Sir Patrick Geddes FRSE (2 October 1854 – 17 April 1932) was a Scottish biologist,[2] sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner.

[3] Following the philosophies of Auguste Comte and Frederic LePlay, he introduced the concept of "region" to architecture and planning and coined the term "conurbation".

[8] An energetic Francophile,[9] Geddes was the founder in 1924 of the Collège des Écossais (Scots College), an international teaching establishment in Montpellier, France, and in the 1920s he bought the Château d'Assas to set up a centre for urban studies.

During a visit to India in 1917, Anna fell ill with typhoid fever and died, not knowing that their son Alasdair had been killed in action in France.

While he thought of himself primarily as a sociologist, it was his commitment to close social observation and ability to turn these into practical solutions for city design and improvement that earned him a "revered place amongst the founding fathers of the British town planning movement".

[26] Geddes drew on Le Play's circular theory of geographical locations presenting environmental limitations and opportunities that in turn determine the nature of work.

His central argument was that physical geography, market economics and anthropology were related, yielding a "single chord of social life [of] all three combined".

"[26]These ideas can also be traced back to Geddes' abiding interest in Eastern philosophy which he believed more readily conceived of "life as a whole": "as a result, civic beauty in India has existed at all levels, from humble homes and simple shrines to palaces magnificent and temples sublime.

Geddes attributed the destruction of cities via World War I not to the invasion of imperialist powers but the prevalence of paleotechnic forms of life in European society.

From Geddes' perspective, the purpose of his theory and understanding of relationships among the units of society was to find an equilibrium among people and the environment to improve such conditions.

Geddes championed a mode of planning that sought to consider "primary human needs" in every intervention, engaging in "constructive and conservative surgery"[30] rather than the "heroic, all of a piece schemes"[31] popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In and around this area Geddes commenced upon a project of "conservative surgery": "weeding out the worst of the houses that surrounded them…widening the narrow closes into courtyards" and thus improving sunlight and airflow.

The basis for the grid as an enduring and appealing urban form rests on five main characteristics: order and regulatory, orientation in space and to elements, simplicity and ease of navigation, speed of layout, and adaptability to circumstance".

According to Geddes' analysis, this approach was not only "unsparing to the old homes and to the neighbourhood life of the area" but also, in "leaving fewer housing sites and these mostly narrower than before" expelling a large population that would "again as usual, be driven to create worse congestion in other quarters".

In 1892, to allow the general public an opportunity to observe these relationships, Geddes opened a "sociological laboratory" called the Outlook Tower that documented and visualized the regional landscape.

Geddes would host tours throughout the tower and boast its maps, photographs, and projection via ‘camera obscura’ in order to present the sociological dimensions of cities, urban problems, and town planning.

The Outlook Tower is a physical assertion of Geddes belief in the importance of all areas of knowledge; all arts, all sciences, all, religions, all cultures, etc.

Geddes used it as a tool for cultural and regional analysis and provided space for many thinkers to explore the idea of 'regions' which he later introduced to the field of planning.

He was particularly critical of that form of planning which relied overmuch on design and effect, neglecting to consider "the surrounding quarter and constructed without reference to local needs or potentialities".

Through these reports, Geddes was concerned to create a "working system in India", righting the wrongs of the past by making interventions in and plans for the urban fabric that were both considerate of local context and tradition and awake to the need for development.

According to Lewis Mumford, writing in introduction to Tyrwhitt’s collected reports: "Few observers have shown more sympathy…with the religious and social practices of the Hindus than Geddes did; yet no one could have written more scathingly of Mahatma Gandhi's attempt to conserve the past by reverting to the spinning wheel, at a moment when the fundamental poverty of the masses in India called for the most resourceful application of the machine both to agricultural and industrial life.

In 1919, he designed a plan for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the request of the psychoanalyst, Dr. David Eder, who headed the World Zionist Organization's London Branch.

[46] Geddes also influenced several British urban planners (notably Raymond Unwin and Frank Mears), the Indian social scientist Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Catalan architect Cebrià de Montoliu (1873–1923) as well as many other 20th-century thinkers.

[58] In 2008, the Scottish Historic Building Trust (SHBT) was approached to imagine a future for Riddle's Court in Edinburgh's Lawnmarket, which Geddes had restored for use as a university hall of residence in 1890.