Planning as Imperial Cultivation in the Work of Patrick Geddes

This chapter considers colonial planning through the work of Patrick Geddes. Geddes is credited for inspiring the now-common phrase “act local, think global,” and in this chapter I argue that both scales—the local and the global—were made possible by the infrastructure of empire and produced through colonial practice. Working in India and Palestine in the interwar period, Geddes did not seek to use this authority to evacuate the local, but instead sought to preserve and reproduce locality in order to further integrate it into existing imperial structures. In so attending to the local, Geddes imagined the figure of the planner as a gardener of places and cultivator of people. Indeed, much of his work in India is pedagogical in nature—rather than unidirectionally imposing his plans, he sought to educate the native populace on the importance of city planning for environmental and social renewal.