Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

Every human being, wherever located, is in a threefold relationship to existence, and it is this. He is related to his environment by its situation, whether north, south, east, or west by longitude and latitude; whether in frigid, temperate, or torrid zone; whether near an inland sea or the great ocean or deep in one of the great land masses; whether on rich arable or bare rock, in scrub or in forest. This is his economic dimension. Secondly, he is related to those other human beings who share the same environment, and possibly also others, more distant, who do not. This is his political dimension. But wait, you may say, what if he is Robinson Crusoe? The answer is that the lack of fellow-humans is just as much a feature of his political situation as the complications that arise from their presence. Thirdly, there is still part of his life unaccounted for, when we have paid full attention to the economic and the political. It is what is going on in his own mind and heart about it all, and about the thought and feeling of his predecessors. Some would describe this third dimension as his relation to God, others as his relation to values—but however we conclude about that, he has this cultural dimension.

Now the sciences of the first two are geography and economics, and of the third is anthropology. They give us the techniques of studying—Geddes’ monosyllabic triad of PLACE, WORK, FOLK. In fact he relates Place to geography and to politics—as our constant need to refer to maps about the affairs of Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Nigeria or Northern Ireland may illustrate.

Then there is another way of working ‘from the ground up’ which Geddes has shown. He called it “the valley section’, and showed how you start up in the hills, where rivers are born, and you will find, as you go down to the sea, the following basic human types: the miner, the woodman, the hunter, the shepherd, the poor peasant, the farmer, the fisherman. This sounds perhaps a tame enumeration—but Geddes builds up on each a fascinating delineation of typological characteristics, entirely concrete and richly illustrated both by individuals and by cultures and civilizations. It is one of the most stimulating parts of his sociologyfar removed from the number-crunching of a great deal of what goes under the name of sociology in these computerized days. The richness of Geddes’ insights into the organic connections all

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