The City After Patrick Geddes

The City after Patrick Geddes is the first-ever publication to trace the influences of the Scottish biologist, sociologist and city designer, Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), on the modernist debate about the City. The book consists of essays collated together in five sections. In the first, ‘Patrick Geddes and the City’, Geddes is located in his intellectual environment; Scottish and European. Successive sections are derived from Geddes’s theory of the City. Part two - ‘City and Region Surveyed and Displayed’ - discusses Geddes’s idea of a survey and the contemporary fascination with international city planning exhibitions and civic museums. The American visions of Lewis Mumford and his fellow regional planners and theoreticians are the focus of part three, ‘Planning the Regional City’. The contributions in part four - ‘Reconstruction of City and Region’ - concentrate upon representatives of subsequent phases of international urbanism and planning, who developed and redefined Geddesian proposals in their own work. The final part - ‘Critical Futures’ - offers a critical reassessment of this legacy in the light of current international debate on the City and its future.