The Annual Sir Patrick Geddes Commemorative Lecture 2023
By Imandeep Kaur, Founder and Director of CIVIC SQUARE
Thursday 25 May 2023
Throughout her decade-long career, Immy has focused on convening and building community, the role of citizens in radical systemic change, and how we together create more democratic, distributed, open source social and civic infrastructure. Through this work she has discovered much about economic justice and broader injustices, the pivotal role of land and social/civic infrastructure in neighbourhoods, and the value extracted from communities through our broken investment models. It’s an ongoing journey of discovery, emergence and learning together.
Immy is a Co - Founder and Director of CIVIC SQUARE. CIVIC SQUARE is a public square, neighbourhood lab, and creative + participatory platform focused on regenerative civic and social infrastructure within neighbourhoods. Immy is part of a creative and dynamic leadership team who work alongside the local neighbourhood, to offer a bold approach to visioning, building and investing in civic infrastructure for neighbourhoods of the future.
She is also an active member of Project 00. Immy is part of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab Advisory Team, a Birmingham Hippodrome Trustee, a Birmingham Open Media (BOM) Board Member and an Inclusive Economy Partnership Board Champion, and the **National Lottery Community Fund Advisory Board.** Immy was a founding director of Impact Hub Birmingham, which was open between 2015 - 2019. Impact Hub Birmingham was on a mission to help build a fairer more equal and just city, through people place and open movements. On a voluntary basis, Immy also led and ran TEDxBRUM between 2012 and 2017.
Immy’s work has been recognised with a series of notable honours and awards. In 2018, Impact Hub Birmingham was named a NESTA New Radical. For her services to the city of Birmingham, Aston University’s School of Life & Heath Sciences granted Immy an Honorary Doctorate in 2019. And in 2020, Immy was awarded a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship.
View the recording here.
Who was Sir Patrick Geddes?
Patrick Geddes is widely regarded as the founder of modern town planning. His interest in the natural sciences led him to a professorship at Dundee University in botany, after which he developed his interest in sociology and planning. He lived most of his life in Edinburgh during which he established the Edinburgh Social Union, promoted a wide range of sympathetic redevelopment and conservation schemes the length of the Royal Mile, largely for university residential accommodation, founded a publishing company, founded the Franco-Scottish Society, became a major sponsor of the arts, developed summer schools, promoted international festivals, and published seminal texts such as "Cities in Evolution".
He also spent time in India as Chair in Sociology at Bombay University, prepared a plan for the Hebrew University at Jerusalem and finally retired to France where he founded the College des Ecossais in Montpellier. He was knighted in London in the year of his death.
