“It takes the whole region to make the city”: territories, ecosystems and populations by Patrick Geddes
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. This text explores the thought and work of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a biologist, sociologist and urban planner who was a pioneer in many fields, thinking about the relationship between town and country at the turn of the 20th century, and revolutionizing modern urban planning.
As battles for water converge (the Soulèvements de la Terre ecological resistance network[1], indigenous uprisings against the appropriation of water for lithium extraction in the region of South American salars[2]), as rivers obtain the status of “legal person” (Whanganui River in New Zealand and Rio Atrato in Colombia in 2017, Magpie in Quebec in 2021), and as official bodies associated with watersheds have since been established (Loire Parliament[3], Diplomatic Watershed Council in Geneva[4]), calls to create new spaces for bioregional knowledge are increasing. In this respect, biologist and urbanist Patrick Geddes has attracted new interest as a precursor in educating about the relationships between regions, ecosystems and human societies. He tackles it from a historical perspective that differs from the more recent American school of bioregionalism, which is often criticized for its essentialist misanthropy[5].
Geddes is also cited in the Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique by Dominique Bourg and Alain Papaux, who describe him as one of the pioneers of regional planning and, along with Elisée Reclus and Piotr Kroptokine, someone who has consistently promoted reintroducing the countryside in the heart of cities (through outdoor and indoor gardens)[6]. Geddes’s most famous contribution to the city-countryside conflict is the simple diagram of the Valley Section, presented for the first time in 1905 at a meeting of the London Sociological Society[7]. The diagram unites city and countryside through the idea of a “regional valley”. The Valley Section is a longitudinal section that follows a river from its source in the mountains to where it flows into the sea. For Bourg & Paillot, it’s “an intellectual tool for regional studies, which should take into account the concept of river basins, from the viewpoint of the relationship between environmental and human history, as well as the relationship between the city and its surrounding region”[8]. In his first study, Geddes writes: “By descending from source to sea we follow the development of civilisation from its simple origins to its complex resultants; nor can any element of this be omitted. (…) In short, then, it takes the whole region to make the city. As the river carries down contributions from its whole course, so each complex community, as we descend, is modified by its predecessors. The converse is no doubt true also, but commonly in less degree.”[9] The version of the Valley Section published in 1909 combines physical conditions, represented in the drawing by plants, with so-called natural or basic occupations, represented by tools, and social organizations represented by the silhouettes of cities, villages and individual houses. Moreover, in reality the “regional valley” includes several valleys and an agricultural plain that extends from the base of the mountains to the coast. The Valley Section shows how the physical conditions of the environment influence plant life and determine human occupations and their societal organization. It helps us understand “how far nature can be shown to have determined man” and “how far the given type of man has reacted, or may yet react, upon his environment.”[10].
Thinking Machines
Geddes’s diagram was part of his series of “thinking machines”, a visual method of presenting and correlating facts and ideas in order to facilitate reflection and teaching. In conceiving and deploying the Valley Section, he took inspiration from great researchers in biogeography, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. But he was also inspired, perhaps more specifically, by the methodology he learned from Thomas Huxley – under whom he studied biology in the late 1870s – and by the phytogeography research on the relationships between plant species done by his friend Charles Flahault – whom he met during his studies and a residency at the Biological Station in Roscoff, France.
Nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog, Huxley had little appreciation for Darwinism applied to human societies, as promoted by Herbert Spencer, who used it to justify the social exploitation and oppression of marginalized classes. He emphasized the importance of science to elucidate social issues, but he opposed using biology to justify inequitable social policies. He therefore taught lucidity to counter excessive simplifications in describing the relationships between organisms and their environment, between biology and physiography, and in revealing the complex factors leading to natural evolution. Two of his most famous manuals, Elementary Instruction in Practical Biology (1875) and Physiography: an Introduction to the Study of Nature (1877) were published during the time that Geddes was his student. In Physiography, he introduces the book by studying a particular region, the Thames watershed. And in the republications near the end of his life, he expanded the theme of watershed beyond the Thames to any river.
Since the years when Geddes and Flahault studied in Roscoff, Flahault had founded the Botanical Institute in Montpellier[11] and was studying phytosociology, or plant associations that were cooperative and mutually beneficial, in a way the premises for permaculture[12]. By crossing phytogeography and Flahault’s phytosociology using Huxley’s strict methodology, Geddes’s Valley Section also falls in line with the hydrographic basin model as developed by Elisée Reclus in his History of a Stream[13]. Reclus systematically used the hydrographic basin as a criterion for regional division, most notably in his Nouvelle Géographie Universelle. He was one of the first to recognize the intrinsic link between the geographical characteristics of a region and the lifestyles of its inhabitants.
Summer Meetings of Art and Science
Geddes had read extensively and developed a friendship with Elisée Reclus, 25 years his senior. He had hosted him twice in Edinburgh during the Summer Meetings of Art and Science, which he organized with his wife Anna from 1883 to 1899. This summer school, inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement and John Ruskin, combined educational programs in natural sciences, botanical or vegetable gardening, observing biodiversity, arts and crafts, biology, geography, economics and politics, based on Geddes’s own “thinking machines”: “Starting from the familiar idea of working from the concrete to the abstract, from the senses toward the intellect, it is attempted in each subject of study (1) to freshen the student’s mind by a wealth of impressions; (2) to introduce him to the advancing literature of the subject; (3) to supply him with the means of summarizing, arranging and more clearly thinking out these accumulations of observation and reading. Hence (1) the insistence on demonstrations, experiment and field excursions; (2) the introduction in several subjects of the seminar, which, with its guidance to the world of books and activity in using them, is so marked a strength of the German university; (3) the extended use of graphic methods.”[14] Geddes sought to mobilize “hand, heart and head”. He was also behind the slogans “learning by doing” and “think global, act local”. Many students, artists, as well as famous theorists and researchers from various countries participated in the Summer Meetings, from the biologist Ernst Haeckel to Piotr Kropotkine.
Reclus came to the Summer Meetings in 1893 and in 1895. It was in this context that he published “The Evolution of Cities” in The Contemporary Review[15]. The article advocated reconciling constantly expanding cities, which were “engulfing year by year fresh colonies of immigrants, and running out their suckers, like giant octopuses, into the surrounding country”, with the countrymen, which could come to cities to amuse and educate themselves. He concludes: “Thus this type of the ancient town, sharply outlined by walls and fosses, tends more and more to disappear. While the countryman becomes more and more a citizen in thought and mode of life, the citizen turns his face to the country and aspires to be a countryman. By virtue of its very growth, the modern town loses its isolated existence and tends to merge itself with other towns, and to recover the original relation that united the rising market-place with the country from which it sprang. Man must have the double advantage of access to the delights of the town, with its solidarity of thought and interest, its opportunities of study and the pursuit of art, and, with this, the liberty that lives in the liberty of nature and finds scope in the range of her ample horizon.”
For Geddes, every “town arises and renews itself from country; and this not only in blood and in temperament but in tendencies, aptitudes, activities, in qualities and defects; in short in character, individual and social.”[16] Thus, he defines the idea that both conurbation and the constantly expanding city emerge from the countryside and return to it as the highest expression of the country’s inherent possibilities. He gives a lot of importance to artisanal occupations, inspired in particular by the notion of mutual aid advanced by Kropotkine, who saw medieval Europe as the best example of human cooperative society, culminating in the medieval city structured around occupational guilds. Geddes had hosted Kropotkine in Edinburgh in 1886, just after he was released from three years of prison in Lyon. In Fields, Factories and Workshops published in London in 1898, Kropotkine imagined the future city-countryside relationship made up of decentralized units – either in “the factory in the middle of the fields” or in industrial villages. He projected that new, small power plants could make his decentralized, self-determined mode of production possible, even in existing large industrial cities.
Bioregional Learning Centers
In conclusion, we are reminded that in order to study the “city region”, it was necessary for Geddes to begin with an associated Regional Survey; hence, establishing stable and permanent learning centers was essential. Such was his intention in founding his Outlook Tower museum-school in Edinburgh, as well as his Collège des Ecossais in Montpellier: “Hence Education, if real, begins with a Regional Survey, as action with a regional usefulness. Hence such a regional type-museum and school of reference has to be not only geographic, but geotechnical. In the very difficulties of coping with the vast and perplexing division of labour, alike in science and in practical life, it finds its necessity and its justification as at least an attempted clearing-house of education, in which all specialists may again meet.”[17]
These same ideas can be found in the principle of Bioregional Learning Centers proposed in 1982 by Donella Meadows, principal author of The Limits to Growth for the Club de Rome in 1972, which were later developed: “Out of that combination came a vision of a number of centers where information and models about resources and the environment are housed. There would need to be many of these centers, all over the world, each one responsible for a discrete bioregion. They would contain people with excellent minds and tools, but they would not be walled off, as scientific centers so often are, either from the lives of ordinary people or from the realities of political processes. The people in these centers would be at home with farmers, miners, planners, and heads of state and they would be able both to listen to and talk to all of them. The job of these centers is basically to enhance that capacity… to solve problems in ways that are consistent with the culture and the environment. The centers collect, make sense of, and disseminate information about the resources of their bioregions, and about the welfare of the people and of the ecosystems. They are partly data repositories, partly publishing and broadcasting and teaching centers, partly experiment stations and extension agents. They know about the latest technologies, and the traditional ones, and about which ones work best under what conditions. They are able, insofar as the state of knowledge permits, to see things whole, to look at long-term consequences, and to tell the truth. They are also able to perceive and admit freely where the boundaries of the state of knowledge are and what is not known.”[18]
Notes
(1) https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org
(2) Alfarcito Gathering, January 14-15, 2023, in San Francisco del Alfarcito, Jujuy, Argentina: https://aerocene.org/salinas-grandes-eng
(3) https://www.parlementdeloire.org
(4) David gé Bartoli, Sophie Gosselin, Marin Schaffner and Stefan Kristensen, “Pour un Conseil Diplomatique des Bassins Versants”, on Terrestres.org, April 12, 2024.
(5) Antoine Dubiau, “Faire l’histoire intellectuelle du biorégionalisme”, 28 février 2022, métropolitiques.eu. Antoine Dubiau is the author of Écofascismes published by Grevis (2023).
(6) Lewis Mumford referenced and further extended the research initiated by Patrick Geddes in La Cité à travers l’Histoire (1961).
(7) P.Geddes (1905), “Civics: as applied sociology”, Part I, Sociological papers, (ed.) V.V.Branford London: Macmillan, pp. 105-6.
(8) Dominique Bourg and Alain Papaux, under “Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)” in Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique, PUF, 2015, pp. 462-464.
(9) Ibid. note 7.
(10) Patrick Geddes, “The Influence of Geographical Conditions on Social Development”, Geographical Journal 12 (1898), p. 581. Cited in Volker M. Welter, Biopolis, MIT Press, 2002, p.62.
(11) Geddes settled in Montpellier in 1924, where he founded the Collège des Écossais and lived the rest of his life.
(12) The notion of “permanent agriculture” appears around the same time, in 1910, in Cyril G. Hopkins’s Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture.
(13) Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne. Histoire d’un ruisseau, Libertalia, 2023.
(14) Cited in Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner, Routledge, 1990, p.67.
(15) Elisée Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities”, The Contemporary Review, v. 67, January-June 1895, Isbister and Company Ltd.
(16) Patrick Geddes, City Surveys for Town Planning (Edinburgh and Chelsea: Geddes and Colleagues, 1911). Cited in Biopolis, p. 75
(17) Ibid. note 10.`
(18) Bioregional Essays: Bioregional Centres – Donella Meadows’ Vision for Deep Local Change. Statement to the Belaton Group, 1982.