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Book Review
Designing cities
A. SRIVATHSAN
PATRICK GEDDES IN INDIA: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt — Editor; Select Books, 71, Brigade Road Cross, Bangalore-560001.
His contemporaries may have celebrated him as a Scottish Darwin, but Patrick Geddes was not bound by any particular discipline. He traversed the boundaries of natural science, economics and culture with ease. His ideas as a biologist, town planner and sociologist converged in his city design reports. Modern town planning owes the concept of regional survey that locates city within a region, the conservative surgery that demonstrates how one can accommodate changes without
bulldozing the large sections of an old city for the purpose of development, and the concept of conurbation to Geddes. After his successful Cities and Town Planning exhibition in London in 1910, Geddes was invited to Madras by Lord Pentland to share the exhibit and study various Indian towns. This book is a collection of excerpts from Geddes’ plans for India published between 1914 and 1922. This book was first published in 1947.
Town planning
This extract spanning 100 pages is organised into six sections with detailed bibliography of Geddes’ reports for Indian towns. The beginning words of the extract sounds familiar and immediately relevant. Town planning, he reminds, is not a mere place making. It is about finding right places for people to live and flourish, and in that process people must not be coerced against their associations.
The book then quickly moves to discuss two other important concepts — diagnostic survey and conservative surgery. Lewis Mumford, well-known planner, critic and Geddes’ disciple, in his introduction (1947) to this book, terms the survey as something similar to “diagnosis before treatment.” The conservative surgery, on the other hand, demonstrates that violent imposition of gridiron pattern in the old parts of the city is destructive and not necessary. Geddes repeatedly shows that such forced interventions are “spurious methods of reliving congestion” in old towns. Geddes uses examples from Tanjore, Balrampur and Madurai to illustrate this idea.
The idea of conservative surgery is put forth as a critique of industrial order. Unlike his contemporary, Le Corbusier Geddes was heavily critical of gridiron pattern. He severely admonished the standard plan approach to town planning, especially for the old towns. H.V.Lancaster, another friend and disciple, would remark that Geddes never organised his exhibitions in a standardised manner. It was designed in such a way that the exhibit was always reorganised to suit the contours of different locations. This is not surprising from a man who deplored industrialised idea of standardisation. Geddes was not just critiquing planning practices for its formal qualities, but also for its lack of sociological grounding. He points out that the European models of town planning would not be appropriate in India and instead what is required is an understanding of the local conditions — physical and cultural.
As one of his biographers has pointed out, unlike his contemporaries Garnier, Howard and Corbsuier, Geddes never received attention. This is more because of lack of understanding than anything to do with the merits of his ideas.
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