Survey and the assimilation of a modernist narrative in urbanism

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 33-55

  Dehaene, Michiel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 2942662700     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360110114713     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989)
2. Christaene Craesemann Collins, 'Werner Hegemann (1881-1936): formative years in America', Planning Perspectives (Vol. 11, 1996), pp. 1-21
3. Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971), pp. 110-182
4. Also, Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press), pp. 59-82
5. Louis Van der Swaelmen, Préliminaires d'Art Civique, mis en relation avec le 'cas clinique' de la Belgique (1915, republished, Brussels. CIAUD/ICAD, 1980)
6. See also: Herman Stynen, Stedebouw en Gemeenschap, Louis Van der Swaelmen (1883-1929), bezieler van de moderne beweging in België (Brussels, Pierre Mardaga, 1979)
7. 'It was sometimes claimed that Town Planning was ceasing to be an art and becoming a science, though it must surely be always too imprecise a subject to merit the latter name. But it is true that planners, as they ceased to confine their efforts to the creation of a pleasing appearance, began to take account of the results of many branches of applied science and felt therefore able to make larger claims of their work. The new school of planners held that every plan should be based on a preliminary survey; that the plan should first set out what was on scientific grounds the most suitable use of each piece of land and then reconcile this with other existing interests.' W. Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 229
8. David Matless, 'The Uses of Cartographic Literacy: Mapping, Survey and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Britain' in: Dennis Cosgrove, Mappings (London, Reaktion Books, 1999)
9. The planning profession found in Geddes a conception of survey which combined the ideas of a scientific and a socio-pedagogical project. These components of the Geddes survey philosophy had their counterpart in a planning tradition which conceived of itself as concerned both with physical and social reconstruction. These ideas are most readily found in those leading planning figures who acknowledge Geddes as a source of inspiration, in particular Raymond Unwin, Henry Vaughan Lanchester, Patrick Abercrombie, Geroge. L. Pepler. The following quotations are good examples of the double role - both scientific and pedagogic - which was accorded to survey in this context. 'It is to the aims and organisation of these civic studies that I think a discussion may profitably be devoted. They possess a double value: direct as educative to those concerned in their preparation, indirect as the basis on which all concerned with city improvement can form a sound judgment as to the lines such improvement shall take.' H. V. Lanchester, 'Civic Survey and Reconstruction', in: Problems of Reconstruction, Lectures and Addresses delivered at the summer meeting at Hampstead Garden Suburb, August 1917 (London, Fisher Unwin, 1918), p. 296
10. 'The advocates of Regional Survey have shown that many useful things can be done in school, while the Boy Scouts movement owes its growth to a popular rendering of the same ideal. Such a programme introduces contacts with life and work which are of the greatest value in developing initiative and a point of view, so that the young no longer feel their future careers to be things remote and apart from the educational stage of life. They know more of the world at large and are better prepared to assist in the choice of their future work.' H. V. Lanchester, 'The Education of the Architect', RIBA Journal (April 1917), p. 153
11. Helen Meller, 'Cities and evolution: Patrick Geddes as an international prophet of town planning before 1914', in: Anthony Sutcliffe, The Rise of Modern Urban Planning: 1800-1914 (London, Mansell, 1980), pp. 199-223
12. 'It is perhaps safe to say that the modern practice of town-planning in this country would have been a much simpler thing if it had not been for Geddes. There was a time when it seemed only necessary to shake up in a bottle the German town-extension plan, the Parisian Boulevard and Vista, and the English Garden Village, to produce a mechanical mixture which might be applied indiscriminately and beneficiently to every town in this country. [...] Pleasing Dream! First shattered by Geddes, emerging from his Outlook Tower in the frozen north, that nightmare of complexity, the Edinburgh Room at the great Town Planning Exhibition of 1910. [...] This was Geddes' first town-planning emergence into public; but he had long been subterraneously at work, and his disciples were scattered over the face of the land gradually spreading his doctrine, until now all the leaders of the movement base their practise on his theory.' Patrick Abercrombie, excerpt from a letter, in: Amelia Defries, The Interpreter Geddes, the man and his gospel (London, George Routledge and sons, 1927), p. 323
13. 'My own first intimate contact with Geddes's activities and his social philosophy was at Ghent in 1913, where he was showing his Cities Exhibition. This Exhibition, which he moved from place to place, was not set up on a fixed pattern. His method was that in each new setting it should show first a series of studies of that town and its surroundings, followed by sections showing parallel more detailed surveys of planning elsewhere. [...] I soon realized the value of his contribution to a broad humanistic outlook on the social aspect of civic improvement and the importance of this aspect in dealing with India.' H. V. Lanchester, Preface to: J. Tyrwhitt, (ed.), Patrick Geddes in India (London, Lund Humphries, 1947), p. 16
14. Donatella Calabi, Il 'male' città: diagnosi e terapia. Didattica e instituzioni nell' urbanistica inglese del primo '900 (Roma, Officina Edizioni, 1979). See in particular chapter six for an account of the formation of the Town-Planning Institute as an exercise in coalition building
15. F. Longstreth Thompson, Site Planning in Practice: an investigation of the principles of housing estate development, with a foreword by Raymond Unwin (London, Henry Frowde and Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), p. 11
16. P. Geddes, On The Conditions of Progress of the Capitalist and the Labourer (Edinburgh, Cooperative Printing Company, 1886), p. 34
17. H. Meller, Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London and New York. Routledge, 1990), p. 3
18. 'What has biology to say? This views the community not as productive automata, but as organisms which have reached ascendancy after a long struggle for existence, through the survival of the fittest, and in virtue of peculiarly high evolution of nervous system, and of it alone. This is "man's place in nature"'. P. Geddes, John Ruskin, Economist (Edinburgh, William Brown, 1884), p. 32
19. 'Before the polemics of our educationists, the voluminous argumentation and casuistic subtlety of our professors of economics and ethics, yet more before the profound speculations of our epistemologists, the mere naturalist observer can but feel abashed like the truant before his schoolmasters; yet he is also not without a certain deep inward conviction, born of experience, that his outdoor world is yet more real, more vast, and more instructive than is theirs. And this impression becomes strengthened, nay verified and established, when he sees that the initiative thinkers from whom these claim to descend, have in each and every case no merely academic record, but also a first-hand experience, an impulse and message from life and nature.' P. Geddes 'Civics: as concrete and applied sociology, part II', Sociological Papers (Vol. II, 1906), p. 59
20. P. Geddes, The World Without and the World Within: Sunday Talks With My Children (London, George Allen, 1905). Included as an appendix in the 1949 edition of Cities in Evolution
21. 'By 1775 English and German thinkers shared several basic and crucial assumptions about genius and imagination. This is one reason Coleridge later found Schelling and Kant so congenial. These issues have as their common focus a split (Kluft) between the human psyche and nature, a split which encouraged the "return to nature" and became one of the fundamental reasons for the very existence of Romanticism: Romanticism was to heal this gash.' James Engell, The Creative Imagination, Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 127-128
22. Giovanni Ferfaro, Rieducazione alla speranza, Patrick Geddes, Planner in India, 1914-1924 (Milano, Jaca Book, 1998)
23. P. Geddes, On The Conditions of Progress of the Capitalist and the Labourer, op. cit, pp. 25-26
24. P. Geddes, The Classification of Statistics and Its Results (Edinburgh, A&C Black, 1881), p. 29
25. Helen Meller, 'Cities and evolution: Patrick Geddes as an international prophet of town planning before 1914', in: Anthony Sutcliffe, The Rise of Modern Urban Planning: 1800-1914, op. cit., p. 199
26. Sofia G. Leonard, 'The regeneration of the old town of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes', Planning History (Vol. 21, no.2), pp. 33-47
27. Patrick Geddes, City Development, a Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Edinburgh, Geddes and Company, Outlook Tower, 1904)
28. The paper was read at a meeting of the sociological society in July 1904, however, it was only published in 1905 in the Sociological Papers (continued as the Sociological Review). Patrick Geddes, 'Civics: as applied sociology', Sociology Papers, (Vol. 1, 1905), pp. 103-118
29. Patrick Geddes, ibid., p. 103. Sociology Papers
30. A long excursus is dedicated to this distinction in Patrick Geddes, 'Civics as concrete and applied sociology', Sociological Papers (1905), p. 73
31. Patrick Geddes, 'Civic Education and City Development', The Contemporary Review (Vol. 87, March, 1905), p. 423
32. 'With this evolutionary point of view - the sociological, the ethical - our whole perspective changes. It is our social and educational hope and purpose, our conception of civic progress, which must determine our selection amid the many possibilities of life; and if not consciously and for higher ends, then unconsciously and for lower ones.' Patrick Geddes, City Development, a Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes. A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, op. cit., p. 19
33. 'From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of whom may long give his stamp to the work of his followers. The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death, and deep as life." 'Patrick Geddes, 'Civics as concrete and applied sociology', op. cit., pp. 81-82
34. Geddes preferred to present this evolutionary cycle of civic development in the form of one of his thinking machines, a matrix of divisions of a paper realised by means of folding. The subsequent stages of the evolutionary cycle were designated as town, school, cloister and city, referring to the concrete expression of these stages in the mediaeval context. In the rendering of the argument here I tried to avoid the Geddesian idiosyncratic ideolect, while staying close to the actual text. A detailed exposition of this particular thinking machine can be found in: Patrick Geddes, 'Civics as concrete and applied sociology' and Patrick Geddes, 'The Charting of Life', Sociological Review (Vol. 19, 1927), pp. 40-63
35. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1970), p. 319
36. Bruno Latour, We have Never Been Modern, (Essex, Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 37
37. H. L. Dreyfus, P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton, The Harvester Press) p. xv
38. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., p. 313
39. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit., p. 13
40. Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1978), p. 4
41. The distinction made by Françoise Choay in her influential anthology 'urbanisme, utopies et réalité', between a 'culturalist' tradition and a 'progressist' tradition, each entertaining a different relationship to history, one invoking history in order to uncover in the past the truthful expressions of humanity, the other in order to declare a new age wholly different from tradition, closely parallels the opposition between an historically and a positively understood human subject. In her attempt to classify a number of key texts of the planning literature according to this 'culturalist' - 'progressist' opposition, the marked difficulty in placing Geddes in either of the families is perhaps not accidental, exposing Geddes's notoriously blurred position with respect to his understanding of the nature-culture divide. Françoise Choay, L'urbanisme, utopies et réalité: une anthologie (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1965), pp. 58-64
42. 'In a conference on civic art a contribution bearing the title I have chosen [Civic Survey and Reconstruction] may appear somewhat outside the aspect of the subject proposed to study, but I have intentionally adopted it for the reason that to my mind it is impossible to conceive any sound basis for the arts expressing city life except that of the social structure of the community. We have seen again and again in the world's history the imposition of an artificial ideal of city structure on conditions of life demanding expression of another type.' H. V. Lanchester, 'Civic survey and Reconstruction' in: Problems of Reconstruction, Lectures and Addresses delivered at the summer meeting at the Hampstead garden suburb, August, 1917 (London, Fisher Unwin), pp. 293-294
43. 'Geddes had always preached in his social reconstruction doctrine that the planner was more than an administrator. By the quality of his practical work, and the ways in which he organised space and buildings, the planner was to have a social impact as the liberator of the people. Unwin, Abercrombie, and Pepler, with their experiences of Garden Cities, Garden Suburbs and Model Estates, or "problem" areas such as Sheffield or the South Wales Coalfield, were exponents of this view.' H. Meller, Patrick Geddes. Social evolutionist and city planner (London and New York, Routledge, 1990), p. 292
44. This critique can be found for example in: J. Muller, 'From survey to strategy: twentieth century developments in western planning method'. Planning Perspectives (7(1992)), pp. 125-155