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Competing scales in transnational networks: the impossible travel of Patrick Geddes' Cities Exhibition to America, 1911–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

PIERRE CHABARD*
Affiliation:
École d'architecture de la ville & des territoires à Marne-la-Vallée, 10-12 avenue Blaise Pascal, Champs-sur-Marne, 77447 Marne-la-Vallée

Abstract

At the turn of the 1910s, a productive tension opposed two competing kinds of North American city planning actors: urban reformers (such as Benjamin Marsh, founder of the National Conference on City Planning (NCCP) in 1909) and professional city planners (such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, new director of the NCCP in 1911). Analysing the many unsuccessful attempts, between 1911 and 1913, to send the ‘Cities and Town Planning Exhibition’ – a British itinerant exhibition directed by the Scottish thinker and reformer Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) – to tour America, this article examines the transnational similarities and interactions between American and European urbanist milieux; the competing scales (municipal, national, international) in this dialogue; and the strategies of the professionalization of planning.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Unifying several existing organizations (Committee on Congestion of Population, American Institute of Architects, American Society of Landscape Architects, League of American Municipalities, American Civic Association, National Conference of Charities and Corrections), the NCCP organized annual meetings on city planning starting in 1909 (Washington (DC), 21–2 May 1909; Rochester (NY), 2–4 May 1910; Philadelphia (PA), 15–17 May 1911; Boston (MA), 27–9 May 1912; Chicago (IL), 5–7 May 1913; Toronto (Canada), 25–7 May 1914; Detroit (MI), 7–9 Jun. 1915; Cleveland (OH), 5–7 Jun. 1916). From 1917, the NCCP was organized under the auspices of the American City Planning Institute (founded at Cleveland during the 8th NCCP).

2 See Peterson, J.A., The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 See Davallon, J. (dir.), Claquemurer pour ainsi dire tout l'univers. La mise en exposition (Paris, 1986), 14Google Scholar.

4 See Baxandall, M., ‘Exposer l'intention. Les conditions préalables à l'exposition visuelle des objets à fonction culturelle’, Les cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, 43 (1993), 3543Google Scholar.

5 ‘Congestion shows’ of Benjamin C. Marsh, New York, 3–6 May 1909, and Washington, 21–2 May1909, part of the first NCCP; Exhibition ‘Boston 1915’, 1 Nov. – 11 Dec. 1909, of F. Law Olmsted Jr, Werner Hegemann and Philip Cabot.

6 ‘Allgemeine Städtebau-Ausstellung’ of Werner Hegemann, Berlin, 1 May – 30 Jun. 1910, Düsseldorf, 1–30 Sep. 1910; ‘Town Planning Conference and Exhibition’ of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London, 10–22 Oct. 1910.

7 See Welter, V.M., ‘Penser, classer: cataloguing P. Geddes's Cities and Town Planning Exhibition’, Newsletter of the Society of Architectural Historians, 60 (1997), 13Google Scholar; Welter, V.M., ‘Stages of an exhibition, the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition of P. Geddes’, Planning History, 1 (1998), 2535Google Scholar; Welter, V.M., Collecting Cities. Images from P. Geddes’ Cities and Town Planning Exhibition (Glasgow, 1999)Google Scholar; P. Chabard, ‘Exposer la ville: P. Geddes (1854–1932) et le Town planning movement’, University of Paris VIII Ph.D. thesis, 2008.

8 See Boardman, Ph., The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-educator, Peace Warrior (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Meller, H.E., Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London, 1990)Google Scholar; Welter, V.M., Biopolis: P. Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar.

9 Abercrombie, P., ‘Geddes as town planner’, in A. Defries, The Interpreter Geddes: The Man and his Gospel (London, 1923), 323Google Scholar.

10 See Topalov, Ch. (ed.), Laboratoires du nouveau siècle: la nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914 (Paris, 1999), 13Google Scholar.

11 Housing, Town Planning, Etc. Act 1909 (9 Edw. 7, c. 44; royal assent: 3 Dec. 1909).

12 Founded in 1900, after the 1897 Housing Congress, the National Housing Reform Council, located at 41 Russell Square in London, was renamed in 1909 the National Housing and Town Planning Council.

13 Mainly drawings and photographs of the British garden cities (like Letchworth), garden villages (like New Earswick, near York, or Alkrington, near Manchester) or garden suburbs (like Hampstead, near London, or Brentham, near Ealing), or even co-partnership estates (like Harborne, near Birmingham, or Sealand, near Chester) and older philanthropic estates (like Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, and Bourneville, near Birmingham). See Geddes, P. and Mears, F.C., Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. Explanatory Guide Book and Outline Catalogue (Edinburgh, 1911), 33–8Google Scholar.

14 In the CTPExh, we could find, for example, town planning exhibits from the Municipality of Stockholm or the Municipality of Ulm, Joseph Stübben's town extension plans, historic maps and plans of Paris, or small reproduction of American City Beautiful experiments (notably Jules Guérin's drawing of Burnham's Chicago plan). Geddes also exhibited a collection of plans of continental cities (Berlin, Frankfort, Vienna, Leipzig, Düsseldorf) from LGB's own documentation. See ibid., 31–2 and 39–42.

15 The major part of Geddes’ contribution to the CTPExh was his ‘Outline of a survey of Edinburgh’, a heterogeneous and evolving collection of documents about Edinburgh, combining historical and geographical maps, series of photographs, engravings and paintings, synthetic drawings by the architect Frank C. Mears (mainly bird's eye views showing the different steps of the urbanization of Edinburgh), or architectural or geographical models. See ibid., 47–64.

16 See P. Chabard, ‘L'Outlook Tower comme outil d'instruction civique’, University of Paris VIII master thesis, 2000; Chabard, P., ‘L'Outlook Tower, anamorphose du monde’, Le Visiteur, 7 (2001), 6489Google Scholar; Chabard, P., ‘The Outlook Tower as an anamorphosis of the world: Patrick Geddes and the theme of vision’, Journal of Generalism and Civics, 4 (2004) (http://patrickgeddes.co.uk/feature_eleven.html)Google Scholar; Chabard, P., ‘Towers and globes: architectural and epistemological differences between Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Towers and Paul Otlet's Mundaneums’, in Rayward, B. (ed.), European Modernism and the Information Society. Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (London, 2008), 105–26Google Scholar.

17 See Geddes, P., ‘Civics: as applied sociology. Part I’, Sociological Papers 1904 (London, 1905), 103–18Google Scholar; Geddes, P., ‘Civics: as concrete and applied sociology. Part II’, Sociological Papers 1905 (London, 1906), 57119Google Scholar.

18 Part of this documentation was produced, to his request, by close collaborators or friends of Geddes: for example, the artists James Paterson or Eric Robertson, the lithographer Bruce J. Home, the photographer Robert Dykes, the cartographer John G. Bartholomew, the architect Frank C. Mears, etc.

19 In Toronto, for example, he met W.S.B. Armstrong, secretary of the Civic Guild and future chairman of the Toronto Housing Company, with whom he evoked the idea of a Canadian tour of the CTPExh. The negotiations, led from the beginning of the spring to the end of the summer 1911, finally failed for political reasons.

20 Proceedings of the Third National Conference on City Planning, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 15–17, 1911 (Boston, MA, 1911), 264.

21 See Hegemann, W., Der Städtebau nach den ergebnissen der allgemeinen Städtebau-Ausstellung in Berlin nebst einem anhang: Die Internationale Sädtebau-Ausstellung in Düsseldorf (Berlin, vol. I, 1911, vol. II, 1913)Google Scholar; Ch. Collins, Crasemann, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism (New York, 2005), 3545Google Scholar.

22 See letter from R. Unwin to P. Geddes, 17 Jun. 1911 (National Library of Scotland (NLS), MS 19571, fol. 76). See also Collins, Werner Hegemann, 26.

23 See letter from R. Unwin to P. Geddes, 14 Jun. 1911 (NLS, MS 10571, fol. 70).

24 See letter from P. Geddes to F. L. Olmsted Jr, 2 Aug. 1911 (NLS, MS 10513, fol. 46).

25 See letter from P. Geddes to F.L. Olmsted Jr, 2 Aug. 1911 (NLS, MS 10513, fol. 46).

26 See letter from R. Unwin to P. Geddes, 10 Aug. 1911 (NLS, MS 10571, fol. 88).

27 Letter from W. Hegemann to R. Unwin, 2 Oct. 1911 (NLS, MS 10571, fol. 97).

29 Letter from F.C. Mears to R. Unwin, 30 Oct. 1911 (NLS, MS 10571, fol. 101).

31 See Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes, 167–78.

32 See S. Reynolds, Paris–Edinburgh: Cultural Connections in the Belle Epoque (Aldershot, 2007), 79–99 (ch. 3, ‘Bringing Paris to Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes's networks of academics, anarchists and artists, 1870s-1890s’).

33 See Zueblin, Ch., ‘The world's first sociological laboratory’, American Journal of Sociology, 5 (1899), 577–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 The Twentieth Century Magazine was founded in Boston in 1909 by Benjamin Orange Flower (1858–1918). Pioneer of investigative journalism, he first founded the review Arena of which he was editor between 1889 and 1896 and from 1900 to his death, in Aug. 1909.

35 See letter from Ch. Zueblin to P. Geddes, 1 Jul. 1911 (NLS, MS 10542, fol. 149).

36 See Peterson, The Birth of City Planning, 108–15.

37 Founded at Louisville, May 1897.

39 Marsh, B.C., An Introduction to City Planning: Democracy's Challenge to the American City (New York, 1909), 156Google Scholar.

40 Benjamin Marsh was notably an ardent advocate of Henri George's single tax on land, particularly unpopular among big landowners, major actors of urbanism.

41 See letter from J. Fels to W.H. Page (US ambassador at London 1913–18), 5 Aug. 1913 (NLS, MS 10571, fol. 125).

42 See letters from G.E. Hooker to P. Geddes, 17 Oct. 1912 (NLS, MS 10543, fol. 122) and 14 Jan. 1913 (NLS, MS 10543, fol. 196).

43 Counting among the 67 participants of the second NCCP (Rochester (NY), 2–4 May 1910), George Ellsworth Hooker (1861–1939) was nominated by F.L. Olmsted to the new Executive Committee as the expert of transportation issues (see Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problem of Congestion, Rochester, New York, May 2–4, 1910 (Boston, MA, 1912), 4).

44 See Geddes, P., The Masque of Ancient Learning and its Many Meanings (Edinburgh, 1912)Google Scholar.

45 Born in England, brillant student at the University of Edinburgh, Victor Verasis Branford (1863–1930) was one of the first residents of Geddes’ University Halls and a pillar of his famous Summer Meetings (between 1893 and 1897 he gave lectures there on history and economy). After the death of his father (1891), Branford associated with John Ross, accountant (registered in 1893), and himself a resident of University Halls. In 1896, they set up their company, Branford, Ross and Co., in a room of the Outlook Tower, of which Ross was secretary for a time. Involved in the management and financing of most Geddesian undertakings, Ross and Branford opened their London office in the late 1890s, first on Victoria Street, then (before 1900) at 5–7 Old Queen Street, Westminster. Ross and Branford broke their association in 1908, when the latter started to be involved in important agricultural and industrial businesses in America. In a total communion with Geddes’ ideas, Branford co-signed with him numerous publications (for example the book The Coming Polity: A Study in Reconstruction (London, 1917), first book of their collection ‘The Making of the Future’). See Scott, J. and Husbands, Ch.T., ‘Victor Branford and the building of British sociology’, Sociological Review, 55 (2007), 462–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mumford, L., Sketches from Life (Boston, MA, 1982), 252–69Google Scholar.

46 See letter from V.V. Branford to P. Geddes, 21 Apr. 1913 (NLS, MS 10556, fol. 291).

47 Created in 1898, at the same time as the Greater New York City (including Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island), the Board of Estimate and Apportionment was composed of eight members, including the five presidents of Borroughs. This Board worked mainly on budget and land use and worked out the first New York zoning plan.

48 See letters from F. Backus Williams to P. Geddes, 23 and 25 Jul. 1913 (NLS, MS 10543, fol. 251 and fol. 253).

49 Premier congrès international et exposition comparée des villes: I. Construction des villes; II. Organisation de la vie communale; organisé sous le haut patronage et avec le concours de la ville de Gand, à l'occasion de l'Exposition universelle, en cette ville, 1913, et sous les auspices de ‘l'Union des villes et communes belges’ (Brussels, 1914).

50 The reformer Edward Ewing Pratt, familiar with the city planning milieu – he attended the second NCCP (see E.E. Pratt, ‘Relief through proper distribution of factories’, Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning, 107–12) – was responsible for raising funds for the City Planning Exhibition, on behalf of the Industrial Development Bureau of the New York Merchants’ Company.

51 Letter from V.V. Branford to P. Geddes, n.d. [Jun. 1913] (NLS, MS 10556, fol. 298).

52 Letter from P. Geddes to P. Chubb, 24 Nov. 1913 (NLS, MS 10514, fol. 37).

53 Letter from G.S. Webster to C.D. Foss (secretary of the mayor of Philadelphia), 30 Jun. 1913 (NLS, MS 10594, fol. 186).

54 See ‘Report of the Committee on Finance’, in Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning. Chicago, Illinois, May 5–7, 1913 (Boston, MA, 1913), 260.

55 See ‘Report of Panama-Pacific Exhibit Committee’, ibid., 260.

56 Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on City Planning. Toronto, May 25–27, 1914 (Boston, MA, 1914), 345.

57 See letter from H.L. Gray (secretary of Richard B. Watrous) to P. Geddes, 2 Jul. 1913 (NLS, MS 10594, fol. 187).

58 See Cutlip, S.M., Fundraising in the United States: Its Role in America's Philanthropy (New Brunswick, 1990), 550Google Scholar.

59 See ibid., 189–90; Buttenheim, E.J., ‘Public servant extraordinary’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 15 (1956), 231–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Quoted in Cutlip, Fundraising in the United States, 190.

61 See letter from H.S. Buttenheim to V.V. Branford, 24 Jun. 1913, (NLS, MS 10556, fol. 292).

62 Ford, G.B., ‘Chambers of commerce and city planning’, American City, 10 (1914)Google Scholar, 449 (quoted in: Peterson, The Birth of City Planning, 277).

63 See Saunier, P.Y., ‘Sketches from the Urban Internationale, 1910–1950: voluntary associations, international institutions and US philanthropic foundations’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25 (2001), 380403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Payre, R. and Saunier, P.Y., ‘L'Union Internationale des Villes o l'Internazionale municipale (1913–1940)’, Amministrare, 30 (2000), 217–39Google Scholar.

64 For example, Otlet participed in the Congrès Universel d'Esperanto, held in Antwerp in 1911.

65 See Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning, 18–24.

66 E.H. Bennett, ‘Some aspects of city planning with reference to the Chicago Plan’, in ibid., 93–104.

67 See Burnham, D.H. and Bennett, E.H., Plan of Chicago (Chicago, 1909)Google Scholar.

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