Designing the garden of Geddes: the master gardener and the profession of landscape architecture

The influence of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) on the landscape architecture profession has been widely acknowledged, but there is no critical review of the nature of this influence on theory and practice. Geddes appears to have been the first person in Britain to adopt the term landscape architect to denote a profession in the American sense as someone who dealt with city planning, civic design and parks systems. This profession seemed to encompass his wide ranging interests, providing a suitable vehicle for his transdisciplinary approaches, but which he later transferred to that of town and regional planning. His approach to understanding landscapes was to study towns and regions from a cultural, ecological and economic perspective in a systematic way of survey, analysis and design. Geddes’s methods were gradually adopted by the landscape architecture profession, and purely Beaux Arts-architectural approaches phased out. By tracing contemporary references, this paper highlights key individuals who helped to promote his ideas in the landscape architecture profession then and now, and shows how his enduring influence and longstanding impact have to do with the systematic approach and methods he set forth. Today similar approaches are being promoted by other professions, but with a different perspective, and suggests that rather than various disciplines setting up silos, trying to defend their territories, with climate change and food security looming it is timely to promote more integrated approaches. This is well in line with Geddes’s ideas who not only encouraged interdisciplinarity, but also warned against inadvertent specialisation.