ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century, possibly the most influential of Patrick Geddes’ ideas was his conviction that the city and its surrounding landscape were interdependent.1 In the 1880s urban planning was based on the belief that the city and its rural hinterland were two entirely separate sets of problems. Geddes insisted that to understand the city one had to understand the connections between the two. To demonstrate this idea, Geddes took over a disused observatory equipped with a camera obscura, which was near the castle – Edinburgh’s highest point. The camera obscura was a projection device mounted at the top of the observatory tower that overlooked the city. It projected a panoramic image of Edinburgh and the rural landscape surrounding it on to a large flat white table below. Its purpose was educational, to show people the essential connections between the city and its region which Geddes described as ‘any geographic area that expresses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation, industry, and culture’.2 His great planning innovation came out of this idea: the concept of regional planning, and the basic threepart components of the city region, which he described as the interrelationships between place; folk; and work (place being the environment, folk being society, and work being the economy). For Geddes, regional study gave understanding to an ‘active, experienced environment’, and in his book Cities in Evolution he drew attention to the fact that the new neotechnic technologies such as electric power and the internal combustion engine were already causing cities to disperse.3
