Geddes' plans for the Asian cities of Tel Aviv and Indore as disruptions of the European dichotowmy between top-down planners-ideologues and bottom-up urban citizens

As a founding member of the city planning movement, Sir Patrick Geddes was greatly infuential to the movement for his anarchistic challenge of the very idea that new cities form 'of thin air' due to the powerful actions of statesmen, capitalists, and planners (Hall, 2002; Rubin, 2009). Geddes self-distinguished conceptions of modern planning, insisting that "urban planning cannot be made from above using general principles⋯studied in one place and imitated elsewhere. City planning is the development of a local way of life, regional character, civic spirit, unique personality⋯ based on its own foundations" (Geddes, 1915, p. 205). Geddes' urban vision was crafted by issues of housing in the industrial city, yet compared with other theories of urban planning, Geddes' 'city of sweat equity' approach to urban housing "contributed to planning theory the idea that men and women could make their own cities" (Hall, 2002, p. 263). While conceived in Europe - Geddes' ideas of modern planning were not materialized in Europe, but rather in Asia: in Palestine and India. Moreover, while Palestine and India were under British colonial rule when Geddes planned Tel Aviv (1925) and Indore (1918), his plans for the two cities were not commissioned by the British colonial authorities but rather by and for local urban and regional populations (Khan, 2011; Weill-Rochant, 2008). Geddes' 1925 Tel Aviv plan and 1918 Indore plan pose alternatives to accepted models of modern planning: technocratic-capitalist Haussmanism, aesthetic City Beautiful, Corbusian 'radiant cities', or utopian Garden City. At the same time, contrary to the phenomenon of makeshift housing predating formal settlement and creating the city de-facto, as in the auto-constructed peripheries of Cairo, Brasilia, or Calcutta (Holston, 2008)-the formation of Tel Aviv and Indore via housing was the result of a conscious, anarchist planning process where Geddes fully realized his ideas: not merely challenging top-down mechanisms, but disrupting the very dichotomous perspective of modern urbanism as a clash between top-down planners-ideologues and bottom-up urban citizens. This paper asks why was it possible for Geddes' ideas to materialize in an Asian (rather than European) setting, and can we understand this modern urbanism as 'Asian Modernism'?.