Aux origines de l’aménagement régional: le schéma de la Valley Section de Patrick Geddes (1925)

At the beginning of the 20th century, Patrick Geddes was the inventor of one of the first theories of Regional Planning, a field where his influence is widely acknowledged. Using a landscape approach, he built his graphic model of the "Valley Section", or Valley Plan of Civilisation. It is both a longitudinal section of a humanized valley and a metaphor for the geographic dimension of the social and economic progress that Geddes aimed to promote. Geographers like Gary Dunbar and Claude Raffestin argued that the idea of the Valley Section was directly inspired by the hydrographical basin model conceived by Élisée Reclus. Both enjoyed a long, amicable collaboration that can be retraced in their texts and archives.