Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 2/F—Proposed Methodical Analysis

by Patrick Geddes

More fully to understand this two-fold development of Town and School we have first of all apparently to run counter to the preceding popular view, which is here, as in so many cases, the precise opposite of that reached from the side of science. This, as we have already so fully insisted, must set out with geography, thus literally replacing People and Affairs in our scheme above.

Starting then once more with the simple biological formula:

ENVIRONMENT ... CONDITIONS ... ORGANISM

this has but to be applied and defined by the social geographer to become

REGION ... OCCUPATION ... FAMILY-type and Developments

which summarises precisely that doctrine of Montesquieu and his successors already insisted on. Again, in but slight variation from Le Play's simplest phrasing ("Lieu, travail, famille") we have

PLACE ... WORK ... FOLK

It is from this simple and initial social formula that we have now to work our way to a fuller understanding of Town and School. Immediately, therefore, this must be traced upward towards its complexities. For Place, it is plain, is no mere topographic site. Work, conditioned as it primarily is by natural advantages, is thus really first of all place-work. Arises the field or garden, the port, the mine, the workshop, in fact the work-place, as we may simply generalise it; while, further, beside this arise the dwellings, the folk-place.

Nor are these by any means all the elements we are accustomed to lump together into Town. As we thus cannot avoid entering into the manifold complexities of town-life throughout the world and history, we must carry along with us the means of unravelling these; hence the value of this simple but precise nomenclature and its regular schematic use. Thus, while here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists have alternately done—too literally losing or shirking essentials of Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of Folk and Place also.

Tabular and schematic presentments, however, such as those to which we are proceeding, are apt to be less simple and satisfactory to reader than to writer; and this even when in oral exposition the very same diagram has been not only welcomed as clear, but seen and felt to be convincing. The reason of this difficulty is that with the spoken exposition the audience sees the diagram grow upon the blackboard; whereas to produce anything of the same effect upon the page, it must be printed at several successive stages of development. Thus our initial formula,

PLACE ... WORK ... FOLK

readily develops into FOLK

PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK

   (Natural advantages)           (Occupation)

PLACE

This again naturally develops into a regular table, of which the filling up of some of the squares has been already suggested above, and that of the remaining ones will be intelligible on inspection:—

[1]

So complex is the idea of even the simplest Town—even in such a rustic germ as the "farm-town" of modern Scottish parlance, the ton of place-names without number.

The varying development of the Folk into social classes or castes night next be traced, and the influence and interaction of all the various factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history.