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

Later Geddes did marry again, but his last years, though actively devoted, mostly to the developments of Montpellier, seem to have been saddened by his bereavements together with a realisation that so relatively little out of all that he was offering would be taken up and carried into effect, and that men were going on blindly in their old ways towards what might be another cataclysm.

Do we look on him, then, as in the end a failure? It must be apparent from what has been said that I do not take this view. Even if he sometimes failed to get himself properly understood and sometimes perhaps expected too much, the failure is on the side of those who did not take him seriously enough and quickly enough. If we face the question of whether the modern, new, world is still accessible to Geddes’ approach and methods, the question is more difficult to answer. I cannot do better than quote two short extracts from that wise man and human scientist the late Sir John Russell, giving his farewell lecture to the Le Play Society, which Geddes had founded:

‘So the towns expand and factories increase: people become more and more urban; more and more of the countryside is swallowed up. The late 2oth Century townsman can have little sense of the original natural environment but only of an urban setting for his place of work, and a suburban setting for his house which is much the same everywhere though the designers of the modern new towns try to retain something distinctive of the natural features. The influence of the town on its environment spreads far outside its boundaries. ‘In a broad way one can say that the old Le Play-Geddes formula—Place, Work, Folk—is still valid as the basis of sociological study. But the changes in place and work are so rapid that they have insufficient time to exert their full impact on the folk before they are superseded by some new change that may have quite different impacts. Chance and change have always been busy, but never as busy as now, and they will be busier than ever in the future.’

We may see Geddes as directly in the great line of Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris, whose influence has been so profound and so far-reaching. More of a practical man than

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