Geddes conceives the city as an evolving relation among place, work and folk rather than an object available for formal correction. His iconic idea is “survey before plan”: civic intervention must arise from sustained observation of regional geography, social organisation, historical continuity and everyday culture. The theoretical contribution is an ecological urbanism avant la lettre, in which town planning becomes a branch of civics and civic life a form of collective learning. Methodologically, Geddes combines regional survey, comparative exhibition, historical interpretation and constructive action, rejecting the division between science, education, politics and design. The conceptual operation is diagnostic cultivation: the planner does not impose an external order but identifies latent capacities within an existing urban organism and develops them through selective transformation. The wider bridge reaches human geography, sociology, education and environmental planning. Geddes’s importance lies less in organic metaphor than in the institutional form of his method, which makes knowledge production, public participation and spatial design parts of one continuous civic process.
URBANISM MEETS ART