A Man for Our Times - The Living Legacy of Patrick Geddes

The typical blurb is usually something like "botanist, town planner and social reformer", but this much under celebrated victorian Scotsman was a great deal more than that.

He was the pioneering champion of a particular sort of inclusive, hands-on education and an important radical thinker about.....well, pretty much everything. And that's because his ideas, prompted by a biologist's understanding of the natural world, led him to see mankind in the widest possible context. For him, life was not merely a series of separately operating systems but a single interdependent whole, of which humans are only a part.

Ecology and society, art and science, local and global, personal and political - to Geddes, these are two sides of the same coin and our ultimate welbeing and progress depend on grasping this.

This short piece is an intro to a longer film commissioned by the Workers Education Association, and funded by the Scottish Education Department, exploring the ways in which Geddes' inspirational ideas have especial relevance in the 21st Century.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Patrick Geddes
• Edinburgh Old Town
• By Leaves we Live
• Riddles Court