Patrick Geddes on Sustainable City Life

This article reinterprets Sir Patrick Geddes’s work to illuminate contemporary challenges in sustainable urban logistics from a service-oriented perspective. Analysis of his two major works shows that Geddes viewed the city as a living organism, structured around essential logistical operations—supply, production, distribution, and disposal—that are inseparable from daily urban life. Such perspective is placed in dialogue with research on urban metabolism and sustainable supply chains, highlighting the limitations of approaches focused solely on carbon reduction. The analysis arguments that disconnections between logistical infrastructures, inhabited spaces, and social practices undermine urban coherence and generate social tensions often hidden by algorithmic optimization. Revisiting Geddes’s Place-Work-Folk triad emphasizes the strategic value of integrating collective vitality, functional proximity, and social cohesion into urban logistics and service systems. Geddes’s insights, though sometimes overlooked, provide a robust theoretical framework for designing sustainable service networks that align operational efficiency with social and territorial value creation.