Expedients and Experiments 1919–60

While Patrick Geddes was replanning Jerusalem (where the Jews were gathering once more) the Sociological Society in England were exploring, with sophisticated secularity, the third alternative to capitalism and communism. Its special Cities Committee, in a report entitled Earth, Hell, and the Third Alternative looked for a rebirth of the mystique of the city: ⁶⁷⁴ the establishment of a truly co-operative state where the school would be vitally and systematically connected with the social unit which it served. ⁶⁷⁵ Geddes’ successor as Jerusalem’s planner, C. R. Ashbee, even more eschatologically insisted that industrialism had collapsed, and that only a ‘unified city’ could foster a ‘new ethic of human relationships’. ⁶⁷⁶