Double bill of lectures for Patrick Geddes exhibition

The ongoing influence of the Scottish planner and botanist Sir Patrick Geddes will be discussed at a double bill of public lectures at the University of Dundee on Wednesday November 18th.

The lectures coincide with an exhibition of Geddes’ work, “The City is a Thinking Machine – Activism in the Built Environment”, which is currently on show at the University. The exhibition features original archival material, much of it never displayed or published before, plus current work by affiliates of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee.

The accompanying lecture series will see contributions on Wednesday from Mike Small, editor of Bella Caledonia, and Paul Guzzardo, Fellow at the Geddes Institute for Urban Research.

“This double bill should be of interest to architects, planners, lawyers, psychologists, artists and other agitators, anyone interested in the city as the arena in which our social, political and legal relations are played out and inscribed in our collective memory,” said Dr Lorens Holms, Director of the Geddes Institute at the University of Dundee.

The lectures take place at 6pm on Wednesday in the D’Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre, Tower Building, University of Dundee. The event is free and everyone is welcome

Mike Small will speak on `Geddes and the 5th Estate: Publishing, Citizenship and Cultural Insurgency’. Mike is the editor of Bella Caledonia, a columnist for the Guardian and a lecturer in Food Citizenship as part of the UNESCO Chair of Sustainable Development and Territory Management at the University of Torino. He founded the Fife Diet local eating experiment which aims to re-localise food production and distribution in response to globalisation and climate change. He worked with the anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin. He has published widely on Geddes. His lecture will put Geddes’ civics in the context of the contemporary outlier press.

Paul Guzzardo’s talk is `A Septic Turn in the Space of Appearance: A Brief for the City with Elites in Decline’. Paul is a Fellow at the Geddes Institute for Urban Research. He is a media activist, designer, and lawyer based in St Louis and Buenos Aires. He maps the devolving state of the American public sphere. He has published papers in Urban Design Journal and AD: architectural design, and co-authored with Michael Sorkin and Mario Correa Displaced: Llonch+Vidalle Architecture. His installations and theatre pieces have been exhibited and performed the US and the UK. His lecture will focus on the role of digital media in collective consciousness.

The lectures will be followed by questions and answers from the audience and there will be a wine reception in the Exhibition in the Lamb Gallery.

The event will be recorded and posted on the Geddes Institute website.

`The City is a Thinking Machine’ exhibition is at the Lamb Gallery, Tower Building, University of Dundee until December 11th. It can be viewed from Monday to Friday each week from 9.30am to 6.30pm.

For more information, please visit the Geddes Institute website at:

www.dundee.ac.uk/geddesinstitute