The typical blurb is usually something like "botanist, town planner and social reformer", but this much under celebrated victorian Scotsman was a great deal more than that.

He was the pioneering champion of a particular sort of inclusive, hands-on education and an important radical thinker about.....well, pretty much everything. And that's because his ideas, prompted by a biologist's understanding of the natural world, led him to see mankind in the widest possible context. For him, life was not merely a series of separately operating systems but a single interdependent whole, of which humans are only a part.

Ecology and society, art and science, local and global, personal and political - to Geddes, these are two sides of the same coin and our ultimate welbeing and progress depend on grasping this.

This short piece is an intro to a longer film exploring the ways in which Geddes' inspirational ideas have especial relevance in the 21st Century.