Patrick Geddes

advantageous impact.

Secondly, mirroring nationwide spatial and structural changes in employment, new footloose industries (eg, electronics and light engineering) developed on peripheral industrial estates, as at Pitreavie, but, generally, Dunfermline’s employment scene is dominated by the service sector – education, council, health and retail work. Significant employers include Sky UK, CR Smith, Lloyds, Nationwide, and, since 2011, online retailer Amazon with its very extensive warehousing facility, well placed to facilitate fast delivery of goods. Geddes could not have envisaged the digital era, well exemplified by Amazon, but his neotechnic thinking involved ongoing adoption of new technology and cleaner energy.

Thirdly, housing quality improved. Municipal housing schemes were built, for instance at Townhill in the 1920s, and at Abbeyview after WW2; and private housing developed, such as on former farmland at Pitcorthie, from the 1960s. With rapid 21st-century population growth, from 39,229 (2001 Census) to 54,640 (2022 estimate), Dunfermline’s housing and retail parks continue to encroach greenfield space, especially east of the city, notably in the ever-expanding suburb of Duloch, flanked by the M90 motorway. Duloch’s growth reflects, firstly, Dunfermline’s nodality, enabling people travelling from Fife to work in south Fife and Edinburgh, thanks to the proximity of the M90, the Forth Bridge, Queensferry Crossing and nearby railway stations in Dunfermline and Inverkeithing; and, secondly, cheaper housing compared to the capital. Fourthly, basic to neotechnic thought was environmental education. For Geddes, promoting environmental awareness should begin at infancy, progressing throughout formal schooling. Doubtless he thoroughly approved of a series of innovative rail-based school excursions in the Forth Valley for Dunfermline’s school children from 1897 to 1900, led by Geddesian acolytes such as AJ Herbertson and financed by industrialist Henry Beveridge of St Leonard’s Linen Works. Such innovative fieldwork taught youngsters to observe, record and interpret Geddes’s interrelated triad of ‘place-folk-work’; a curricular methodology followed by adherents, notably Norman Johnson, headteacher in the 1930s–40s at McLean School and Commercial School, Dunfermline. For Geddes, such environmental education was the crucial element of a ‘true’ education; the basis of lifelong participation by folk in the re-planning of society on sustainable lines.

In Geddes’s 1904 report, he suggested that Dunfermline should have three books: one on its past, covering history and geography; one on its present, a social survey; and a third on its future, the city’s ‘book of hope’; not to be considered separately but synthesized. Noting that Dunfermline would expand, he accepted that it “cannot become a Glasgow or Edinburgh.” Rather, the hope for its successful future lay in continued fostering of civic pride, grounded in an eclectic environmental and historical awareness, and a recognition that “town planning is not merely place planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning” – a civic challenge for the city authorities, community councils and citizens of Scotland’s eighth and latest city, surely a status of which Geddes would highly approve.