Patrick Geddes’s most widely read entry point for stitching together biology, city, and region in a proto-ecological key is Cities in Evolution (1915). It frames the city as a living organism nested in a dynamic environment, proposing the triad place–work–folk as an ecological schema before ecology had its name. Alongside it, The Survey Before Planning distills his methodological core: diagnosis as a biological act, where attentive observation precedes any design gesture, turning planning into a form of fieldwork. Completing the constellation, City Development (1904) articulates the natural region as the true scale of urban understanding, endowed with morphology, function, and evolutionary history. Read together, these texts convert the city from mechanical artifact to cultural ecosystem, insisting that meaningful planning emerges only from reading the living tissue of territory, economy, and community as a single, breathing continuum.
