Patrick Geddes, who coined the phrase "Think global. Act Local." in his book Cities in Evolution in 1915, is an important but neglected figure. He was a big influence on one of my most favourite writers and thinkers, Lewis Mumford. We can see in this tradition an environmental pragmatism that combines various strands of environmental thinking and practice to give us a pragmatism that is much more than a visionless submission to the status quo. Following Geddes, Mumford developed a regionalism that viewed humankind in an ecological perspective, in dynamic relation to the natural environment, valuing nature and developing tightly knit human communities and a civic concern in an ‘organic’ or ecological self-education. Mumford's civic environmentalism and moral ecology combines anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric elements, including a Geddesian organicist and a biocentric concern for the web of life, including human life.
From Patrick Geddes to Liberty Hyde Bailey, Benton Mackaye, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, John Todd, David Orr, (I’d put John Dewey and his emphasis on education and ‘natural piety’ in there too, and Murray Bookchin's excellent, ground breaking, work also). it’s an impressive tradition because whilst it clearly values nature and the true, the good and the beautiful, it doesn’t get bogged down in intractable philosophical debates concerning foundational truths and the independent moral standing of transcendent norms - notions of inherent worth and the good are built-in. It combines a humanism with an organicist view of nature and society to give us an integral environmentalism, one that encompasses moral, civic, and cultural values as well as a holistic nonanthropocentrism (organicism). We can value nature and the values generated by human experience in dynamic relation to nature to outline the contours of an emerging ecological civilisation.
This tradition gives us, in Geddes’ words, ‘large views in the abstract and the concrete.’ It gives us the unity in diversity we seek.
My own writing on Lewis Mumford along these lines:
Abstract
“In this book I shall develop the urban regional thought of Lewis Mumford in terms of a civic environmentalism concerned with the achievement of a public life fitted to the contours of an ecological civilization. I shall examine Mumford’s conception of ecological regionalism, democratic planning and the regional garden city as giving us both the ideal of a decentralized, balanced and humanly-scaled eco-public, and the means to achieve it. I shall show how Mumford sought to reconstruct public community aesthetically, politically and ecologically, integrating the urban and rural environments in the process. Defining Mumford’s view in terms of civic environmentalism, I connect the task of ecological restoration and preservation to a reinvigorated public life constituted by a democratic pluralism and civic mindedness. I will argue that the writings of Lewis Mumford on the garden city and regional planning suggest a conception of Ecopolis sustained by a vision of civic environmentalism. I will show how Mumford developed a planning intervention that not only countered the destructive consequences of over-urbanization but served also strengthen the civic capacity of the community and infuse political culture with an active democratic content. Mumford’s ecological regionalism combines planning, design and a biocentric understanding of natural processes within a politically grounded and civic-minded environmentalism. His work expresses a commitment to restore the health of democratic public life in the process of tackling the problems of urban life. I will therefore develop Mumford’s idea of regional planning and ecological regionalism in terms of a political or civic concern with environmentalism, in the process lifting the question of the human relation to nature out of academic confines and locating it in the public realm. In fine. Mumford envisions an Ecopolis constituted and sustained by a civic environmentalism.”
Excellent article which shows the influence of the thinking, activism, and education initiatives of Patrick Geddes upon the theory and practice of much of today's regenerative urban design, bioregional planning, ecological economics, and biomimicry at the systems level.
Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and the Emergence of Ecological Planning, Ecological Design, and Bioregionalism
by Daniel Christian Wahl
"The design approach pioneered by Sir Patrick Geddes proposes that the role of design is to sustain and facilitate the continued co-evolution of nature and culture through the integration of people and their livelihoods with the specific conditions of a particular place. This paper situates Geddesʼ work within the context of his own contemporaries, as well as, in the contemporary context of sustainability. It focuses on establishing the significance of Geddesʼ theories and methodologies in the context of contemporary design and planning research, theory and practice. The author suggests that — frequently without direct recognition — Geddes continues to be influential and often surprisingly up to date. There is contemporary value in exploring Geddesʼ role in the emergence of ecological planning, ecological design, and bioregionalism. The paper concludes that Geddes offered a practical and theoretical framework for cultural change. He tried to develop a viable strategy that would transform an exploitative and inequitable industrial growth society, characterized by its lack of a sense of place and limits, into a life sustaining society that meets human needs while integrating sustainably into social and ecological processes at a local, regional, and global scale."
“The central Geddesian lessons — his emphasis of the fundamental unity and interdependence of culture and nature, and his emphasis on transdisciplinary education and locally adapted direct action as a means of cultural transformation — are of profound contemporary significance. For Geddes the role of the designer was two-fold: i) to contribute to the material adaptation of people and their livelihood to the specific opportunities and challenges of the places they inhabit, and ii), to affect in the transformation of culture through education.”
'Town planning. Interest-led, open-minded education. Preservation of buildings with historical worth. Community gardens. All are so central to modern society that our age tends to claim these notions as its own. In fact they were first visualised by Sir Patrick Geddes, a largely forgotten Victorian Scot and one of the greatest forward thinkers in history. In turns a gardener, biologist, conservationist, social evolutionist, peace warrior, and town planner, he spent many years conserving and restoring Edinburgh's historic Royal Mile at a time when most decaying buildings were simply torn down. With these plans of renovation came the importance of education as the development of the Outlook Tower, his numerous summer schools and his College des Ecossais in Montpellier illustrate. It is in India where his name is most widely known. It was here that possibly the greatest example of Geddes' belief in people planning can be seen and which took the form of pedestrian zones, student accommodation for women, and urban diversification projects. When grandiose schemes of urban renewal were in vogue his conservative surgery offered a humane alternative. His influence spread around the world, through the people he met and stimulated, and has survived, after his death. In recent years he has become almost a patron saint of the sustainable development movement. Think Global, Act Local: The Life and Legacy of Patrick Geddes examines not only the life of this important man, but also the enduring relevance of his ideas and their place in our world, present and future.'
all the healthy potentials of the life insurgent are here - the good place to be.