A city of many dreams: How Patrick Geddes brought a human touch to urban planning in India

Some called Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) a genius. Others likened him to an Indian “rishi of yore” and yet others dismissed him as an arrogant crank. But there was no denying his passion to renew and improve cities and towns to benefit humans as well as nature.

Geddes, a Scotsman, was best known as a sociologist, urban planner and ecologist. Many regard him as the father of urban planning. Like many sensitive minds of the late 19th and early 20th century, he too was appalled by the congested, disease-ridden, monotonous, joyless and ugly industrial towns springing up everywhere – poet PB Shelley captured this sentiment when he wrote, “Hell is a city much like London”.

Cities not only exhausted natural resources, but created degraded living conditions for the poor – “slums, semi-slum, and super-slums”, as author Marshall Stalley wrote in the 1972 book, Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment. But Geddes was convinced that better urban planning could change this.

Geddes worked extensively in the Indian subcontinent between 1914 and 1924. He was unsparing in his efforts to study the towns and cities spread across the vast subcontinent, to understand their problems, critically review the official policy for urban development, suggest alternative plans and plead for implementing...

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