Design and Planning for People in Place: Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and the Emergence of…

An even better way to transform the world is to invent a new lifestyle or sensibility: to influence through habits as much as ideas by creating new ways of living.

He encouraged looking at people’s expressed preferences and behaviours—for example, drawing on where people actually chose to gather in a home, perhaps in a corner that caught the sun, or how they used public spaces—rather than an architect’s assumptions about how the city should be built.

Patrick Geddes, founder of environmental sociology and much else, described a more ideal city or ‘eutopia’ as lying ‘in the city around us; and it must be planned and realized [with] us as its citizens—each a citizen of both the actual and ideal city seen increasingly as one.’9 In his architectural designs for the city of Edinburgh, for example, he

realised from my research’, Baden later reflected, ‘that we desperately need cultural offerings with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like, to inspire hope and positive change.’9

Designers need the tools and skills to conceptualize people’s lives, to visualize and understand the circulation of capital, people and culture at a global scale, and to intelligently envision the future.”

Christopher Alexander was known for his theories on bringing humanity into architecture. He believed everyone possessed the ability to create and design a space that he called alive. His book, Pattern language, is based on core belief that people should design their own communities. Observation is that some of the best places in the world were desi