Biopolis

Volker Welter's book offers a fascinating journey into uncharted territory. The seminal figure of Patrick Geddes emerges from the extraordinary quantity of archival documents as a key thinker on the city and its history. Issues hitherto repressed in the history of modern urbanism, such as the impact of spirituality on town designs, are brought back to the center of attention.

Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the history of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Director, Institute francais d'architecture

A landmark study that analyzes the complex ideas that lie behind Geddes's work with fresh clarity and insight.

Choice

Welter does a first-class job of 'reading' Geddes and interpreting the complex ideas in his work.

Journal of Regional Science

Biopolis scrapes off a century of gloss to give us Patrick Geddes's early modernist vision of the city in all its original vivid coloration.

Michael J. Hebbert, Professor of Town Planning, University of Manchester

This impressive and topical study on Patrick Geddes is a major contribution to the 'postfordist' call for an understanding of the city as an expression, symbol, and monument of human culture—as a social piece of art. Biopolis is an indispensable source of inspiration for all urban theorists and practitioners who are engaged in the reinvention of the city after a century of failure in urban planning and urban design.

Dieter Hassenpflug, Faculty of Architecture, Bauhaus Universität Weimar

Biopolis breaks through the long-standing enigma of Patrick Geddes and his 'thinking machines.' It is essential reading for anyone interested in the cross-currents of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Robert Wojtowicz, Chair, Department of Art, Old Dominion University

Taking the city as the unifying focus of the prolific but seemingly disparate activities of Patrick Geddes, Welter brilliantly illuminates and lucidly explores the guiding threads in Geddes's projects on the city within a 'larger modernism' and as an organic entity, as expression of life, as historical ensemble, as metaphysical city, and as cultural and spiritual metropolis. In so doing, and for the first time, Welter has provided us with a richly textured conception of Geddes's project as a living whole, one that is not only deeply embedded within its international philosophical, cultural, and social contexts but is revealed to be profoundly relevant to today's urban and architectural concerns. As such, this finely crafted and meticulously researched study should be essential reading for all those concerned with the development of the modern city.

David Frisby, Professor of Sociology, Glasgow University

Going further than all recent discussions of the history of the city in the first machine age, Welter considers the Geddesian thinking machines' as fundamental with regard to the emergence of the modern city. Biopolis, with its profound analyses, has set a keystone for a new way of looking at the starting point of modern town planning in Britain and Europe before World War I.

Bernd Nicolai, Department of Art History, University of Trier