Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 2/L—The City Complied: Town, School, Cloister, and City Proper

by Patrick Geddes

In course of this fourfold analysis, it is plain that we have reached the very converse—or at all events the complement—of that geographical determinism with which we started, and that we have returned to a view corresponding to the popular one (of "People, Affairs, Places," p. 69), which we then set aside for the reasons given. The "great man theory" of history, at best less crudely stated, thus reappears; in short, to the initial thesis we have now the distinct antithesis. It is time, therefore, to bring these together towards the needed synthesis. Hence to the page (p. 77) on which was summarised the determinist view of Town and School, we now require the complemental statement upon page (p. 87) of Cloister and City proper. Nor must we be content, with too many controversialists hitherto, to keep in view only one at a time; but by folding back the pages of print between these two half-schemes, as the book lies open, to take in both together.

We may thus finally compress the essentials of this whole paper into a simple formula— Town, school, cloister and city.

[1]

or most briefly—

/\ TOWN CITY |
| |
| |
| SCHOOL CLOISTER \/

—noting in every case the opposite direction of the arrows. The application of this formula to different types of town, such as those already indicated in the former instalment of this paper (Vol. I., p. 107) or in the present one, will not be found to present any insuperable difficulty. It must, however, be kept clearly in view that the city of each day and generation subsides or decays more or less completely into the mere town anew, as the cloister into the schools. The towns and cities of the world are thus classifiable in terms of their past development and present condition.

SUMMARY

Condensing now this lengthy, yet compressed and abbreviated series of analyses into a single page of summary, we may briefly define the main aspects and departments of civics from the present point of view. First then, comes the study of civics as fundamentally (and ever anew) an orderly development—at once geographic, economic, and anthropologic in its nature—a survey of place, work, and folk—and these not merely or mainly as broken up into the fine dust of censuses and statistics, nor even of the three too separate sciences above named, but as a living unity, the human hive, the Town.

Corresponding to this objective and organic life we reorganise its fundamental subjective life. This is fundamentally, and ever partially, the record and reflex of the life of the hive, the Town: of all its general and particular environment and function, its family type and development; and however overlaid by imported culture or by decayed ideals, it is fundamentally expressed in local knowledge, in craft tradition, in kinship and its associated kindness, in habits and customs, and their developments up to morals and laws. Simple terms corresponding to place, work, and folk, are hard to find; say, however, till better be suggested, that in close relation to the maternal arms in which general social thought and its utmost pedagogic developments alike begin, it is place-lore, work-lear, and folk-love, which are the essentials of every School.[11] That existing educational machineries may not adequately recognise these is not of course the question here.

These three terms, lore, lear, and love are thus well related to their respectively deepening levels of sense, intelligence and feeling; and their respective relation is thus more plain to the imagery, the theory, and the idealism above defined as the essentials of the Cloister. The psychology of the processes of poetic, philosophic and spiritual awakening and renewal is in these days being approached anew, both from the individual and social side, but cannot here be entered upon.

Finally and supremely arises the City proper—its individuality dependent upon the measure and form in which ideals are expressed and harmonised in social life and polity, ideas synthetised in culture, and beauty carried outwards from the study or chamber of the recluse into the world of art.

Practical conclusion

The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of citizenship. Thus social survey prepares for social service, as diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon our knowledge and understanding anew. Beyond social observations, and the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social activities and the laboratories for preparing them, or at least the leavens of them; or, again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more synthetic, we need some shelter[12] into which to gather the best seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend the seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a centre of survey and service in each and every city—in a word, a Civicentre for sociologist and citizen.