Patrick Geddes

Geddes came from biology and brought its method: before intervening, observe. His motto «diagnosis before treatment» proposed studying the geography, economy and history of a place before designing, and he was the first to insist that a city does not end at its administrative boundary.

He coined «conurbation» to name the agglomerations already forming, and practised «conservative surgery»: in the dense quarters of Edinburgh and India, opening courtyards and cleaning rather than demolishing. A century on it remains the alternative to mass demolition.

A Scottish biologist, sociologist and planner, born in 1854 and dead in 1932, Geddes came to planning from evolutionary biology and treated the city as an organism to be studied before it is altered. From the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, his civic laboratory, he formulated the principle of survey before plan, and in Edinburgh's Old Town he practised conservative surgery: rehabilitating and opening courtyards instead of demolishing. Cities in Evolution (1915) coined the word conurbation and proposed the valley section, which reads each city alongside its natural region.

Between 1914 and 1924 he worked in India, where he wrote dozens of planning reports, such as the one for Indore (1918), which argued for improving existing neighbourhoods against colonial demolitions, and in 1925 he drew up the plan for Tel Aviv. His disciple Lewis Mumford carried his ideas to the United States and to regionalism, and ecological planning, participation and the rehabilitation of historic centres still recognise him as a precursor.