The Influence of Patrick Geddes in Post-War Italy Through Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Giancarlo De Carlo

The essay aims to shed light on the influence that the thinking of Patrick Geddes had on urban planning in Italy, through his theories broadcasted by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and interpreted in the work of Giancarlo De Carlo. In fact, a key role in the spreading of Geddes’s inheritance was that of Tyrwhitt, a British town planner, landscape architect, editor and educator almost neglected by architectural historiography. In 1949 she edited Geddes’s Cities in Evolution of 1915 and promoted his ideals during the planning for postwar Britain reconstruction. She attended the CIAM congresses after World War Two, where she met De Carlo. Cities in Evolution accompanied De Carlo’s professional and cultural life throughout his career. Geddes and De Carlo shared the operational eclecticism and the idea of the city mainly in three directions: the unfruitfulness of the city-country opposition, the practice of ‘reading’ to decode the context, and the interdisciplinarity as a criterion to move from urban planning studies to realizations.