Heritage Eutopias: Can Heritage Planning Redefine the Future?

Drawing inspiration from the visionary planner Patrick Geddes and his aspirations for the harmonisation of ‘work, folk and place’, join Murdo Macdonald and John Lowrey as they consider how engaging with the past can actually act as form of imagining better futures for cities and the landscapes they occupy. 

Murdo Macdonald is the author of Patrick Geddes Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Professor Emeritus of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee. His book explores Geddes’s Scottish intellectual background in depth for the first time, highlighting his insistence on the importance of both arts and sciences.

Murdo will explore the stained-glass version of Patrick Geddes’s valley section diagram. Originally made for Outlook Tower, it is a multiple representation of the physical and social world as Geddes found it and what it could be in the future. The valley is first a ‘microcosm of nature’, but also the place where human beings make their lives, and linked to that it is a dramatic theatre of history. Finally, it is the ‘eutopia’ or ‘good place’ of the future; a good place that Geddes believed could be achieved through local and international co-operation.

John Lowrey is a senior lecturer in architectural history in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh University. His research interests are mainly Scottish and mainly in the long eighteenth century, with a special interest and wide range of publications in the architecture and urban design of the Enlightenment period, especially in, the early classical country house of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and the designed landscape of Scotland.

In his talk, he will discuss the utopian city from C. N. Ledoux, to J. B. Priestley, via Edinburgh New Town.