakdown, there is a different way of creating the future. And the vehicle to achieve that is in Geddes’s vision of lifelong creative learning. “By living we learn,” he coined, and “By creating we think.”

In fact, Geddes was the first to see the creative potential of August in Edinburgh, organising international summer schools packed with creative and practical activities. That is why the Scottish Storytelling Festival and the Patrick Geddes Trust are offering a day of creative learning inspired by Geddes for Edinburgh 900. I reckon Geddes himself will be there in spirit. 

Donald Smith is curator of By Creating We Think: Patrick Geddes and the Futures of Edinburgh – a day of workshops, screenings, talks and discussions at the Storytelling Centre on 22 February.

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