Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

called Eotechnic. Geddes may have failed to look back as far as this, or to see the need for classifying it as a separate period, which it is, but his eye was very much upon the future. He saw us well into the Neotechnic period, but to him this, like the Palaeotechnic was only a bridge. What he was pressing towards was the Biotechnic age—the time when life values should predominate over money or any other purely material valuation. Moreover this would signalise the predomination of livin thought over the dry intellectualism associated with the Neotechnic period. Beyond or perhaps synonymously with the Biotechnic he saw the Eutechnic—spelled with Eu- by analogy with the spelling he always used for Eutopia, for he pointed out that Sir Thomas More left it to us to decide whether we should move towards Outopia (No-place) or Eutopia (Fair-place). And in this last Geddes firmly believed. He considered it practical to work for ‘“Eutopia now’.

Geddes had the happiest touch with words, and found ways of using them that counteracted any tendency for them to go dead. He used ‘politography’, ‘politogenics’, and ‘eupolitics’; and in a famous passage on the decline and fall of cities he said:

‘In all the great cities—especially the great capitals—London,

New York, Petrograd, Berlin and Vienna, Paris and so forth—

you have in progress the history of Rome in its decline and

fall. Beginning as Polis, the city, it developed into Metropolis, the capital; but this into Megalo-polis, the city overgrown, whence megalomania. Next, with ample supply of “bread and shows” (nowadays called “‘budget”) it was Parasitopolis, with degeneration accordingly. Thus all manner of diseases, bodily, mental, moral: hence Patholo-polis, and finally, in due time Necro-polis—city of the dead, as its long-buried monuments survive to show.’

One can only comment—see Piccadilly Circus today.

Mention of More’s ‘Utopia’ reminds us of another excellent illustration of Geddes’ practical effectiveness when he could get his own way. Every time we go along the Chelsea embankment and enjoy the splendid XVth century fabric of Crosby Hall, (which is even finer inside than outside) we should be grateful to Geddes. That Hall was standing neglected in Bishopsgate