‘The Making of the Future: Now’: Edinburgh Art Festival

Abstract

In spite of his international legacy, Patrick Geddes is perhaps not so well known outside Scotland. Born in 1854, the biologist and botanist turned sociologist, turned town planner and experimental pedagogue, conducted work at home and overseas, establishing schools, universities and city plans in France, India, Israel and Palestine. In Edinburgh, the Aberdeenshire-born polymath is perhaps most remembered for his impact on the city’s Old Town. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the area was a slum crippled with poverty and disease, Geddes moved his family into a tenement just off the Royal Mile. From this base, Geddes set about his method of tackling urban poverty: ‘conservative surgery’. Instead of entirely demolishing and clearing the area to rebuild from scratch, he suggested that existing space should be ‘opened out’ to let in light and air: a botanist’s take on city planning. In practice, this was achieved through removing selected tenements in order to create small squares or courtyards; windows could then be added to the newly exposed walls, and gardens planted in the new spaces opened up. The myriad hidden gardens, closes and courtyards peppered throughout the Old Town are testament to this. Founded in 2004, Edinburgh Art Festival is one of the major programmes existing within the city-wide palimpsest of alternative, fringe and satellite festivals. 2017 saw the alignment of two anniversaries: seventy years of the Edinburgh International Festival, and one hundred years since Geddes’ 1917 publication The Making of the Future: A Manifesto and a Project, from which the art festival takes its title. In this text, written in the middle of the First World War and looking forward to its end, Geddes laid out his vision for a new holistic society in which ‘Art and Industry, Education and Health, Morals and Business must . . . advance in unison’. The rubric of ‘inter-disciplinarity’ finds its intellectual precursor in Scottish Generalism; Geddes believed in a ‘synthesised’ intellect as opposed to what he saw as a veer towards increased specialization of disciplines. Edinburgh Art Festival’s invocation of Geddesian ideals is two-fold. Through programming projects from Scottish and international artists it seeks to reinforce an outward-looking Scotland (particularly pertinent to current independence debates, in which an independent Scotland might seek EU membership), and calls to mind a phrase that is also Geddesian in origin: ‘think local, act global’. The commissions programme treads the same turf by ‘opening out’ venues in the Old