IT is not often that a man’s decision to move house can be seen as a turning point in Scottish history, but in 1886 when Patrick Geddes relocated his family from Princes Street less than a mile to the Old Town of Edinburgh, it was a short journey that became a giant leap forward, arguably for all humankind.

For no sooner had Geddes and his wife Anna, then pregnant with their daughter Norah, arrived in James Court just off the Lawnmarket at the top of the Royal Mile than he began to change Edinburgh for the good and forever. Arguably it also began a movement that is now global – city conservationism.

Two years previously, Geddes had taken the first real steps in what would become a lifelong cause to improve cities by founding the Environment Society which later became the Edinburgh Social Union with the aim of encouraging local citizens to survey, plan, and improve their local environment.

Now he put his ideas into practical action and his new home at No 6 James Court was a very good place to start. He began by improving the building in which he lived, but he was soon persuading his neighbours that communal action could benefit them all.

In short he created a process of community conservation which arguably is the greatest influence he had on Scotland – he showed us that old buildings fallen on hard times could be brought back to useful life by creative innovation and communal redevelopment. The Old Town had become a slum in the 19th century after the building of the New Town and the expansion of suburbs. Geddes stopped the Old Town’s decay in its tracks and it all began with James Court.

Built between 1723 and 1727 by James Brownhill, and once a prestigious tenemented property, James Court had been home to the likes of the philosopher David Hume and the writer James Boswell who entertained Dr Samuel Johnson in his flat during the Englishman’s famous trip to Scotland. Before Geddes arrived one writer described the building as “a spot where unredeemed squalor had reigned for at least half a century”.

Geddes saw the possibilities, however, and the official website of Edinburgh World Heritage, the body which in 1999 replaced the Conservation Committees of the Old and New Towns, records the capital’s debt to Geddes.

“Geddes was committed to the regeneration of the Old Town,” states their account, “and to bringing the university and the community together. Together Patrick and his family energetically set about trying to transform James Court, cleaning, painting, planting window boxes and organising rubbish collection. Their idea was to enable the people to take control of the area and demonstrate that it could be a pleasant place to live. It is largely thanks to his efforts that so much of old Edinburgh still exists today”.

James Court was only the start. Geddes was anxious that his employer, Edinburgh University, should strengthen its links to the capital in general and he came up with the idea of establishing a student residence in renovated Old Town buildings. Thus several buildings in the Old Town began to be converted and Geddes can add the foundation of the first Scottish halls of residence to his achievements. Abbey Cottages, White Horse Close and the impressive Riddle’s Court all got the Geddes treatment – the last-named place, formerly home to University Hall, is home to the Patrick Geddes Centre today.

They not only proved a boon to students but helped make the Old Town seem a desirable place to live again. Not that he was sentimental – if a building was beyond repair and renovation he would have it demolished, usually to allow in more light and air.

Even though he became Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee, in 1888, Geddes continued with his conservation and development work in the capital, culminating in his development in 1890-93 of the Outlook Tower with its famous camera obscura and Ramsay Garden.

Geddes actively encouraged people to question their environments, once writing: “It is interesting sometimes to stop and think and wonder what the place you are currently at used to be like in times past, who walked there, who worked there and what the walls have seen.”

The Outlook Tower was an innovation of huge importance because it made Geddes’ ideas that people should survey and plan their environment a practical reality – he did not build the original tower but took it over in 1892 and as visitors ascended to the camera obscura on the top floor they learned about the world, Europe, English-speaking countries, Scotland and Edinburgh itself. There is still a room in the Outlook Tower dedicated to Geddes and of course the camera obscura remains one of the city’s great attractions.

GEDDES’S development of Ramsay Garden is for me his most extraordinary achievement in Scotland. Originally named for the poet Allan Ramsay the Elder who had a house on the site from 1733, Geddes’ Ramsay Gardens development was conceived as student residences and was designed around Ramsay Lodge, the various flats were built in a mixture of various styles, with Scots Baronial to the fore.

Geddes moved his family into No 14 which had view over to Fife and frescoes by Charles Mackie. Even today, with its location adjacent to the Castle Esplanade, visitors sometimes just stop and stare at Ramsay Garden, for it is truly beautiful. Now in his forties, Geddes was only just hitting his stride. In 1883, he had founded a series of international summer schools, Meetings of Art and Science, and thanks largely to them, his fame was spreading across the world as his ideas on everything from sociology to town planning began to be appreciated. They lasted until 1903, while his famous Cities Exhibition toured Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Belfast and Ghent in the early 1900s, also helping to spread his town planning philosophy and making him even more famous.

In 1900, he held an International Assembly in Paris, stating this aim: “Instead of isolating our school and our many subjects from the everyday world, we intend to plant it not merely in the French capital, but in what for next summer at least will be the focal point, the capital of the entire civilized world.”

In 1904 he published City Development and in that year and in 1905 Geddes read his two-part paper, Civics: as Applied Sociology, to the first meetings of the British Sociological Society which he helped to found.

It contained his acerbic view of politics and politicians, as well as city problems: “Representative government fails to yield all that its inventors hoped of it, simply because it is so tolerably representative of its majorities; and there is thus great truth in the common consolation that our municipal governments, like larger ones, are seldom much worse than we deserve

“The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance, dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene, and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist, utilitarian and artistic.

“Even the most earnest and capable workers towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.”

Two visits to the US made his name there, but he did not take up an invitation to stay.

Back in Edinburgh in 1909, Geddes helped lay out Edinburgh Zoo, taking the view that the needs of animals should be respected.

As well as the culture of France – he founded the Franco-Scottish Society – Geddes had always been an admirer of eastern philosophy and he was invited to India to show his exhibition. In 1914, with war raging in Europe, Geddes prepared to go to India. The ship carrying the exhibition was sunk, but within a few weeks Geddes had reconstituted it and of course the exhibition proved a triumph.

It led to governors and councils across India commissioning Geddes to report on their town planning.

In a 1915 report on the towns of the Madras (now Chennai) region, Geddes gave probably the best summary of his planning philosophy: “Town Planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes, and interest, as we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish.”

Two years later he expounded on the holistic approach he wanted taken in the planning of cities. He wrote to the Maharaja of Kapurthala: “Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.”

Yet that year of 1917 was to prove disastrous for Geddes. His wife Anna caught typhoid fever and died, and while she was on her death bed Geddes learned that his son Alasdair had been killed in action on the Western Front.

Geddes threw himself into his work. The capital Delhi was undergoing a renewal and Geddes is credited with laying out the new city, all of this while taking the Chair of Sociology at Bombay (Mumbai) University from 1919 onwards.

In that year he also started work on projects in Palestine, working with the architect Frank Mears – later knighted and at one time Scotland’s foremost planner – who had married Geddes’s daughter Norah. This collaboration led to an invitation to produce the layout for the city of Tel Aviv, which was closely followed by the developers and which became the capital of Israel, thus enabling Geddes to say he had designed two capital cities, as well as substantially altering his own capital. You could even say a fourth now that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, as he deigned much of the city’s Hebrew University and made major recommendations on its planning regulations.

Geddes said he was retiring due to ill health which caused him to leave India, but in 1924 he went to France and there founded in Montpellier an international teaching institution, the College des Ecossais, or Scots College, which he hoped would be a recreation of the famous Scots College of Paris.

Growing more frail, at the end of 1931 Geddes was offered a knighthood by King George V, and he lived long enough to receive the honour. He died in Montpellier on April 17, 1932, at the age of 77.

I firmly believe Sir Patrick Geddes still does not get the appreciation he deserves, but the Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust, the Patrick Geddes centre and many others are trying to rectify that. More power to them.