#EDINBURGH & ME

This article was first published by the now-defunct TheState.ae on July 2012. I first learned about this creative platform at the very end of 2011, when Rahel reached out to me while looking for contributors to their first print publication. I didn’t feel like I had much to say then, so I didn’t submit anything. These reflections would be the first of a few posts published on their website, a relationship that would eventually lead to my first visit to Dubai in 2013.

I’m writing this in a room on the second floor of a building named after a man the Fife Psychogeographical Collective calls a “great polymath, regional theorist, activist and (as yet unacknowledged) proto-psychogeographer.” The building is part of a residential complex with a very long history, and an impressive-sounding address. In fact, I chose to live here for the past year partially because I took some nudgy pride in writing “The Royal Mile” on my forms and applications. I soon realized, however, that the official postal designation, the one bona fide residents use, was much more prosaic: 517 Lawnmarket. A further damper on my misplaced, touristic pride in postal code ostentation is the fact that this building, Patrick Geddes Hall, is topographically below the Royal Mile.

I had no idea who Patrick Geddes was before I came here, but I’ve since experienced that mild, dissociative wonder of being in this room, in this building. Reading a book in which—by chance, and not by dewey-decimal design—I found his name repeated throughout the introductory chapter.

The building is perched on top of a strange lump of earth known as The Mound, an artificial hill reportedly engineered out of 1,501,000 cartloads of soil, the kind of overly-specific factoid I’ve gotten used to hearing in Scotland. This weird topography is why I found myself at an utter loss when I first arrived here in September, dragging my suitcase around in circles, my sheepish disorientation brought about by a co-conspiracy of my hubris—distances seemed so small, I didn’t print out directions—and of cartesian cartography. How was I to realize that I should be looking up when the map I’d put my faith in and committed to memory had flattened the whole area?

As I’ve learned virtually every morning and every evening that I’ve lived here, tour guides covet this location for the vantage it affords over Edinburgh’s New Town and the landmarks below. Earlier today, for example, fragments of the story of George IV’s visit to Edinburgh, and how that original Scottish booster, Sir Walter Scott, managed to get the good king into a kilt, came streaming in through my window. Late last night, on that same spot, two lads were yelling “yolo” into the darkness and asking young ladies below whether they wanted “sex on the [Olympic] Rings.”

A few minutes from where I’m sitting, you’ll find a popular tourist attraction once called the Outlook Tower but now known as the ‘Camera Obscura and World of Illusions.’ This was Geddes’ pet project, a “public laboratory for social understanding and progress.” Its central instrument, the observation deck, was inspired in part—and in a manner only those “‘gentlemen scholars’ who wished to know everything” could possibly pull off—by his readings of French geographer, anarchist theorist and Paris communard, Elisée Reclus. The aim was to provide citizens with the means of observing their urban environment, with the hope that they may get an understanding of the relations between regions.

Geddes’ was a gentler ‘texturology’ than that which Michel de Certeau described from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Not only did Geddes reject the grid as a meta-model for urban planning, but his simple idea of opening up that “ecstasy of reading such a [urban] cosmos,” paternalistic and positivist as it may be, can be understood as an early attempt at democratizing the planner’s god’s-eye-view. If nothing else, taking his camera obscura into account makes for a much weirder archeology of Google Earth, drones, and other modern ‘outlook towers.’

Patrick Geddes was a botanist, biologist, sociologist, geographer and urban theorist. He was a lecturer at the University of Bombay. He co-wrote a book about sex. Yet the strangest twist to his story, for me, is the work he did in the Palestine.

First, he was commissioned by the Zionist Organization to build the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Here he is, in his own words, describing the attitudes prevailing at the time:

“Zionists [are] very deeply impressed with the culture (with some of the misculture too!) of the various nations and countries from which they come. Thus the Americans are very American, the Germans very German, the French very French, English very English, and so on:—all Westerners so far, not yet re-orientalised (which may take some forty years!)—and all this in architecture as much as other things. Thus any Western eye can see that the Arabs are dirty, untidy, in many ways degenerate, and is all too likely to overlook, or have difficulty in seeing, the qualities of their buildings, even those of the fine houses of the Damascene type in Jerusalem, with ample courtyards, airy rooms of ample proportions within, and so on. The plain little box-like houses are appreciated hardly at all: and so, in Tel-Aviv etc. we have nice little houses of the London and other suburban type before the Garden Village period in England, and with no Oriental character at all!”

It’s easy to paint Geddes as an obnoxious—and racist!—Orientalist here, but again, I choose to see him as someone trying to look beyond the paradigms of his day, while at the same time being a product of his times. As Diana Dolev argues:

“The Geddes and Mears master plan for the Hebrew University was part of the Oriental aspect of creating the new “Hebrew” culture. But one must bear in mind that this Oriental style was adopted mostly by people who had been accustomed to Western, or rather East-European standards. Orientalistic characteristics were in fact as alien to Schatz, Barsky, Baerwald, Geddes and Mears, as they were to most of their clients in Palestine. Thus, while this approach played a short part in building a romantic image of the new “Hebrew”, regretfully it did not lead to a more meaningful relationship with the Orient.”

The question of why that was “regretfully” the case lies, of course, in the nature of the Zionist project itself. But can we really quarrel with Geddes for that when so many don’t even question it today? I’m sticking my neck out again and saying no, not really.

Geddes’ work in Palestine did not end there. He submitted a master plan for Jerusalem, and a few years later, another for Tel-Aviv. This plan was actually adopted, making the White City the only city center ever to be built completely to his specification. As Neal Payton argues, this contradictory city, with its modernist buildings on pedestrian-scale streets, was an urban success largely because of Geddes’ master-plan.

So what are we to make of Sir Patrick Geddes? I don’t know. His life and ideas are definitely of another time. The movements he aligned with—the Garden City movement, neo-romanticism, Celtic revivalism—and his association with the Zionist Organization, make him easy to dismiss today. And yet, I feel an affinity for the man who designed the roof I’ll be sleeping under tonight. Is it possible to enjoy the garden he designed for us, the residents of 1 Mound Place, now Patrick Geddes Hall, while still being critical of the orderly, sanitized, Garden City ideal?

And will there be a day, after Zionism, when I may stroll through Tel-Aviv without the shadow of war and apartheid looming over me?