Influential British town planner Patrick Geddes was trained as an evolutionary biologist long before he began to work on urban social problems in the 1890s. Geddes’ intellectual background led him to see the city less as an industrial machine—as many of his peers imagined (including Haussmann, in the destruction of the social and physical fabric of swathes of medieval Paris; author’s addition)—and more of a great organism splayed out across an entire metropolitan region… he hoped to reintroduce the importance of the environment as a factor in the evolution of civilization, and to make sociology a tool for social change (p. 4).