Civics: as Applied Sociology

by Sir Patrick Geddes

M—THE HISTORIC CITY-COMPLEX

The criticism may have already arisen in the reader's mind that the "Town" and "School" of our analysis are by no means so simple as we have assumed them. Our surveys of antique towns ever disclose the material survivals, at least the vestiges, of the cloister or the acropolis of the past, of its cathedral or its forum. The processes of our industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat, condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer's masterly treatment of their main results. How, then, shall we correlate this process of all things growing old with the analysis of cities above attempted? In other words, how shall we interpret the course of their historic evolution, their renewed growth and decay, progress and degeneracy, their present condition, crowded with residues of the past, with those potentialities which our outline discloses? This is the more necessary since this fourfold analysis applies in principle to all human groupings from the simplest village to the Eternal City. To this, indeed, we have in principle already traced it, onwards from our primitive valley section with its humble hamlets, its fundamental occupations. Returning then to our main diagram, with its four-fold analysis of the City so soon as we have completed this, and carried its progress up to the level of city life proper, we must next turn over the leaf and begin a new page, with place and work and folk once more. This simplest of acts expresses with graphic significance the very process of history; for in closing our diagram page its "Cloister" has been folded down on the "School," our cathedral and forum, our "City" proper upon the "Town." Thus it is that the ideals and the achievements of one day and generation and city are ever melting away, and passing out of sight of the next; so that to the joy or sorrow of the successors the new page seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past. Hence each page of history is a palimpsest. Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less penetrate to the inner history. So for the decayed Renaissance learning of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the "Grammarian's Funeral"; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of our urban lives. Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East. These processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on everywhere day by day.

Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer "Town" and "School" anew: we have no continuing City. This too commonly has existed at its best but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world's memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or forgotten. Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our historic cities. Obviously in the deeper and more living sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is that the ideal city lies ever in the future. Yet it is the very essence of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town. Where shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances: the needed kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed vision and imagery and expression of them all?

N—THE EVILS OF THE CITY

Disease, defect, vice and crime

I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we must know something of the normal course of evolution. Hence, the old and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of "the institutes of medicine." Sociology has thus to become "the institutes of citizenship."

Often though philanthropists forget this, diagnosis should precede treatment. The evils of the city, by the very nature of our hypothesis, demand special survey, and this no less thoroughly than do the normal place and work and industry. It is only our most permanent intellectual impulse, that of seeking for unity, which excuses the cheap unitary explanations so often current; as, for instance, that social evils are mainly to be explained by intemperance, as for one school of reformers; by poverty or luxury, for a second and third; by Tammany or other form of party government, by socialism or by individualism for yet others; that they are due to dissent or to church, to ignorance or to the spread of science, and so on almost indefinitely—doubtless not without elements of truth in each!

Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more general one—distinguished from the preceding by including them all and more—that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city, are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew. It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.

Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. They are not unrelated, but correspond each as the negative to that fourfold presentment of ideals we have hitherto been raising. To this ideal unity of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds, with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the corresponding defects in detail.

The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist, utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.