Think Global, Act Local

About the Book: 

It’s time to look again at the originator of the phrase for our times – ‘Think Global, Act Local’

Town planning. Interest-led, open-minded education. Conservation of worthwhile buildings. Community gardens. All are so central to our society that we think we invented them. In fact, they were visualised by Sir Patrick Geddes, one of the greatest forward-thinkers of the modern world.

A Victorian Scot, Geddes went out of fashion after his death but in recent years he has become almost a patron saint of the sustainable development movement. His ideas and his practical example continue to inspire the world, in the present and in the future.

This new edition of Think Global, Act Local incorporates much new work on Geddes and examines, in particular, the question of how this Scot from a fairly humble background, with no university degree, could be welcomed into the Darwin/Huxley circle, could be the confidant of two Viceroys and twice be offered a knighthood.

Reviews: 

Should be in every secondary school in Scotland. SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT

There is a distinct sanguinity rising from these pages regarding the free-wheeling, multidisciplinary, transcontinental life of Geddes.  SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS

Geddes was a global thinker in practice, a whole generation or more before the Western democracies fought a global war. LEWIS MUMFORD

About the Author:

WALTER STEPHEN was born in Thurso, Caithness and educated at schools and universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with degrees in Geography, Economic History and Education. He was Principal Teacher of Geography in distinguished schools in Fife and Edinburgh, then became the first Adviser in Social Studies in Edinburgh and Senior Adviser in Lothian Region. In schools shrunk by falling student numbers, he set up Castlehill Urban Studies Centre, the first successful Urban Studies Centre in Britain, and the History of Education Centre.

As an independent scholar he has been active in investigating Interesting Victorians and has been responsible for books on Patrick Geddes (planner and polymath), Willie Park Junior (‘The Man who took Golf to the World’), Frank Fraser Darling (born in 1903, but a Victorian in spirit who lived among the red deer and founded the environmental movement) and Charles Darwin (in The Evolution of Evolution: Darwin, Enlightenment and Scotland).