Patrick Geddes

Patrick Geddes, 1886

Sir Patrick Geddes FRSE (2 October 1854 – 17 April 1932) was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology.

Quotes

• Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.
  • Patrick Geddes (1947). "Town Planning in Kapurthala. A Report to H.H. the Maharaja of Kapurthala, 1917". In: Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries. p. 26.

Quotes about Patrick Geddes

• The study of public administration must include its ecology. "Ecology," states the Webster Dictionary, "is the mutual relations, collectively, between organisms and their environment." J. W. Bews points out that "the word itself is derived from the Greek oikos a house or home, the same root word as occurs in economy and economics. Economics is a subject with which ecology has much in common, but ecology is much wider. It deals with all the inter-relationships of living organisms and their environment." Some social scientists have been returning to the use of the term, chiefly employed by the biologist and botanist, especially under the stimulus of studies of anthropologists, sociologists, and pioneers who defy easy classification, such as the late Sir Patrick Geddes in Britain.
  • John Merriman Gaus, Reflections on public administration (1947), p. 6

• Happily there is one figure whose life-interests fully represent the forces I have been describing: one whose conscious philosophy reached a fuller stage of formulation than either Emerson or Whitman: one whose actual life, coming later, faced more fully the corruptions and devitalizations of the present scene. Obscure in his own lifetime, hardly better known today, a dozen years after his death, he incarnated the organic and made an orderly constellation of its vitalities. Patrick Geddes was his name. What he was, what he stood for, what he pointed toward will become increasingly important as the world grows to understand both his philosophy and his example. Lincoln, observing Whitman striding past a White House window, is reported to have said: There is a man. So one who followed the darting glance and eager footsteps of Geddes, rambling through a city, or wandering with an armful of plants along a country road, might have said: There goes one enriched and energized and sensitized by the life-force he has studied so fervently: his is the touch that will make the dry wand burgeon. Such a man has worshiped the burning bush and beheld from afar the Promised Land.
  • Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (1944), p. 382

• The official town planning history attributes the success of the Colombo, 'garden city' plan to Patrick Geddes, casting him in heroic light.
  • Anoma Pieris in: Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth, Routledge, 1 January 2013

• Few observers have shown more sympathy... with the religious and social practices of the Hindus than Geddes did; yet no one could have written more scathingly of Mahatma Gandhi's attempt to conserve the past by reverting to the spinning wheel, at a moment when the fundamental poverty of the masses in India called for the most resourceful application of the machine both to agricultural and industrial life.
  • ‎Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in: Sir Patrick Geddes, ‎Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1947), Patrick Geddes in India, p. 8