PATRICK GEDDES’ OUTLOOK TOWER--AND OURS

by

Ernest J. Yanarella

The dream of building vibrant, robust, sustainable cities has informed the vision of many twentieth-century urban planners--in particular, urban visionaries whose intellectual ken exceeded the narrow bounds of individual disciplines. When the history of sustainable cities is written early in the next millennium, the figure of Patrick Geddes will find a prominent and honored place in the pantheon of this century’s interdisciplinary dreamers and practitioners.

Biologist, geographer, educator, civics activist, urban planner, this Scottish urban visionary spent much of his active life from the 1890s until his death in 1817 exploring the implications of the major innovations and movements in nartural and social sciences for humankind’s place in the natural world. His encyclopeidic works on uman biology and the evolution of cities remain classics in their fields and mirrors of the maelstrom of ideas, hopes, and possibilities for human betterment swirling about in intellectual circles of his times. A man of action as well as of ideas, Geddes’ experiments in urban design are keynoted by his bold town plans and model colonies in India and Palestine--all marked by his regional approach to urban planning and his commitment to molding a built environment congenial to an active civic life for their citizens.

No doubt, one of his greatest contributions to the building of sustainable and habitable cities of the future, still not fully appreciated, is his Outlook Tower. At once, an "index museum," a "civic laboratory," a "college/workshop," even an "inlook tower," this unimposing edifice and former observatory built in the 1890s along a quiet, winding street in Edinburgh, Scotland, was both symbolic of his new and holistic outlook on life (including the complex and interwoven relations among human beings, nature, culture, and habitat) and the graphical and three-dimensional expression of Geddes’ creative vision.

Beginning at the top of the building featuring a camera obscura, the visitor could take in a luminescent regional survey of the urban fabric of historic Edinburgh and surrounding rolling farmland and countryside. Then, as the visitor descended from one story to the next, he or she was presented with pictures, maps and other graphical representations of an ever widening circle of knowledge and experience beginning with Edinburgh on the fifth floor, expanding to Scotland, the British Isles, Europe, and finally opening up to the world on the first floor. Emblazoned with the motto, "Vivendo Discimus" (By Living We Learn), this new museum of the future inspired a philosophy of education constantly in search of constructive synthesis and an image of human beings as lifelong students of nature and culture embedded in a place, not as a passive receptacle but as an active collaborator.

Even as the fate of the late-modern city grows more grim and the taproots of the civic spirit animating his urban vision atrophies, the tools for updating and bringing to fruition Geddes’ interdisciplinary museum/laboratory/tower are no longer on the distant horizon but essentially state-of-the-art technologies within reach or on the shelf. Advanced computer technology and three-dimensional modeling software give interdisciplinary researchers the ability to put the city in the computer and the computer in the city. So too do these technological innovations in computer visualization and design allow urban planners and civic-minded public officials and citizens to balance and coordinate urban developments with their surrounding regions (countryside, nation, earth, and world) through sustainable, balance-seeking relations, forms, and patterns. With the power and visualizing capacities many millions of times greater and faster than Geddes’ folding paper "thinking machines" (which he used to represent new combinations of human and natural life in its many dimensions and to free the solitary mind of conventional ideas and stereotypic solutions to new problems of the modern urban-industrial order), the latest microcomputer developments are placing before groups and communities instruments capable of creating either new and more tyrannical forms of subjugation and exploitation or nascent, democratic forms of participatory decisionmaking and genuinely public policymaking.

As a new millennium approaches, the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Kentucky has undertaken a large and ambitious agenda for arresting those powerful unsustainable trends and tendencies which threaten the well-being of ecosystem and humankind’s urban habitat. This agenda is being promoted not only by the use of powerful three-dimensional computer modeling programs to envisage ways of bringing the many parts of the city into sustainable balance; it is also working toward a governance model supportive of the civic ecology of participatory democracy. That is, the Center for Sustainable Cities has outlined the basic assumptions and general rules of the Sustainability Game intended to widen the scope of participation in urban design decisions before sizable amounts of scarce capital are invested and prior to the mobilization of single-minded interest groups and the hardening of positions into fixed and inflexible design and policy alternatives. In the spirit of Patrick Geddes’ commitment to civic-minded urban planning, the Center’s Sustainable Game calls for expanding urban design and planning decisions to greater numbers of participants who can put anything on the table (or into the computer models) as long as the implications of each proposed change are measured against the need to restore sustainable balance to the systems and processes constituting the urban-regional context of which they are a part.

Like the Janus-faced approach to urban planning of Patrick Geddes, the Center looks forward and backward for its design inspirations. Borrowing much from the medieval example of Italian hilltowns like Todi and Perugia, the Center has completed design studies culminating in a "City-as-a Hill" model for sustainable cities. In its Montenero project, a program for marrying a model sustainable agricultural community of the future with a reconstruction of its medieval counterpart was designed with the goal of illuminating the flows and processes supporting sustainability between community and farm. In perhaps its most ambitious project to date, the Center has designed a huge sustainable city implant over and around the Westbanhof railway station and tracks reweaving sustainable processes into an urban structure and stitching it into the surrounding streets, buildings and neighborhoods in the area. Convinced that the city is the largest unit capable of addressing the many urban architectural, social, economic, political, and other imbalances besetting the modern world and simultaneously the smallest scale at which such problems can be meaninguflly resolved in an integrated and holstic fashion, the Center looks to these urban design projects and others planned as catalysts for change at every other level and windows to the the future of the human species and our earthly Gaia.

Though constructed and opened to the public, Geddes’ Outlook Tower was relatively short-lived and never completed. His creative, fecund mind, moreover, was always searching impatiently for new sources of intellectual nourishment and new building projects to make concrete his interdisciplinary visions. But as the practical embodiment of his educational and planning philosophies, the Outlook Tower beckons us as an inspiration and guide to fulfill its ambitions and open our computerized "camera obscura" and encyclopedic databases to the twin tasks of envisaging and building the sustainable cities everywhere. For, amidst urban agglomeration and cultural homogenization, they shine forth as the only true and fit habitat for humankind and its earthly partner.