In hmolscience, Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) (CR:8) was a Scottish physical economist, biologist, and urban planner noted, in architectural thermodynamics, for his circa 1910s theories on energy construction and energy destruction in the design of urban centers.
Overview
Geddes linked historical developments with the consumption of energy and the importance of English polymath John Ruskin’s vision of the role of the physical sciences in the processes of life and for his development of an energy accounting methodology that represents net energy and material transformations, illustrating production inefficiencies and the relative value between energy inputs and outputs. [1]
Geddes is often grouped with Ukrainian physician and socialist Sergei Podolinsky along with engineer and social reformer Josef Popper-Lynkeus who each were said to have tried to promote a biophysical view of economy as a subsystem embedded in a larger system subject to the laws of thermodynamics. [2]
It is difficult, to note, to find exactly what in publication Geddes uses thermodynamics logic? According to Italian architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, Geddes alludes to thermodynamics logic in his 1915 Cities in Evolution, stating that we need both “constructive and destructive energy” in the design of urban fabrics. [4]
American political economist Kenneth Stokes lists Geddes as one of the ‘heretical philosophers of social energetics’, along with Wilhelm Ostwald, Leon Winiarski, A.A. Bogdanov, Nikolai I. Bukharin (Historical Materialism: a System of Sociology, 1921), Julius Davidson, Eduard Sacher, Felix Auerbach, Rudolf Clausius, Leopold Pflaunder, Georg Helm, Thomas Carver, F. Ackerman, F. Henderson, Alfred Lotka, and Frederick Soddy. [3]
References
1. Wallace, Thomas P. (2009). Wealth, Energy, and Human Values (Geddes, pg. 25-26). AuthorHouse.
2. Alier-Martinez, Juan. (2002). The Environmentalism of the Poor: a Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (pg. 19). Edward Elgar Publishing.
3. Stokes, Kenneth M. (1994). Man and Biosphere: Toward a Coevolutionary Political Economy (pg. 90-91). M.E. Sharpe.
4. Fernandez-Galiano, Luis. (2000). Fire and Memory: on Architecture and Energy (pg. 276). MIT Press.
External links
● Patrick Geddes – Wikipedia.
