The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of
citizenship. Thus social survey prepares for social service, as
diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon
our knowledge and understanding anew. Beyond social observations, and
the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social
activities and the laboratories for preparing them, or at least the
leavens of them; or, again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more
synthetic, we need some shelter[12] into which to gather the best
[Page: 93] seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend the
seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a centre
of survey and service in each and every city--in a word, a Civicentre
for sociologist and citizen.
[12] Without forgetting the many institutions and workers in almost all
departments of the field of civics, the rise of definite surveys and of
scientific groupings like this Society, without ignoring also the many
admirable workers and institutions of social endeavour, and their
progressive integration into Social Unions, Institutes of Service, and
the like, I may be permitted to press for the need of uniting both
types, the scientific and the practical, into a single one--a civic
museum and active centre in one. Of this type, my own Outlook Tower at
Edinburgh is, so far as I am aware, the earliest beginning; and, despite
its rudimentary condition, may thus serve to suggest a type of
institution which will be found of service alike to the sociologist and
the citizen.