Geography, colonialism and town planning: Patrick Geddes’ plan for mandatory Jerusalem

Abstract

Patrick Geddes worked in Jerusalem between 1919 and 1925. He was originally summoned to the city by the Zionists, in order to plan the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; eventually, he also submitted an overall plan for the city, presented to its British Governor. Geddes’ university plan and many of his other local cultural and educational endeavours were not successful. However, his plan for the city was approved and still dictates its development on many planes. The article discusses Geddes’ overall work in Jerusalem as a product of his imperial world view, as he pictured the re-instatement of a biblical Jerusalem and assigned the homecoming Zionists the ancient role of a regional leader among its neighbouring countries. Geddes’ tools for the study of the environment, such as the survey, and his educational endeavours such as the museum and the exhibition, are discussed as local manifestations of the geographical imperial project. Geddes’ urban theory is discussed as a rigid and a foreign product of western and orientalist nature, which was enforced upon the landscape. Geddes himself is presented as a colonial town planner, one who practiced through an imperial professional and personal network and who had aspired to serve both the British and the Jews over the control of identity and space in contested Palestine. Finally, the article links Geography and Planning through the colonial practice of urban and social transformation.