A transformative Outlook on the twenty-first century city: Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower revisited: Fid-Bau Portal

A transformative Outlook on the twenty-first century city: Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower revisited

Cerra, Joshua F. / Muller, Brook Weld / Young, Robert F.

Highlights•Geddes’ Outlook concepts offer perspective for today’s urban climate change issues.•Today’s Outlook would combine building and landscape within their city-region context.•It would build climate awareness by visualizing impacts and demonstrating adaptation.•It would offer a forum for discourse about climate adaptation strategies.•Such an Outlook could catalyze a new “civics” centered on resilient urban futures.

AbstractAs described in Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower embodies an approach to urban planning that maintains currency in planning and design discourse today. Geddes' tower arranged the history of the city into a vertical array of exhibition spaces while offering a broadened perspective of the city's condition amidst the lateral spread of the region. In this interdisciplinary project, we speculate as to how the planning and design community might draw inspiration from Geddes' work to devise an Outlook for our own times, one that helps people appreciate the interrelated and rapidly evolving dynamics of climate change and urbanization and motivates them to work collaboratively toward positive future outcomes.