Sir Patrick Geddes (; 2 October 1854 – 17 April 1932) was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology.
Following the philosophies of Auguste Comte and Frederic Le Play, he introduced the concept of "region" to architecture and planning and coined the term "conurbation". Later, he elaborated "neotechnics" as the way of remaking a world apart from over-commercialization and money dominance.
An energetic Francophile, Geddes was the founder in 1924 of the Collège des Écossais (Scots College), an international teaching establishment in Montpellier, France, and in the 1920s he bought the Château d'Assas to set up a centre for urban studies.
The son of Janet Stevenson and soldier Alexander Geddes, Patrick Geddes was born in Ballater and the Old Parish Register for baptisms in the parish of Glenmuick Tullich and Glengairn recorded his first name as 'Peter'. He was educated in Aberdeenshire, and at Perth Academy. His extraordinary capacity for work became evident in early life.
He studied at the Royal College of Mines in London under Thomas Henry Huxley between 1874 and 1877, never finishing any degree, and he then spent the year 1877–1878 as a demonstrator in the Department of Physiology in University College London where he met Charles Darwin in Burdon-Sanderson's laboratory. While in London, he became acquainted with Comtean Positivism, as promoted by Richard Congreve, and he converted to the Religion of Humanity. He was elected as a member of the London Positivist Society. Later he raised his children to worship 'Humanity' following the Positivist system of belief. He lectured in Zoology at Edinburgh University from 1880 to 1888.
From 1888 to 1918, Geddes worked as the Professor of Botany at University College Dundee.
He married Anna Morton (1857–1917), who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, in 1886 when he was 32 years old. They had three children: Norah, Alasdair and Arthur. During a visit to India in 1917, Anna fell ill with typhoid fever and died, not knowing that their son Alasdair had been killed in action in France. Their daughter was the landscape designer Norah Geddes, who was active in Geddes's Open Spaces projects; she married the architect and planner Frank Charles Mears.
In 1890, he assisted John Wilson in laying out a teaching garden at Morgan Academy in Dundee.
Between 1894 and 1914, he served as an active member of the ruling Council of the Cockburn Association, a campaigning conservation organisation founded in Edinburgh in 1875.
In 1895, Geddes published an edition of The Evergreen magazine, with articles on nature, biology and poetics. Artists Robert Burns and John Duncan provided illustrations for the magazine.
Geddes wrote with J. Arthur Thomson an early book on The Evolution of Sex (1889). He held the Chair of Botany at University College Dundee from 1888 to 1919, and the Chair of Sociology at the University of Bombay from 1919 to 1924. He inspired Victor Branford to form the Sociological Society in 1903 to promote his sociological views.
While he thought of himself primarily as a sociologist, it was his commitment to close social observation and ability to turn these into practical solutions for city design and improvement that earned him a "revered place amongst the founding fathers of the British town planning movement". He was a major influence on the American urban theorist Lewis Mumford.
He was knighted in 1932, shortly before his death at the Scots College in Montpellier, France on 17 April 1932.
Patrick Geddes was influenced by social theorists such as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and French theorist Frederic Le Play (1806–1882) and expanded upon earlier theoretical developments that led to the concept of regional planning.
He was a proponent of the Comte - Le Play view of the interconnectedness of city region as a potentially autonomous unit. He adopted Spencer's theory that the concept of biological evolution could be applied to explain the evolution of society, and drew on Le Play's analysis of the key units of society as constituting "Lieu, Travail, Famille" ("Place, Work, Family"), but changing the last from "family" to "folk". In this theory, the family is viewed as the central "biological unit of human society" from which all else develops. According to Geddes, it is from "stable, healthy homes" providing the necessary conditions for mental and moral development that come beautiful and healthy children who are able "to fully participate in life".
Geddes drew on Le Play's circular theory of geographical locations presenting environmental limitations and opportunities that in turn determine the nature of work. His central argument was that physical geography, market economics and anthropology were related, yielding a "single chord of social life [of] all three combined". Thus the interdisciplinary subject of sociology was developed into the science of "man's interaction with a natural environment: the basic technique was the regional survey, and the improvement of town planning the chief practical application of sociology".
Geddes' writing demonstrates the influence of these ideas on his theories of the city. He saw the city as a series of common interlocking patterns, "an inseparably interwoven structure", akin to a flower. He criticised the tendency of modern scientific thinking to specialisation. In his "Report to the H.H. the Maharaja of Kapurthala" in 1917 he wrote:
"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."