Survey and the assimilation of a modernist narrative in urbanism

The presence of civic and regional survey as a locus of discussion in early British planning texts is closely associated with the involvement of the Scottish biologist planner Patrick Geddes in the early planning movement. This paper reads the Geddesian survey idea and its assimilation into planning discourse as the expression of a modern apology of planning. Geddes's understanding of survey places science and society in a relationship in which society is not merely determined by the progressive development of scientific insights. Instead, survey is understood as a process in which a growing awareness of the urban environment encourages an informed and self-conscious citizenry to take charge of its own future. In the Geddesian survey-project the citizen appears as the modern subject, caught in an ambiguous relationship to the environment. He or she seems to be fully determined by the environment, while at the same time able to shape that environment freely and independently. The effort to ground planning in scientific survey inserts the planning process within a logic of environmental determinism, while attempting to safeguard a place for planning as an emancipated act of self-determination. Planning appears both as a process determined by 'nature' as well as the quintessential expression of the human con trol over 'nature'. Survey, presented as preliminary to planning, is understood as a thought vehicle which opens up a space for the development of the modern plan in its full reformist breath of both physical reform and social reconstruction.