Sir Patrick Geddes

1854 - 1932

A Scottish Genius

Ballater, Royal Deeside,
Scotland

“This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.” 
- Patrick Geddes

As our American cousins might say a "reality check" if ever there was one!

     
About
Patrick Geddes

 

Sir Patrick Geddes
Born: Ballater, Scotland, 1854
Life: International
Died: Montpellier, France, 1932.


Hugh MacDairmid
by
Sheila Maclean

"...he was one of the outstanding thinkers of his generation, not merely in the world, and not only one of the greatest Scotsmen of the past century but in our entire history.”

Hugh MacDairmid


"...He chose life itself as his subject and refused to subdivide it."

“Everything I have done”, he once said at Le College des Ecossais, “has been biocentric; for and in terms of life, both individual and collective; whereas all the machinery of the state, public instruction, finance and industry ignore life, when indeed it does not destroy it. The only thing that amazes me, therefore, as I look back over my experiences is that I was not caught and hung many years ago.”


Patrick Geddes


Rob Cowan (edited) quoting the Scottish Poet, Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), and Geddes himself, in “Town and Country Planning” September 1979
.

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Ballater Geddes Archive
Including: 2004 "Geddes Today" Exhibition and its' travels;
"Language of Rivers and Leaves"

 


Logo of the Ballater Geddes Project featuring Geddes's famous words "By Leaves We Live".
Material published on this site over the last few years.

“...Geddes was in modern times - although in different fields - what Leonardo (Da Vinci) had been four hundred years before: a prodigy in physical endurance, range of interests, and imaginative powers.” ...what few persons in any field now know is that Patrick Geddes achieved one of his earliest ambitions: he became, in a sense, a second Darwin. Not by reason of an epoch-making pronouncement as spectacular as “The Origin of Species”; that is self evident. It was in his feeling for nature, in his understanding and interpretation of the evolutionary drama of life that Geddes equalled, even surpassed, Charles Darwin. And Darwin was a naturalist with few peers.”

Philip Boardman on PG

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Read Geddes

 


This image features Charles Darwin writing in support of Patrick Geddes.
Selected reading list.

Charles Darwin

“I have read several of your biological papers with very great interest, and I have formed, if you will permit me to say so, a high opinion of your abilities...”

Charles Darwin to PG

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Talk Geddes

 


Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore - Geddes friends and contemporaries.
Ways to contribute to the current debate on Geddes, his ideas and legacy.

Rabindranath
Tagore
and
Mahatma Gandhi

"...he has the precision of the scientist and the vision of the prophet; and at the same time, the power of the artist to make his ideas visible through the language of symbols"

Rabindranath Tagore on PG

I have heard much praise from my Jewish friends concerning Mr. Geddes’s work and personality. All who know him admire and honor him highly”

Albert Einstein on PG

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International Directory

 


Map of some of the places where PG worked.
A Patrick Geddes Directory listing those (who have asked to be listed) world-wide, with an interest in, Patrick Geddes's Life and/or Work.

Lewis Mumford and child

"...one of the truly seminal minds the last century produced: a philosopher whose knowledge and wisdom put him on the level of an Aristotle or a Leibnitz.”....

Lewis Mumford on PG

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What's New

 


"The Professor" a cartoon circa 1912.
What's new on this web site.

 

 

 

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Links

 


Patrick Geddes with a planning collaborator in India in 1919.
Links to other sites and resources.

 

 

 

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Contact

 


"A Masque of Love", 1921, by John Duncan.
John Duncan was one of PG's main artistic collaborators

 

 

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