Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish Enlightenment

The essays cover a cross-section of building types and cities, representing the authors' interests. All deal with the specific ways in which the process of urbanization and industrialization in Scotland led to changes in both urban form and institutional architecture. The eighteenth century saw the growth of a middle class in Glasgow, connected with industry and commerce, which had to be housed (described in Frank Walker's article); it saw the rise of an academic and professional class in Edinburgh which apparently wanted to be separate from the old overcrowded city (described in Peter Reed's essay on the Edinburgh New Town); it led to the rise of public education for children and the growth of hospitals, asylums and prisons for those who would necessarily be at the lowest rungs of the social ladder, given the new industrial order (described in Thomas Markus's two articles on the Scottish version of what Erving Goffman called "total institutions"). And finally it led to the need to cover up, on the part of the ruling classes, the terrible urban conditions that were developing, and instead romanticize the Scottish countryside and pastoral life, in literature (described in Andrew Noble's essay "Visions of Scottish Pastoral").