WCDC2019 Inspired by pioneering ecological town planner Patrick Geddes

The 2019 World Community Development Conference in Dundee, Scotland https://www.wcdc2019.org.uk/ has been inspired by the visionary work and writing of Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and the Emergence of Ecological Planning and Design. Geddes, who for thirty years was a Professor at the University of Dundee, was a pioneering town planner, ecologist and sociologist influential in town planning in Europe, India and Israel

The central Geddesian lessons was his emphasis of the interdependence of culture and nature, and his emphasis on transdisciplinary education and locally adapted direct action as a means of cultural transformation . For Geddes the role of the urban 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.

Geddesʼ was an early proponent of what we would now call education that engaged hands, heart, and mind or transformative education.

“Our greatest need today is to see life as whole, to see its many sides in their proper relations; but we must have a practical as well as a philosophical interest in such an integrated view of life.”1

At a time when the effects of humanityʼs exploitation of the Earthʼs natural resources, the decimation of cultural and biodiversity and manmade climate change are having alarming ecological, social and economic effects, Geddesʼ call for an integrated view of life deserves even more attention, today, then it did a hundred years ago.

Seeing ʻlife as wholeʼ, which is to understand life as a dynamic ecological, social, and cognitive process in which humanity participates, raises awareness of the fundamental interconnection of nature and human culture. Patrick Geddes understood that such a participatory worldview informed by detailed knowledge about the ecological, social and cultural conditions of a local region would be instrumental in facilitating the emergence of sustainable communities.

“Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.”

You can find more about Geddes and his influence today from the Geddes Institute at the University of Dundee

https://www.dundee.ac.uk/geddesinstitute/

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