The word ‘survey’ considered both as a noun and as a verb has its origins in the interrelationships between the natural and social uses of the natural. Its earliest usages are related to the laying out of land for agricultural purposes but it has been extended into the description of character of both the built environment as a whole and elements of that built environment. One component here is the making of maps – of descriptions of the world as it is. Here let us consider that branch of the making not only of maps but also of charts of bodies of water – hydrography. The marine hydrographer makes not only charts in the sense of maps of the physical layout of the seabed but also notes the relatively constant but subject-to-dramatic-change phenomena which are ocean currents and the regularly changing character of tides. The seabed of the continental shelf changes regularly and has to be constantly resurveyed. In other words hydrographers have to survey complex systems and describe not only how they are but how they have changed, while noting important aspects of them, which are constantly subject to change in themselves and are the sources of change in other aspects of the systems.

The task of the social survey is essentially similar with the added proviso that the sources of change in social systems can be the willed and intentional acts of human beings expressed at all of the micro, meso and macro levels. Patrick Geddes, the polymathic founder of much of modern urban planning while also being an innovatory systems biologist and significant figure in the development of British sociology, described the survey as the foundation of any kind of social intervention. He recognised that it had to be not just a static description or snapshot of what is but also had to take account of how what is had come to be. In other words all social surveys must deal in terms of change towards what is now – with the processes of becoming. We will return subsequently to Geddes’ subsequent phases of planning and implementation and add to them the phase of evaluation, that is the processes of deciding what to do in order to change what is, of doing it, and of assessing what has been done.