PRESS COMMENTS
The Times (July 20, 1904)
in a leading article, said:
In the paper read on Monday at a meeting of the Sociological Society by Professor GEDDES—an abstract of which we print—are contained ideas of practical value to be recommended to the study of ambitious municipalities. This is the age of cities, and all the world is city-building. Almost everywhere is a flow from the country town-ward. China and India may be still, in the main, lands of villages. But the West, Russia perhaps excepted, is more and more peopled by dwellers in cities. In a dim sort of way many persons understand that the time has come when art and skill and foresight should control what so far has been left to chance to work out; that there should be a more orderly conception of civic action; that there is a real art of city-making, and that it behoves this generation to master and practise it. Professor Geddes truly said the land is already full of preparation as to this matter; the beginnings of a concrete art of city-making are visible at various points. But our city rulers are often among the blindest to these considerations; and nowhere probably is to be seen a municipality fully and consistently alive to its duties in this respect. London may be left out of the question. Still a province rather than a city in the strict sense, wanting what, in the view of the early master of political science, was an essential of the true city, that it could "easily be overseen," with a vast floating population, it will be some time before it can be dealt with as an organic whole. But the rulers of such communities as Manchester and Newcastle and York ought long ago to have realised, much more than has been done, that they are not so much brick and mortar, so much rateable area, so many thousands of people fortuitously brought together. They have all a regional environment of their own which determined their origin and growth. They have all a rich past, the monuments of which, generally to be found in abundance by careful, reverent inquirers, ought to be preserved; a past which ought to be known more or less to all the dwellers therein, and the knowledge of which will make the present more interesting. Even when old buildings have disappeared, ancient roads, pathways, and streets can be traced; place names keep alive much history; and the natural features reveal to the practised eye what must have been the look and condition of a town in past ages. Professor Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be. Even if the comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its ancestral house or lands—will, even without much reading, have some sort of notion of his predecessors and a certain pride in his membership of an ancient community. If he has not the good fortune to be a De Vere, a De Bohun, a Howard, Mowbray or Cavendish, he may perhaps be a citizen of a town which flourished when some of these families were unknown.
Such pride, or, as the lecturer preferred to term it, such "growth of civic consciousness and conscience, the awakening of citizenship towards civic renascence," will be the best security for a worthy city of the future....
Professor Geddes glanced at the opening civic future, "the remoter and higher issues which a city's indefinitely long life and correspondingly needed foresight and statesmanship involve," the possibilities which may be easily realised if only there be true civic pride, foresight, and unflagging pursuit of a reasonable ideal.... It remains to be seen what our cities will become when for some generations the same spirit of pride and reverence shown by old families as to their possessions has presided over all civic changes and developments.... Ruskin somewhere points out the mediaeval love of cities, unwholesome, dirty, and forbidding though they were. He did not teach his generation that that affection might with more reason attach to the modern city if its people knew what it had been and steadily strove to make it better, if there was in every large community patriotism and a polity.
DR. J.H. BRIDGES in The Positivist Review (Sept., 1904), said:
Under the title, "Civics, as applied Sociology," Prof. Geddes read on July 18th a very interesting paper before the Sociological Society. The importance of the subject will be contested by none. The method adopted in handling it, being in many ways original, invites remark ...
What is wanted is first a survey of the facts to be dealt with—a regional survey. This point of view has next to be correlated with corresponding practical experience acquired by practical civic life, but "aiming at a larger and more orderly conception of civic action.".... Students of Comte will not forget his well-known maxim, Savoir pour prévoir, afin de pourvoir.
What is to be the area of survey? Prof. Geddes decides that the City may be taken "as the integrate of study." Whether any modern towns, and, if so, what, may be taken as integrates in the sense which would undoubtedly apply to ancient Athens or to mediaeval Florence, may be questioned; but it is too soon to interrupt our author.... Every one who heard the lecturer must have been fascinated by his picture of a river system which he takes for his unit of study; the high mountain tracts, the pastoral hillsides, the hamlets and villages in the valleys, the market town where the valleys meet, the convergence of the larger valleys into a county town, finally, the great city where the river meets the sea. The lecturer went on to advocate the systematic study of some of the principal river-basins of the world for the purpose of examining the laws which govern the grouping of cities. All would agree that much instruction might be derived from such a survey, provided two dangers be avoided. One is the exaggeration of the influence of the environment on the social organism, an error into which the Le Play school have sometimes fallen; as when, for instance, it was sought to explain Chinese civilisation by the rice-plant. The other danger, which needs much care and thought to avoid, is the accumulation of such a mass of irrelevant detail as renders (perhaps sometimes it is intended to render) all generalisation impossible. Thinking men are at last beginning to regard the accumulation of memoirs as one of the principal obstacles to scientific progress. On the pretext of "more evidence," conclusions are adjourned, not merely sine die, but sine spe diei. Yet so long as man is man, he must, and will, have conclusions; be they final or otherwise.