Memory and Resistance

At the end of the nineteenth century Patrick Geddes acquires the Short Observatory in Edinburgh, and starts its transformation in the Outlook Tower. the building will be restructured by the Scottish biologist, town planner and educator in order to become a pedagogic device to understand the city and support interactive planning processes. from the observatory scoping the city with a 360 degree view from a 25 mt. height, the visitors of the tower could descend through a collection of didactic objects, maps, models, samples, providing an explanation of the urban dimension related to geology, zoology, botanics, statistics, economy, history and sociology. finally, the multidisciplinary experience of the tower led to the street level, to walk into the streets of what, at that time, was a critical transforming area of the city: the degraded old town of Edinburgh. In the following years, Geddes would be an essential actor and activator of the process of regeneration of this territory, restoring housing, founding a cooperative of inhabitants to rebuild the Ramsey Garden district, a people’s university and a self-managed student hostel, and involving inhabitants and children in creating gardens and playgrounds. the Outlook Tower will constitute the organisational and creative fulcrum of this process. As Patrick Geddes remains an essential reference in the history of participatory planning, so his Outlook Tower stands as a quintessential prototype of a typology of interactive structures dedicated to catalyse urban regeneration from below and within.[^1]