The City is a Thinking Machine: Activism in the Built Environment

This project evaluates the relevance of Geddes’ thought for today by curating an exhibition and associated events and publications that place his work along side the work of contemporary practices.

An exhibition of material drawn from the Geddes Archives, much of it never seen before, plus current work by affiliates of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research.

Patrick Geddes, the polymathic Scottish planner and Professor of Botany at University College Dundee, published his seminal text Cities in Evolution in 1915, to accompany his Cities Exhibitions which he showed around the world. To celebrate the centenary, this new exhibition has been organised by the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee, with a grant from the Carnegie Trust. It features Geddes’s original plans and diagrams, drawn from the Archives at the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, and Strathclyde; along with recent architecture and planning projects by affiliates of the Geddes Institute. The exhibition aims to evaluate Geddes’s thinking for the 21st century.
Accompanying this exhibition is a programme of three evening events
Four publications have been produced accompanying the project