Patrick Geddes's (e)utopian Belvedere in Southern France

The College des Ecossais in Montpellier, France, Patrick Geddes' last major project and place of death in 1932, may have been a mere reproduction of his Edinburgh Outlook Tower under fairer skies. The site Geddes fell in love with in the South was, characteristically of his ideals, mostly a place with a view, in fact over much of Languedoc. As we shall show, this view was one of a whole region made ``legible' at a glance, with city, mountains and sea, a prospect at the same time wide and limited, an area with ready access to the rest of the world yet self-contained. Besides, what the ageing Geddes wanted to achieve near Montpellier was no less than to gather a representative assemblage of up-and-coming scholars from three continents. Yet again, the College may have been an excuse for Geddes to postpone the writing of long-awaited books. However, we will see that it also served as a stone-and-mortar receptacle for his ideas and systems, which would hardly be surprising from a thinker who was ever looking for ways of escaping traditional teaching methods.