The Cities and Town Planning Exhibition

The traveling Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, initially mounted in London in 1910, apparently marked the birth of Patrick Geddes as a distinguished planner. It then embarked upon a journey across Britain and, from there, the British Empire at large. The exhibition was first displayed in Edinburgh where it was opened by the local Lord Provost, followed by an address of Lord Pentland, then secretary of State for Scotland. It hosted teachers and school children in the mornings and paying public in the afternoons, the evenings being filled with working men and women, and was a notable success. ¹ The exhibition then moved to Belfast in conjunction with the Health Exhibition and the Royal Sanitary Congress, and then to Dublin, in connection with the congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health and upon the invitation of its president, Lady Aberdeen whose husband was at the time Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. ² There it aroused great interest and ended in practical results, including an international planning competition and the beginning of a Department of Town Study in the National Irish Museum. ³ Its success was described in length in the report Geddes later wrote for the city of Nagpur. In 1911, he said:

The Exhibition interested only small sections of the community, but neither Corporation nor citizens, governing, or working classes as a whole. […] and within less than three years… the Cities Exhibition was recalled, as the nucleus of a “Civic Exhibition,” upon a far greater scale… Dublin was stirred… Hence a “neighbourhood Brightening Association” arose, and this largely among the slum people themselves [transforming] the whole aspect of the eleven surrounding streets in a very few weeks. The Corporation mended the streets, and improved its cleansing and watering. Friendly donors saw to the supply of flowering plants for such poor houses… help too was given with the removal of the rubbish heaps, and with the levelling of fallen houses, as temporary playgrounds, with the whitewashing of the walls surrounding these… But in the main… the people of the neighbourhood produced the essential transformations themselves; and set about the cleansing and brightening of their homes, inside as well as out… all concerned, from the Viceroy and his consort downwards, were agreed that the most encouraging result of the Exhibition, was the renewal of citizenship and domestic uplift together; and this in a class and in a neighbourhood at the lowest level of this poorest of Western cities. ⁴