Doxiadis - Entopia Greeting Card

Constantinos A. Doxiadis.
Entopia greeting card, 1974.

Constantinos and Emma
Doxiadis Foundation.
Planetary Home and Garden:

Ekistics and EnvironmentalDevelopmental Politics
PANAYIOTA PYLA
All these three areas [the natural, the agricultural, and the urban] taken
together will form the universal cityits home its backyard and its natural
garden.
C.A. Doxiadis, 19671
In greeting cards sent to clients, associates, and friends in the early 1970s,
the international firm Doxiadis Associates featured its founder, Constantinos
A. Doxiadisalready famous as a busy remodeler of the worldpointing
at a large drawing of a methodically structured urban fabric that promised
to provide adequate housing and community facilities to people of all
classes and backgrounds.2 The image illustrated Doxiadiss vision of
entopia. Coined from the Greek en topos as a term opposite to utopia,
entopia was meant to be a plausible reality for the future. It held onto the
modernist optimism for the architect-planner as an agent of socioeconomic
reform, while simultaneously rejecting earlier modernisms excesses of
individualism and rationalism. Entopia also promised to accommodate the
forces of industrialization and modernization while minimizing their dehumanizing impact by reclaiming physical qualities of past settlements that
had achieved a balance between nature and society. To this end, entopia
eradicated high densities and tall structuresfor which Doxiadis had
always professed disdainand placed high-speed roads and industrial
establishments underground, so as to keep the intrusions of mechanization
out of sight and out of mind. Entopia also reintroduced green areas in and
around the metropolis so as to nurture a harmonious coexistence between
nature and the city.
The serenity of the urban morphology extended to entopias social character. The sprawling metropolis was organized as a blend of communities
that would obey common zoning laws. Some, such as the one on the hill to
the left on the greeting-card drawing, were old communities that would
be duly preserved. Others were composed of mass-produced buildings.
Certain communities were open to all religious groups, whereas others
Grey Room 36, Summer 2009, pp. 635. 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
corresponded to distinct religious needs. A nudist community, on the righthand side of the greeting-card image, accommodated the special interests
of its inhabitants.3 Each community was to have its own special character,
but all would be integrated into a harmonious whole.4 Social problems
were to be managed away, and any expressions of diversity were supposed
to coexist neatly within this overarching order. This image was in many
ways a culmination of Doxiadis Associates formal and social principles as
they were promoted through the firms practice around the globe during the
previous two decades. The housing projects for Iraq (19551958); the plan
for the restructuring of Homs in Syria (1959); the building of the new capital city of Pakistan (1960)all manifested a preoccupation with visual order,
uniformity, and regularity that was also extended to the rational ordering of
social life. Much like the imaginary entopia, the cities of Baghdad, Kirkuk,
Homs, and Islamabad (among others) aspired to nurture harmonious communities through suprapolitical expert planning.5
The rendering of entopia was a rare mode of representation for Doxiadis
and uncharacteristic of his group, which favored charts and diagrams to
communicate their ideas. The greeting-card image was meant to present a
generic Mediterranean metropolis of the future (the geography was probably loosely based on Athens), but the image also captured the key principles
that guided the planning of Ecumenopolisthe global city of the future that
Doxiadis envisioned for the twenty-second century. The Mediterranean
metropolis was, for all intents and purposes, a segment of Ecumenopolis.
Arguably the most ambitious of the firms projects, the concept of
Ecumenopolis crystallized in the early 1960s when Doxiadis Associates was
experiencing mounting success, securing commissions for the design of
complexes, infrastructures, and urban
and regional plans around the world. In
its physical formas the joining together
of all urban regions to ultimately create
a global system of urban concentrations
covering the earthEcumenopolis was
the culmination of Doxiadiss commitment to urbanization as the key to
spreading socioeconomic modernization. If Le Corbusiers Ville Radieuse was
a city of nowhere in El Lissitzkys eyes,
then Doxiadis was envisioning a city of
everywhere, for all time.6
Methodologically, Ecumenopolis represented the epitome of Doxiadiss mod-
Top: Doxiadis Associates. Proposals

for Islamabad, 19651966.
Master Plan. Constantinos and
Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Bottom: Doxiadis Associates.
Proposals for Islamabad, 1965
1966. A pedestrian street in a lowand middle-income neighborhood
(model). Constantinos and
Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Grey Room 36
ernist ambition to coordinate the entire system of knowledge about the

physical environment. Since the mid-1940s, when he formulated ekistics
as an altogether new field, the science of human settlements, Doxiadis
aspired to expand the scientific basis of architecture, urban design, and
planning. Derived from the Greek oikos, meaning house, Doxiadiss
ekistics aimed to respond to the totality of human needs across cultural,
geographic, and socioeconomic differences. The concept of Ecumenopolis
brought ekistics commitment to comprehensive rational planning to a new
level. Ideologically, Ecumenopolis was the apogee of Doxiadiss optimism
for a postpolitical global society where social, economic, racial, and ethnic
inequalities would be managed away by benevolent technocrats. From the
beginning of its practice as a development consultant, Doxiadis Associates
established its appeal to its international clients (often the governments of
young nations) because it promised socioeconomic modernization while
simultaneously championing a shared ideal of national identity and pride.
But the new concept of an ecumenical city aspired
to replace altogether national affairs with an ideal of
transnational organization and action. The very term
Ecumenopolisyet another term invented by Doxiadis
whose neologisms were, by that time, forming their
own disciplinary lexiconhad quasi-spiritual connotations of ecumenical unity that resounded with
postwar dreams of global cooperation.
Along with its methodological and ideological
ambitions, Ecumenopolis represented another culmination in Doxiadiss thought and practice: a sharper
environmental focus. One can argue that Doxiadis
was a pioneer in environmental thought from the
1940s, because the concept of ekistics, shaped during his early career as a coordinator of postwar
reconstruction in Greece, sought to integrate people
and environments in a comprehensive system. One
could also cite, for example, his various permutations of the ekistic grid that echo ideas from
Patrick Geddes to Conrad Waddington.7 However,
once the concept of Ecumenopolis crystallized, the
Top: Cover of Ekistics showing

the five Ekistic elements that
define human settlements
and reflect the totality of human
needs, 1974. Athens
Technological Organization
Athens Center of Ekistics.
Bottom: Doxiadis Associates.
Ecumenopolis, showing cities of
high, medium, and low density,
1975. Constantinos and Emma
Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics
environmental considerations of ekistics went well beyond speculating on

the dehumanizing effects of urbanization-modernization and began instead
to outline specific strategies for the symbiosis of the global city with the
natural world. With the concept of Ecumenopolis and, later, Ecumenokepos
(global garden), Doxiadis and his enterprise began to reconceptualize
issues of environmental interdependence on a truly global scale and to reinvent ekistics not only as a strategy for international development but also
as a strategy for global environmental protection.
This paper focuses on the environmental strategies implied in Doxiadiss
concept of Ecumenopolis and its complex entanglement with postWorld
War II discourses of development and environmentalism. The specific prescriptions of Ecumenopolis regarding the scientific management of the
earths land and resources, and its metaphors of nature, balance, and ecumenism, speak to the sociopolitical implications of Doxiadiss optimism for
a harmonious and balanced global city and his visions crucial role in midtwentieth-century debates on architecture, technology, nature, and ecology.
The nuances and the fluidity of the concept of Ecumenopolis-Ecumenokepos
led to multiple alignments with changing modernist paradigms and allowed
Doxiadiss vision to persevere, even after the demise of high-modernist optimism, as a response to ecological exigencies.
Reformed Prophesies
The idea of Ecumenopolis was first formulated in Doxiadiss 1961 internal
report, Ecumenopolis, the Settlement of the Future.8 The report, which was
disseminated among the branches of Doxiadiss firm, proclaimed that the
expansion of cities was irreversible and that the move from megalopolis to
a globally interconnected network of cities covering the entire earth was
irreversible. Influenced by postwar trends in regional planning that favored
urban industrialization, the report polemically proclaimed Doxiadiss commitment to urbanization as key to economic growtha commitment that
had been the basis of Doxiadis Associates practice since the 1950s. But
even as Doxiadis called for architects and planners to take charge in planning for a dramatic urban expansion, he was also eager to add a caveat: the
global urban network needed to achieve a complete balance between its
own forces and the forces of the countryside.9
Doxiadis voiced similar concerns in many international meetings in the
early 1960s. In January 1963, when the United Nations (UN) Economic and
Social Council (ECOSOC) convened its first Committee on Housing,
Building, and Planning in New York to investigate the role of shelter in
advancing growth rates in underdeveloped countries, Doxiadis was one
of the most vocal members.10 To the founder of ekistics and to many other
10
Grey Room 36
invited specialists (including the American housing expert Charles Abrams

and the Yugoslav architect Ernest Weissman), the establishment of this
committee signaled that the UN finally recognized the issue of shelter as
key to socioeconomic development.11 ECOSOCs emphasis on economical
housing and social services, local materials, and efficient urban infrastructure was, to Doxiadiss ears, a long-overdue endorsement of ekistics basic
goals.12 Yet Doxiadis wanted to assign the building expert a much bigger
role than ECOSOCs agenda allowed. His speech underlined the need to
impose rational limits to building to control mans burgeoning settlements and to prevent the depletion of resources essential to human existence.13 The comprehensive management of land, resources, and
settlement growth was now endowed with an altogether new urgency. The
issue was not simply a matter of organizing an efficient global society;
rather, the building expert had to act as the guarantor of human survival.
Doxiadis could not help but make one of his extravagant assertions, claiming that the task of building experts is more important than that of rocket
scientists. Building experts were so significant for the protection of
humanitys future, he maintained, that it was regrettable the great talents
of the contemporary age are directed principally towards the exploitation
of outer space.14
Doxiadis made a similar appeal a few days later in a larger forum in
Geneva, the UN Conference on the Applications of Science and Technology
for the Benefit of Less Developed Areas. He argued that urbanization and
resource depletion warranted the establishment of a new UN agency comparable to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).15 The UN conferences
final report indirectly endorsed Doxiadiss position by calling for the comprehensive advancement of urbanization strategies. The report almost
mentioned Doxiadis by name, noting a Greek speakers suggestion of
Ekistics as a possible name for a new science of human settlements that
would approach the human habitat as a single problem.16 Doxiadis might
have succeeded in introducing ekistics into UN debates, but his plea for an
independent international organization for human settlements would not
bear fruit for another decade, when the International Habitat and Human
Settlements Foundation was created by the UN General Assembly in January
1975. Until then, the issue of built environments was bounced between
various UN branches.17 Doxiadis thus took matters in his own hands.
Delos Charter?
Disappointed with the UNs foot-dragging, Doxiadis organized and funded
his own conference on the global crisis of urbanization.18 The weeklong
11
conference, the idea for which had been simmering for years in his mind,
took place in July 1963 and brought together thirty-four leading scientists,
architects, engineers, and administrators from twelve countries. The conference took place on the ship New Hellas cruising the Aegean, with Delos
as the final destination. Modeled after the legendary 1933 Congrs International
dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) meeting on a cruise ship that traveled from
Marseilles to Athens, Doxiadiss Delos Symposion, as he called it (he
coined the term from the Greek symposion, in order to differentiate this particular meeting from a typical symposium), attempted to organize a new
professional society that would be more diverse, and more technocratic,
than the old Modern Movement congresses.19 The goal was to propose a
Charter of Delos that would simultaneously replace the Athens Charter
and underline the gaps in UN bureaucracy. The event was a turning point
in the history of ekistics not only because it increased its international visibility but also because it reshaped its agenda. Like Doxiadiss speeches at
the UN a few months earlier, the multi-ethnic and interdisciplinary Aegean
cruise pushed the debate on shelter well beyond the economics of efficiency,
the aesthetics of order, the management of resources, or the engineering of
social reform to inaugurate an even greater cause: saving the earth.
If the participation of Sigfried Giedion and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in this
conference underlined the link between CIAM and ekistics, the involvement of Buckminster Fuller, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and the
economist Barbara Wardglobal activists in their own right and reportedly
the stars of the cruiseboosted the meetings multidisciplinary appeal.
Also invited were communications expert Marshall McLuhan, soon to
become the director of the Center for the Study of the Extensions of Man at
the University of Toronto; geneticist and professor at Edinburgh University,
Conrad Waddington; and sociologist Eiichi Isomura, professor at Tokyo
Metropolitan University and also director of the Japanese bureaus on planning and social development. Architects and planners also had a strong
presence and included Sir Robert Matthew, who had been in charge of
numerous British New Towns and new schools in England; Mohamed
Makiya, a prolific builder and architecture professor in Iraq; and the Polish
housing expert Juliusz Gorynski. This interdisciplinary encounter also
included several UN officialsthe American housing expert Charles Abrams
and planner Jacob Crane; the British economist David Owen; and the Canadian
economist Steward Bates. Other international consultants included Edward
Mason, Lamont University Professor at Harvard and adviser to the Agency
for International Development. Also invited were government officials,
such as Allah K. Brohi, a Pakistani diplomat; Shafik El-Sadr, undersecretary
of housing and public utilities in the United Arab Republic; and Edmund
12
Grey Room 36
Bacon, executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission. If the

involvement of scholars was intended to underline the intellectual complexity of urban problems, the presence of government officials reflected
ekistics urge to ally physical planning with decision-making power.
Giedion himself hailed the Delos Symposion for including more administrators than had the CIAM meetings.20
Doxiadis insisted on the term symposion to echo, he contended, the
informal character of ancient Greek symposia, where discourse and debate
took place in a relaxed atmosphere of food and drink. Indeed, the pleasant
atmosphere of a cruise ship sailing the Mediterranean Sea, and Doxiadiss
reportedly marvelous hospitality, proved instrumental in counteracting
the frustrating incongruities of the discussion. Doxiadiss terms were contentious topics of debate. While all participants agreed that they were
citizens of a worldwide city, threatened by its own torrential expansion,
Doxiadiss vision of Ecumenopolis was questioned from various directions.21 Brohi was suspicious of ekistics projections, accusing planners
vanity of ignoring the uncertainty of the future.22 Mason found ekistics
analyses of urban problems too general to actually attract the interest of
scientific minds.23 Gorynski drew attention to the political threats of a
single socioeconomic world order.24 McLuhan, however, embraced the
premise of Ecumenopolis as an interconnected global system, but he was
uneasy with ekistics attachment to physical design.25 According to McLuhans
vision of an electronic age that collapsed spatial and temporal barriers unifying the globe, physical design would be rendered obsolete by a new kind
of interconnectedness constituted by information traffic and electronic networks. McLuhans view of global consciousness as the new human scale
sounded fascinating to participants but was far removed from Doxiadiss
view of human scale, which was bounded by the logic of physical
design.26 Fuller, already a close friend of ekistics, also proposed an alternative vision of Ecumenopolis, suggesting that increasing mobility was a
much stronger force for tying the world together than the kind of static
settlements Doxiadis was envisioning.27 Waddington, whose own work
concerned the general principles that tie a biological organism into a whole,
embraced Ecumenopolis from yet another direction, arguing that ekistics
global planning should be conceptualized as a process of organizing all the
living material of the universe.28 Giedion, one of CIAMs old guard, stayed
at the margins of the overall debate, and his endorsement was limited
to praising ekistics emphasis on generalist planners. Giedion had different
reservations. His own attempt to promote a new monumentality was
in complete disagreement with Doxiadiss focus on minimal and basic
structures.29
13
The tensions among competing worldviews were finessed, if not resolved,

thanks to the charming setting and evening partiesincluding the celebration of Giedions birthday.30 In a memo to Doxiadis soon after the meeting,
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt captured the social success of the eventeven as she,
one of the few women participants, revealed her own gender biases: My
over-riding impression was the pleasantness and friendliness of all personal
contacts among the participants. Even the toughest and least cordial characters relaxed and mellowed after the first day or so. Also the wives
appeared agreeable, happy and unobtrusive.31 Indeed, Tyrwhitt liked to
appear agreeable and unobtrusive herself and was often shown in pho-
14
Grey Room 36
tographs as quiet, taking notes, even though she was instrumental in organizing the meeting and those that followed. A pillar of Doxiadiss entire
enterprise, Tyrwhitt played a key role in shaping the agenda of Delos and
was key to proposing new members for the network.32
Barbara Ward was another important participant, one who proved key to
reconciling opposing views by recasting Doxiadiss objectives in more general terms in order to underline the conferences unifying cause: the expansion of urban problems as a grave threat to humanity.33
Each day we considered the plight of the modern city. Each day, for
contrast, we went ashoreto Hydras coloured waterfront, to the
walled Crusaders city at Rhodes, to Priene and Delos whose ruins
show the completeness of the old civic pattern, to Lindos, floating
between sky and sea, to Mykonos, where we sang and danced by the
white quays. And against this charming background of light and clarity and space, these were the frightening facts that we were asked to
face and which, for the first time, compelled me at least to see the
cities not simply in terms of inconvenience or discomfort but in the
much grimmer terms of potential catastrophe.34
The environmental exigency indeed became the main theme of the Delos
Declaration that was published at the end of the cruise. (Doxiadiss initial
hope to produce a charter outlining specific strategies proved impossible
because of the differences in views.) Carefully drafted by Barbara Ward so
as to sidestep controversial topics, the declaration criticized the chaos in
cities of all continents, the inexcusable waste in development practices,
the excessive funding for armaments to the detriment of housing initiatives,
and the inadequacy of administrative policies and educational systems to
tackle these problems. The document hinted at some of Doxiadiss characteristic language, calling for rational and dynamic planning and a new
discipline of human settlements, while it conflated nuclear threats and
food shortages with urban problems. The signing of the declaration during a
torchlit meeting in the ancient
theater of Delos dramatized even
further the groups noble cause.
Fuller, too, focused on shared global
threats in his concluding remarks
and presented the cross-cultural
encounter at Delos as a catalyst for
efforts to prevent man from eliminating himself from his extraordinary role in the universe.35
Delos meeting, 1963. Opposite,

top left: a visit to Hydra; opposite,
top right: Fuller and Mead; opposite, bottom: Fuller celebrating
his birthday; and left: Doxiadis
dancing with Barbara Ward.
15
The Delos Symposion attracted international press coveragein the New

York Times, Washington Post, Sunday Telegraph, Melbourne Age, and
Sddeutsche Zeitung, as well as the American Socialist newspaper Weekly
People, which saw it as a reaction against the Capitalist Jungle.36 Through
systematic publicity efforts by Doxiadis Associates and the Athens
Technological Institute, the event was also covered in professional societies
and journals. The flood of publicity emphasized uncontrolled urbanization
as a global crisis that plagued both underdeveloped and developed countries alike. The earths limited capacity was becoming more pronounced as
the world was realizing that the developed countries wastefulness would
be repeated in the third world.37 Both journalists and Delians (as Doxiadis
called the Symposion participants) became apologists for the meeting and
reiterated Doxiadiss belief that urban problems required a transcultural
and interdisciplinary approach to control land use, regulate buildings
shape and scale, and manage access to nature.
Barbara Ward was most forceful in exposing cities that devour space
as a dire environmental threat:
Most people are aware of the menace of nuclear war to the future of
mankind, and many people are aware that possibly population could
outrun food supplies; but what I think is not generally recognized is
that the urban explosion could be, in its own way, as lethal as either.
It can destroy communities more slowly but perhaps more surely than
atomic destruction, and it can starve the spirit as malnutrition starves
the body.38
Ward condensed the multiple themes that were explored at Delos into a call
for approaching global urban problems in an ecological sense, the sense of
the whole environment profoundly conditioning the men inside.39 Only
three years later Ward was to write Spaceship Earth (1966), which projected
a vision of the earth as having the intimacy, loneliness, and vulnerability of
a spaceship. The metaphor grasped the gist of the new consciousness that
Right: Sigfried Giedion signing

the Delos declaration during
a torchlit meeting in the ancient
Theatre of Delos, 1963.
Opposite: Doxiadis Associates.
Ecumenokepos or the global
garden, 1974. Constantinos
and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
16
Grey Room 36
was emerging. As photographs from outer space vividly illustrated the

physical finiteness of the world, what linked peoples together was no longer
a drive for growth as in the old days of development but their common
dependence on the same biophysical life-supports.40 Ward rapidly came to
the forefront of international debates on the environment, and through her
efforts to awaken a new planetary awareness she advanced Doxiadiss ideas
as the basis for managing the earths total environment.41
The Delos Symposion became an annual event. The island destination
changed every year, and so did the composition of the group. Some of the
key actors from the first meeting were invited to many moreTyrwhitt,
Fuller, Ward, Mead, Makiya, and Waddingtonwhile many others were
recruited. New members included American planner and Harvard University
professor Martin Meyerson, preeminent Japanese architect Kenzo Tange,
American vice president of the Ford Foundation David Bell, and Nigerian
World Health Organization official Thomas Lambo. Different themes on the
city of the future were exploredbuilding density, networks, housing, and
so onthat increasingly emphasized the need to organize the globe as an
interconnected system.
Balancing Acts
Through the new debates on ordering the cosmos, Doxiadis arrived at new
concepts of Ecumenopolis. He came to see that the planetary network of
cities envisioned in his 1961 proposal was only part of the global equation.
The nonurban world (what Doxiadis had earlier described as natural
areas or countryside) also constituted a networkof forests, deserts, gardens, rivers, and seas. In Doxiadiss first report on the subject, the countryside was given a clearly utilitarian purpose as either (a) agricultural
land that would meet the worlds food production demands or (b) a recreational space, with forests, riversides, lakes, and mountaintops.42 Eventually,
however, the countryside was reconceptualized as a comprehensive
global system, and its name, Ecumenokepos, signified an even more intimate interdependence with Ecumenopolis.
To organize and stabilize the city of the future, Doxiadiss team had to
plan Ecumenopolis as well as its backyard, Ecumenokepos. The fourth
Delos Symposion, in July 1966, helped crystallize this notion by underlining the interdependence of the natural and man-made worlds.43 Conrad
17
Waddington encouraged this direction by suggesting that the global network of human settlements should be conceptualized as part of the larger
system of living creatures.44 Kenzo Tange introduced another twist by suggesting that the entire global network could be understood as an interconnected nervous system.45 Doxiadis embraced these analogies to the extent
that they supported notions of the stability, health, and balance of the globe.
He, too, spoke of Ecumenopolis and Ecumenokepos as an organism
whose life depended on hierarchically structured systems of settlements,
circulation, and communication, echoing Waddingtons view of an organism as a complex and overall organizational system. However, Doxiadiss
strategies for integrating people and environments in a global system did
not quite adopt the fluidity and indeterminacy of Waddingtons notion.46
Instead, Doxiadis insisted on the assumption that by the middle of the
twenty-first century the rate of growth of the global city would decrease
to virtually zero, and from then on the global shape of Ecumenopolis would
stabilize to form one large and static urban settlement.47 Furthermore,
Doxiadis insisted on the significance of physical planning and functional
and territorial organization, which distinguished his views from those of
Marshal McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, who saw the interconnectedness of the globe in terms of invisible networks of information.48 (Fuller
thought that the very process of urbanization Doxiadis promoted would
become obsolete as cities become the launching pads for each humans
blast-off into world shuttling citizenship.49) To Doxiadis (and also to his
close collaborator John Papaioannou, who was instrumental in shaping the
concept of the global garden), however, Ecumenopolis and Ecumenokepos
were spatial concepts, pertaining to visible, physical interconnections
around the globe.50 This view would soon guide Doxiadiss new paths to
managerialism.
From 1967 onward, Doxiadiss research teams developed increasingly
detailed proposals for Ecumenopolis-Ecumenokepos, with the ambition to
achieve a global ecological balance. Calculations and terminology
changed when these ideas were presented at the International Conference
on Water for Peace (Washington, DC, 1967), the Edison Electric Institute
(1968), and elsewhere, but the main ideas remained.51 The global ecological balance would be achieved through the functional organization of the
earths land to accommodate the competing needs of production, settlement, recreation, and environmental protection. The ultimate goal was
clear: In the [future] we will have built the great, universal city and garden
of man with water running in its arteries bringing life and guaranteeing its
inner balance and peace.52
The most elaborate version of Doxiadiss proposals for Ecumenopolis-
Doxiadis Associates. The Twelve

Global Zones of Land, 1973.
Numbers 15 on the figure represent various wildlife habitats,
6 and 7 represent land for natural
and industrial cultivation, 8 is
land for human recreation, and
912 represent urban settlements
and industries. Constantinos
and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
18
Grey Room 36
Ecumenokepos was presented in the posthumously published book, Ecology

and Ekistics, which divided the earths land into twelve zones, some of
which were devoted to human habitation, others to cultivation, and others to wildlife.53 The part of the earths land devoted to human habitation
was to be confined to 2.5 percent (and only a small percentage of that was
for high-density cities), and 15.5 percent of the land was to be devoted to
cultivation or for sports and recreation. This left the remainder, 82 percent
of the earths surface, for Ecumenokepos, parts of which would be largely
inaccessible to human beings (real wildlife), others of which could be
enjoyed by nature lovers (wildlife visited), and others of which would
be available for economic exploitation (wildlife invaded). These new and
more elaborate territorial divisions incorporated ideas from Doxiadiss circle and Delos participants. For example, many participants in the fourth
Delos symposium had emphasized that apart from the categories of cultivation and recreation from the 1961 proposal, some natural habitats
should be left entirely inaccessible to protect the present or future advancement of biological, medical, and other scientific knowledge.54 Similarly,
other vocal participants, including Barbara Ward and Arnold Toynbee,
advocated the preservation of various types of wilderness areas in order
to support alternative lifestyles and to maintain variety in the forthcoming planetary society.55
All in all, the resulting managerial division (with decimal-point precision!)
of the earths land aimed to accommodate every type of imaginable human
need. The need for industrial progress, for scientific advancement, for
access to nature, and for alternative lifestyles: all were given a slice of the
planetary pie. The proposal included no references to real places and situations (Which forests would fall under the categories of real wildlife? How
long would the exploitable forests remain forests?), although the overall
proposal involved the reshuffling of population, the redistribution of
resources, and even the abandonment of some habitable areas.56 Problems
in the location of national resources and imbalances in technological and military power or in
international trade that could shape the range of
contact with nature seemingly were to be left in
the hands of suprapolitical expert management.
What underlay the massive redistribution of
peoples and resources was no longer the imperative of efficiency, but the loftier environmental
ideal of achieving an ecological balance. In the
initial 1961 vision of Ecumenopolis, Doxiadis
had initially referred to the concept of balance
19
between built and natural areas to signify the maximum acceptable limits
of future development. As Doxiadis espoused popular and scientific
notions from ecological thought, he projected a range of new meanings onto
the term balance to speak of the need to ensure a balance between nature,
society, and anthropos and a balance between man and food and water
resources.57 By calling for the achievement of this balance with the minimum of human sacrifices, he cast the protection of nature as a matter to be
negotiated against the venerated standard of human needsthe satisfaction
of which was presumed to require economic development.58 Ultimately, the
mission to guarantee the inner balance and peace of the forthcoming
universal city was strongly committed to urban growth and as such was
linked with assumptions that had justified development in preceding
decades.59 The mission to prevent resource depletion and environmental
degradation while pursuing development did not present a conflict between
the protection of nature and its exploitation. Rather, to Doxiadis it revealed
the development expert as the necessary mediator of the two. The task of
the development expert was skillfully to juggle environmental requirements
with human needs for goods and services, to orchestrate the efficient utilization and equitable distribution of resources.
Doxiadis Associates greeting-card sketch of entopia captured Doxiadiss
ideas of a balance in human settlements. The ideal future settlement eradicated the excesses of the present, reclaiming the physical qualities of past
settlements that had achieved a balance between nature and society. In
Doxiadiss version of planetary planning, sophisticated technologies for the
globe such as those suggested by Fuller did not tackle the ecological exigency. The builders ecological task was not the enclosure of cities in domes
or the proliferation of geoscope projects but the selective recovery of lost
physical qualities, their enlightened reorganization, and their large-scale
dissemination.60 Even though he agreed with Fuller on the urgent need to
refashion architecture and planning in response to new ecological threats,
Doxiadis linked global solutions with advanced scientific management, not
with advanced technology.61 Effectively, the call for balanced urban settlements was just as much an appeal for balancing architecture itself, for
detaching it from the formal excesses of modernismextravagantly tall
buildings, narcissistic signature designs, and technophilic utopias.
Doxiadiss proposal also involved radical technological interventionsfor
the massive reshuffling of population, the new transportation networks,
and enormous underground structures. But the resulting global settlement
had a superficially low-tech familiarity consistent with ekistics claims to
prudence and realism.
All in all, the term balance and its constellation of meaningsharmony,
20
Grey Room 36
moderation, equitability, and a type of orderwere in tune with the ideological formations that portrayed the protection of nature as an expert managerial task. For a champion of moderate positions like ekistics, which
favored the reform of rational planning rather than a radical questioning of
its morality and principles, the pursuit of balanced or appropriate
development defended the validity of international development and tempered predictions of imminent doom with an optimism to manage it away.
The belief in the benign possibilities of centralized management and the
astounding confidence that it was possible were encouraged by the new
conceptual construct of systems thinkingcoming from systems management concepts of military and space programsthat augmented the tendency to map people and communities as coded global systems and
networks. Doxiadis had embraced the paradigm of systems theory since his
1961 report in order to conceptualize the ecumenical city as an interdependent system whose unity depended on the harmonious interaction of its
parts. With the growing interest in systems management, Doxiadis emphasized general systems theory as the basis for mapping and predicting the
interaction and evolution of settlementsand Fuller hailed this as one of
the most essential contributions to architectural research at large.62 As engineers and development experts were rechristened as systems analysts who
would monitor and orchestrate the consumption of resources and the
worldwide waste output, Doxiadis ekisticians were also envisioning themselves no longer as builders but as managers of building growth. Their
historical responsibility was to keep the vital interdependence of settlements and nature from being destabilized.
From One World to One Earth
The global urgency of appropriate management of the environment was
officially established at the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment, in which many members of the ekistics circle participated.
The first of a series of UN theme conferences on critical global issues, the
conference convened in Stockholm in 1972 and introduced environment
to the international agenda; it ultimately led to the creation of the United
Nations Environment Program (UNEP).63 Initially proposed by Sweden in
1968 to address the dangers of pollution in industrialized countries, the
conference expanded the definition of environmental problems to include
such issues as the rapid growth of human settlements, the degradation
of soils and other resources, desertification, and tropical ecosystem
management, to demonstrate the transnational relevance of environmental
concerns.64 The conference advanced the idea that the unity of humankind
was no longer based on the postwar cosmopolitan dream of One World
21
which had pushed every nation into a race for the exploitation of resources
but on the biophysical reality of One Earth, which carried with it a menacing fate.65 The term human environment was supposed to signal the
expansion of environmental concerns beyond nature protection and
resource conservation and to herald the inclusion of humanity as an integral part of the global environment.66 The term also presaged the anthropocentric priorities of the conference. And the universal connotations of the
human reflected the conferences key assumption: the homogeneity of
humanitys position vis--vis the environment.
Barbara Ward, a key member of Doxiadiss circle, was the coauthor of the
World Environment Report, prepared prior to the conference to provide
the Stockholm delegates with a basis for their deliberations. The other
author of the report was Ren Dubos, the microbiologist and experimental
pathologist who was soon to become a neophyte Delian.67 Later published
with the title Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet,
the report synthesized concerns for economic development with concerns
for environmental quality. The idea of recalibrating development for environmental protection was presented as a realistic alternative to the passionate rejections of industrialization and economic growthrejections that
had been expressed by various branches of a substantial and popular environmental movement in Western industrialized countries since the mid1960s. (At the crest of this movement in 1970, Earth Day celebrations
attracted twenty million participants in the United States alone.)68
Through its lofty ethic of conciliatory realism, which was supposed to
balance the need for development of the so-called third world with the first
worlds environmental fears, the Stockholm conference transplanted the
organizing logic of development into environmental debates. The call for
universally recognized fundamental principles, integrated development
planning, and rational planning revived the belief in planning as a neutral, universal, and perfectible process.69 Given the powerful new motive of
securing human survival, collective action was naturalized as the only remedywhile the unequal economic and geopolitical realities affecting the
distribution patterns of food, water, and energy remained unquestioned.
Human links with nature were conceptualized in terms of sanitized (and
market-based) categories of resource availability, recreational values, or
health standards. Shortages and inequality were supposed to be resolved
through the constant refinement of land distribution, zoning laws, and
emission controls. The final guidelines insisted on the authority of bureaucratized international or governmental institutions, and in the process any
alternatives that rejected capitalist priorities or favored economic decentralization fell out of sight.
22
Grey Room 36
From Stockholm to Delos: Local Varieties in the Global Order

Stockholms emphasis on rational action involving international policymaking was definitely palatable to the ekistics circle. The World Society for
Ekistics that sprung from the Delos symposia (the term world society
being inspired by Fuller) participated in the conference as an international
nongovernmental organization having a consultative status with the UN.70
The World Society for Ekistics underlined the significance of human settlements to the management of the total environment and played a key role in
pushing for another UN theme conference, planned for 1976, that would
focus exclusively on human settlements. Doxiadis himself did not attend
the Stockholm conference because of his failing health, but he was on the
panel of expert consultants that reviewed Only One Earth. His 1968 book
Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements was one of
the recommended readings for the conference, which also included such
books as Paul Ehrlichs How to Be a Survivor (1971), Ren Duboss Reason
Awake (1970), and Carsons Silent Spring.71 Doxiadiss comments on the
draft of Only One Earth criticized the distinction between developed and
developing countries for making sweeping categorizations of societies
based only on economic criteria. Even though Doxiadis, too, embraced
modernization theorys view of cultures being on the same path of progress,
except at different stages, he opposed the binary distinctions typically made
by development professionals, because these compromised the understanding of global problems as a whole.72 Doxiadiss comments on the
report also criticized efforts to set limits on population and proposed resource
management as a preferable priority. (His schemes for Ecumenopolis always
opted for accommodating population increase rather than limiting it.) In
doing so, Doxiadis took exception to the doomsday predictions about the
population problem that influenced not only the Stockholm conference
but two other influential reports on the environment that came out in 1972:
the Club of Romes Limits to Growth and the Ecologist s Blueprint for
Survival.73 Doxiadiss critique foreshadowed the reactions of third world
countries and activist organizations, which associated population control
policies with a new form of imperialism.
Despite his prophetic reservations, Doxiadis saw the Stockholm conference
as a milestone in the history of ekistics because it affirmed the triangle
human settlementsdevelopmentenvironment. Ward echoed this view
when she referred to the Stockholm conference as an important step in
making the Delian dream a reality.74 Vindicated by the UNs decision to
tackle the problems of human settlements in their own right, Doxiadis prepared a series of new books that would be used as support material for
the UN Conference on Human Settlements, which would take place in
23
Vancouver in 1976.
In July 1972, soon after Stockholm, Doxiadis hosted the tenth Delos
Symposion, which included some of the Stockholm participantsWard,
Mead, Dubos, and Fuller among others. Delos Ten produced a new declaration that reiterated ekistics commitment to the management of the environment.75 In response to the protests that surrounded the Stockholm
events, Delos Ten gave its own spin to the UN conference by highlighting
the significance of social and cultural particularity. A newcomer to Delos
Ten was Ren Dubos, who argued that Stockholms most significant lesson
was that the concepts of ecology brought there by the rich nations were
unsuited for the world problems of environment.76 Duboss recommendation to his fellow Delians was framed as follows:
The paradox inherent in the dual nature of mannamely the biological
uniformity of mankind and the social diversity of human lifewas at
the heart of the questions discussed at the United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment. A global approach is essential for dealing with the ecological and economic problems of the spaceship earth,
which affect all of us, but each human settlement has problems of its
own which require local solutions.77
Once human unity and diversity were conceived through these categories,
it seemed reasonable that if social diversity was pulling people apart,
then biological uniformity was bringing them together, because all people were in the same spaceship, sharing the same life supports, and heading to the same destination (presumably a natural drive for progress and
development). To achieve an ecological equilibrium that accounted for
human diversity, Dubos concluded, the creation of local ecologies which
are compatible with each other, constituting sub-systems within the global
ecosystem was essential.78
Doxiadis had always urged that the grand proposals for Ecumenopolis
and Ecumenokepos be calibrated according to cultural particularity, to prevent homogenizing impositions: Our problem is universal, but the solutions are universal in the long run and to a certain extent only, in practice
they are local; they have to grow out of the soil and be watered by the local
springs.79 Duboss recommendations reinforced ekistics long-standing
position because they confirmed the interdependence of the local and the
globalthe micro and the macro, the house and the city, the megalopolis
and Ecumenopolisnot simply as a design theory but as an ecological
truth. In line with this belief, the overall scheme for the globes functional
organization had to account for varying political systems, ownership patterns, and the like. This is why Doxiadis qualified his final proposal for
Doxiadis Associates. The

Anthropocosmos Model. This
version dates from 1975. Various
versions of this model were used
by ekistics to organize knowledge about human settlements.
24
Grey Room 36
Ecumenopolis and Ecumenokepos by arguing that in every continent,

nation and region, different percentages of land will be appropriate for the
various zones and land uses, depending on geography, existing development, condition and value of natural environment, potential for growth,
productivity and so on.80
The rational assessment of local conditions and techniques also
promised to limit dependence on capital-intensive technological fixes.
Much like the local construction methods that were used in Doxiadis
Associates projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Greece, and elsewhere, local techniques in resource management were to be analyzed in terms of their scientific validity and economic efficiency. In discussing methods for water
conservation in 1967, Doxiadis criticized large-scale plans and policies that
bulldozed diverse local and more appropriate approaches:
Considering what is being done in the whole world, we can state that
much more talent and financial resources are geared to such projects
as dams and desalination plants than to the small tanks, wells and irrigation systems. Much more is spent for actual construction than for
organization and management of an effort for conservation and more
efficient use of water.81
Doxiadiss pitch for localized approaches to environmental management
was governed by the conviction that the efficacy and appropriateness of
each solution could ultimately be grasped by the sober objectivity of ekistics
scientific analysis. The heterogeneity of the human subject increased the
data required to map basic human needs and environmental requirements rather than challenging these categories altogether. Local climate,
material availability, education levels,
and the overall organization of the
population were variables that would
calibrate the quantification of the
average needs for the average
person in a city of a given density.82
Diversity was itself conceptualized in
terms of the sanitized categories of the
ekistics gridspopulation scale,
economic desirability, technological feasibility, cultural feasibility,
and the likethat were supposed to
neatly circumscribe the total ecological
system. Ekistics believed that inequality, exclusion, and exploitation in their
25
various forms could somehow be planned away, as long as enough flexibility was built into the managerial system. As Delos Ten concluded, the challenging requirements of safety, variation, cultural style, access to nature,
individual age, and health would be met through continuous assessment,
error correcting, responsive feedback, and evaluation.83
For all his commitment to a peaceful and egalitarian future, Doxiadis
emphasized the urgency of a comprehensive, coordinated system of a universal city rather than questioning its teleological logic. By presupposing
the commensurability of the local with the global, ekistics assumed that
voices of diversity could neatly coexist with the overall of the managerial
scheme to achieve the earths inner balance and peace.84 Doxiadis and his
supporters like Mead, Fuller, and Ward perceived ethnic, racial, and gender
struggles through the prism of a cosmopolitan idealism that rendered politics obsolete. By emphasizing the big picture, the new environmental cause
as it was formulated by ekistics overlooked the economic and political priorities it was promoting. The limits of human exploitation might well have
become increasingly narrow in Doxiadiss progressively elaborate landredistribution schemes, but they were still based on the dream of a human
society testing nature to its limits. In the meantime, competitive industrialism and the ideology of production, which were at the root of the environmental degradation that both Stockholm and Delos lamented, remained
intact. Also intact was the primacy of the expert as the key figure in the synchronization of local and global solutions.
Only One Home
Conceptualized as a holistic entity, the planet was shrinking. Ward and
Dubos called for the care and maintenance of a small planet and replaced
the image of a unified world market with an image of the globe as a single
home. Even more powerful than the metaphor of the earth as a spaceship,
the warm and familiar image of the earth as humanitys home underscored
the shared environmental fate. Dubos repeated this idea at Delos Ten:
As we enter the global phase of social evolution, it becomes obvious
that each one of us has two countrieshis own and the planet earth.
We cannot feel at home on earth if we do not continue to love and cultivate our own garden. And conversely, we can hardly feel comfortable in our garden if we do not care for the planet earth as our
collective home.85
The ideas of smallness, oneness, danger, and resilience were all wrapped
into the linguistic sign of the home. Its unquestionable preciousness made
loyalty to the planet a moral obligation. The home could avert imminent
26
Grey Room 36
threats as long as the universal family remained united. The chairman of

the U.S. delegation to Stockholm, Russell E. Train, called on the economist
and the ecologist to jointly tackle the problems of the house of man.86 In
the meantime, Ekistics reminded its readers that like ecology and economics, ekistics comes from the same Greek root word for home: Ecology,
economics, ecolibrium [sic], and ekistics all come from the same Greek root
word for home. Implicit in the derivation is the notion of integrating mans
nest-building activitieshis settlementswith the natural environment.87
If ecology (knowledge of the home) and economics (management of the
home) had to reconceptualize their tasks to manage the global household,
so should ekistics.88 Ekistics centrality to environmental debates was
rooted in its etymology. QED!
If, for Dubos and Train, the displacement of the home into the globe
evoked the preciousness and finiteness of the earth, the symbolism was
even greater for Doxiadis. What better metaphor to capture ekistics aspiration to construct a postpolitical global society that eradicated military, political, and social conflict in the name of a better future! Doxiadiss neologism,
Ecumenopolis, already presaged this interpretive leap by conflating the
home (oikos) with the globe (oicumene). Ecumenokepos (global garden)
transported home and garden to the global dimension.
As a spatial metaphor, the globe as home reinforced the validity of
ekisticsthe science (or the art and science) of planning and designing
the home.89 Because it blurred the boundaries between ekistics, ecology,
and economics, the home metaphor allowed the conflation of physical
design/planning with household management. In one of the last proclamations in his career, Doxiadis described the management of natural resources
by referring to the design [of] goals for nature.90 The metamorphosis of the
architect/planner into environmental managerfor which Doxiadis had
fought for three decadeswas finally taking hold.
The concept of a shared planetary home, like the idea of earths balance, served a double purpose: to underline the moral imperative to protect
the environment and to rejuvenate the need for global management. The
irony is that, as Mark Wigley points out, the metaphor of the planetary
home exposes, rather than conceals, the shortcomings of efforts to reconcile sociocultural discontinuities into a contrived unity. Far from transcending issues of discrimination, conflict, and power, domestic space has
its own intense politicsof control, privilege and exclusionalready well
illustrated in the historiography of modern architecture.91 Even if Stockholm
delegates aspired to an image of a happy planetary family, the strong
protests of the Chinese delegation inside the hall, the protests of nongovernmental organizations outside, the conspicuous absence of the USSR
27
and East European countries, and, overall, the bitter debates about colonialism, Vietnam, whaling, and nuclear weapons testing were reminders of
the struggles within the home.92 They exposed the pitfalls of the technocratic rationale of development that was nonetheless being transplanted
into the new environmental cause.
As the UN reinforced the moralism of management (and the 19731974
oil crisis confirmed resource fears), ekistics became more entangled with
the UNs global cause. The 1976 UN Conference on Settlements, later renamed
the Conference on Habitat, was in many ways the long-awaited vindication
of ekistics. Even though the conference did not take place until a year after
his death, Doxiadis had a strong presence with the four red books he prepared as background material for the conference.93 Seventy members from
the World Society for Ekistics participated in the conference, emphasizing
the pioneering contributions of ekistics in both the domains of human settlements and environment.94 Fuller, the president of the World Society
for Ekistics, presented Doxiadiss red books at the plenary session of the
Habitat conference with an emotional speech, after which the secretary general referred to Doxiadis as the father of human settlements and suggested
that the conference be dedicated to him.95
Human Unsettlements
Starting with the Delos conferences, the last decade of Doxiadiss practice
was marked by the globalization of ekistics discourse as it attracted the
attention of even more global visionaries from Ward to Dubos, as well as
architectural thinkers from Tange to Fuller, all of whom contemplated their
affinities with Doxiadiss thought and used the journal Ekistics as a major
forum for advancing their ideas. Throughout the 1960s into the early 1970s,
schools of architecture were teaching ekistics; libraries were circulating not
only the journal but even Doxiadis Associates newsletters and reports;
highly regarded publishers were printing Doxiadiss books; and, more
important to Doxiadis, the UN recognized ekistics and appropriated his
own terminology (human settlements), thus fulfilling at least some of his
dreams. In the meantime, ekistics was ascending to new levels of abstraction and managerial generalization. Doxiadis tried to hold onto ekistics
specificity by maintaining the categories of physical design and planning
insisting on land percentages, settlement patterns, and density ratios to
explain his grand proposalsonly to make his ideas sound increasingly out
of date. Doxiadis Associates projects in Greece tried to contemplate a new
aesthetic and reconceptualize ekistics specificity, but these experiments
did not go far enough. Fuller was already suggesting that the idea of human
settlements and urbanization would become obsolete and began to speak
28
Grey Room 36
about human unsettlements as a more realistic vision of the future.96

Dubos also kept a distancehe did not return to another Delos conference
after his initial participation. He was not convinced of the centrality of
ekistics to the global environmental cause.97
The 1976 Conference on Human Settlements that was the peak of
ekistics international success also signaled its end. Doxiadis had passed
away the year before, and the Delos conferences had come to a close. The
World Society for Ekistics maintained the interdisciplinary network, and the
journal Ekistics still exists today, with members of the old guard on its advisory board (Panayis Psomopoulos, Gwen Bell, Richard Meier). The journals
circulation is limited, and the Ecumenopolis-like maps that stubbornly
appear in its pages seemed, until recently, like relics of a bygone era. Yet, as
a new round of globalization is taking hold and as sustainable development is fast becoming the favorite catchphrase in architectural (and other)
circles, Doxiadiss vision of Ecumenopolis is becoming ever more current.
To examine Doxiadiss enterprise is to consider the complex relationships between environment and development from historys critical angle.98
To reflect on the presumptions of ekistics management and the politics of
its optimism is to contemplate the entanglement of environmentalism with
modernization and development discourses when the belief structure of
globalization was taking hold; it is not to look for pseudohistorical cycles
but to increase the vigilance of theoretical reflection on architectural discourse and broader cultural transformations.
29
Notes
The author wishes to thank the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives and in particular Giota
Pavlidou for their valuable assistance in accessing and sorting out the archival data. Sincere
thanks also to Panayis Psomopoulos for offering a vivid picture of Doxiadiss life and
endeavors through interviews. The source for the figures for this essay is the Constantinos
A. Doxiadis Archives.
1. C.A. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment (paper presented at the International
Conference on Water for Peace, Washington, DC, 23 May 1967), F4, articles-papers 2878,
Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Athens. The archives are hereinafter cited as Doxiadis
Archives.
2. Doxiadis was described like this in an illustrated article on him in Life magazine.
Busy Remodeler of the World, Life, 7 October 1966. Doxiadis was also the recipient of the
Aspen Award in 1966. For a more extensive overview of Doxiadis Associates activities and
fame at the time, see Christopher Rand, The Ekistic World, The New Yorker, 11 May 1963,
4987.
3. C.A. Doxiadis, Entopia [a short description that accompanies a rendering of entopia
printed on Doxiadis Associates greeting cards] (Doxiadis Associates, 1974). See also C.A.
Doxiadis, Between Dystopia and Utopia (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
4. C.A. Doxiadis, Entopia.
5. For the role of Doxiadis Associates in national planning, see Panayiota Pyla,
Baghdads Urban Restructuring, 1958: Aesthetics and Politics of Nation-Building, in
Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed.
Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008): 97115.
6. El Lissitzky made this comment on Le Corbusiers plans for the reconstruction of
Moscow (1930), which Le Corbusier soon retitled the Ville Radieuse, or Radiant City. For
El Lissitzkys reactions to Le Corbusiers ideas see Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the
Mystique of the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 109.
7. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, The Ekistics Grid, Architectural Association Journal 87 (September
October 1965): 12.
8. C.A. Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis, the Settlement of the Future, R-ERES 18 (Athens
Technological Organization, 23 June 1961). This document was reissued practically unchanged
as C.A. Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis, the Settlement of the Future, Athens Centre of Ekistics
Publication Series, Research Report No. 1 (Athens Centre of Ekistics, 1967). Following citations are to the 1967 version.
9. Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis, the Settlement of the Future, 165. See also C.A. Doxiadis,
The Future of the City, Newsweek International, March 1968, 4.
10. First Meeting of the United Nations Committee on Housing, Building and Planning,
Ekistics 15, no. 90, (May 1963): 251253.
11. UN reports admitted that progress in housing had remained inadequate in relation to
other fields of development and argued that housing had to be acknowledged as an integral
part of other areas of growth so as to foster a balanced social and economic development.
ECOSOC, Committee on Housing, Building and Planning, Report of the Secretary General,
UN document symbol E/C.6/2, 17 December 1962.
12. ECOSOC, Report of the Secretary General.
13. ECOSOC, Committee on Housing, Building, and Planning, Summary Record of Third
30
Grey Room 36
Meeting Held Tuesday 22 January 1963, UN document symbol E/C.6/SR3.

14. ECOSOC, Summary Record of Third Meeting.
15. Report on the United Nations Conference on the Application of Science and
Technology for the Benefit of Less Developed Areas, UN document symbol E/CONF.39/1,
vol. 5, 179180.
16. Report on the United Nations Conference on the Applications of Science and
Technology, 180.
17. Doxiadis believed that the UN resisted the creation of an independent body on human
settlements not to offend other agenciesa view that was also shared by other UN housing
experts. C.A. Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 422423.
18. Doxiadis, Ekistics, 423.
19. Many of the symposion participants, including the prominent CIAM member Sigfried
Giedion, emphasized the parallels between the 1933 CIAM and the Delos Symposion. The
Ekistics issue on the Delos Symposion included in its appendix the CIAM Charter of Athens
with the subtitle, Outcome of a Similar Effort. Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 263266.
20. Sigfried Giedion, quoted in The Declaration of Delos, Statements and Comments,
Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 254. Tyrwhitt, on the other hand, felt that the group was
too heavy on administrators: The creative spirits among the group were all out-weighed
and out-numbered by the investigators and administrators. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Personal
Impression of Delos Symposion, Graduate School of Ekistics Memo, 19 July 1963, file 17761,
Doxiadis Archives.
21. Doxiadiss reasons for insisting on the term symposion are captured in C.A. Doxiadis,
Comments on the Delos Symposion, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 204. The skepticism of the invited participants is evident from the comments that each participant made to
the journal Ekistics. See The Declaration of Delos, Statements and Comments, 252254.
22. Allah K. Brohi, Contributory Papers, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 257258.
23. Edward Mason, quoted in The Delians, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 228.
24. Juliusz Gorynski, Contributory Papers, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 259.
25. Marshall McLuhans contribution emphasized how electronic technology expanded
the brain to embrace the globe and reduced the planet to the scale of a village. Marshall
McLuhan, Contributory Papers, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 257.
26. McLuhan, Contributory Papers, 257. For more on McLuhans specific objections see
Mark Wigley, Network Fever, Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 82122.
27. Fuller, quoted in The Delians, 224.
28. Waddington, quoted in The Delos Symposion, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 205.
29. Giedion, who was General Secretary of CIAM from its foundation to its dissolution,
tried along with Jos Luis Sert to reorient the postwar CIAM agenda toward a new monumentality as a means to fulfill more than functional requirements. See, for example, the
polemical Nine Points on Monumentality written in 1943 by Giedion in collaboration with
Fernand Lger and Sert that stressed the need of architecture to express the collective aspirations of people. Siegfried Giedion, Fernand Lger, and Jos Luis Sert, Nine Points on
Monumentality, in Architecture Culture 19431968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan
Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). In contrast, Doxiadis defied the monumental aspects of
architecture in favor of peoples basic needs. Both of them, however, called on architecture to address multiple aspirations and argued that the postwar changes in the economic
31
structure of nations could form the basis of a new community life.

30. The Delos Symposion in Pictures, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 211217.
31. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Personal Impression of Delos Symposion.
32. The important role of Tyrwhitt was confirmed by Panayis Psomopoulos, interview by
author, 27 July 2005, Athens. Architect and planner Panayis Psomopoulos was one of the
closest collaborators with Doxiadis. He played an active role in Delos symposia and held
high positions in many branches of Doxiadisiss enterprise. To this day, Psomopoulos is the
secretary general and treasurer of the World Society for Ekistics (a position he held since its
establishment in 1965), and since Doxiadiss death in 1975 he has been president of the
Athens Center of Ekistics.
33. The British economist Barbara Ward (19151981), also known as Lady Jackson, was
assistant editor of the Economist from 1940 to 1950. She became a close associate of
Doxiadis in the late 1950s, and she also collaborated with other international housing
experts (e.g., she went to Ankara with Charles Abrams in 1964). In 1968, she was appointed
Schweitzer Professor of International Economic Development at Columbia University, and
in 1973 she became president of the International Institute of Environmental Affairs.
34. Barbara Ward, Catastrophe in Our Cities, Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 240.
Wards article was originally published in The Sunday Telegraph, 11 August 1963.
35. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in The Delos Symposion, 205.
36. City Planners vs. Capitalist Jungle, Weekly People, 17 August 1963; A Cruise Party
Ponders the Menace of the City, Washington Post, 21 July 1963; Party on Cities Asks World
Drive, New York Times, 2 July 1963; Mankind Menaced by Chaos of the Cities, London
Times, 17 July 1963; Sddeutsche Zeitung, 28 August 1963; excerpts of these articles were
reprinted in Ekistics 16, no. 95 (October 1963): 235241.
37. Barbara Ward made this point as she summarized the urban crisis: To the catastrophic growth in urban population must be added in the developed countries an equally
rapid growth in the number of automobiles men try to stuff into the cities with them. One
can only surmise that as income grows in under-developed countries, the same pressures
will develop there. Barbara Ward, Notes on the Urban Problem, Ekistics 18, no. 107
(October 1964): 198202.
38. Barbara Ward, The Menace of Urban Explosion, The Listener, 14 November 1963,
785786. In this article, Ward summarized the conclusions of the first Delos symposium.
39. Ward, The Menace of Urban Explosion, 786.
40. Wolfgang Sachs, One World, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge
as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992), 108.
41. Barbara Ward, Urban Growth towards the Jungle of the Asphalt, Oikonomikos
Taxydromos, 20 July 1967.
42. Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis, the Settlement of the Future, 157.
43. Delos Four was initially titled The Preservation of Human and Natural Beauty, but in
the midst of the conference the title was changed to The Preservation of Quality to underline
that man is an aspect of nature and the preservation of beauty needs no division into natural
and manmade. Need for Preservation of Quality, Ekistics 22, no. 131 (October 1965): 288.
44. Conrad H. Waddington, Biology and the Human Environment (lecture, International
Seminar on Ekistics, Athens, 6 July 1965), document series B, no. 5, file 2615, Doxiadis Archives.
45. Kenzo Tange, Kenzo Tange, Ekistics 22, no. 131 (October 1966): 248250, 258259,
274275.
32
Grey Room 36
46. The influence of Waddingtons notion on other architectural and interdisciplinary

communities at the time, and especially his influence on Fuller, is discussed in Reinhold
Martin, Crystal Balls, Any 17 (1997): 3539. For the larger significance of this version of
organicism to mid-twentieth-century scientific thought, see Donna Haraway, Crystals,
Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
47. C.A. Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis (lecture, International Seminar on Ekistics, Athens,
12 July 1965), document series B, no. 8, file 2615, Doxiadis Archives, p. 2.
48. C.A. Doxiadis, From Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis: A Short Outline (lecture,
Ekistics Research Discussions, Athens, 5 July 1967), document series B, no. 4, file 2501,
Doxiadis Archives.
49. Buckminster Fuller, Letter to Doxiadis, Main Currents in Modern Thought 25, no. 4
(MarchApril 1969): 8797. McLuhan had a similar reaction and would later dismiss
Doxiadis and his group as bricks and mortar people. Marshall McLuhan to Tom and
Dorothy Easterbrook, 1 August 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro,
Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 454.
50. C.A. Doxiadis and John G. Papaioannou, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the
Future (New York: Norton and Company, 1974).
51. For example, C.A. Doxiadis, Energy and Human Settlements (lecture, Conference
on Energy, Economics, and the Environment, Edison Electric Institute, Chicago, 31 January
1968), articles-papers 2918, Dioxadis Archives; C.A. Doxiadis, The Future of the City (draft
prepared for Newsweek International, March 1968), file 17705, Doxiadis Archives, pp. 14.
52. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment, H3.
53. C.A. Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).
54. [Untitled summary of Delos Four], Ekistics 22, no. 131 (October 1966): 286.
55. [Untitled summary of Delos Four], 286.
56. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment, A1H3.
57. Doxiadis, Energy and Human Settlements.
58. Doxiadis, Energy and Human Settlements. Ivan Illich referred to the human needs
discourse to describe how the allegedly global demand for goods and services justified international development. Ivan Illich, Needs, in The Development Dictionary, ed. Sachs, 88101.
60. Here I draw on Reinhold Martins analysis of Fullers photomontages. Martin,
Crystal Balls.
61. For Fullers negotiations between architecture and ecology, see Mark Wigley,
Planetary Home Boy, Any 17 (1997): 1623.
62. Buckminster Fuller, Why Am I Interested in Ekistics, Ekistics 22, no. 131 (October
1965): 180181. In this article, Fuller described the alignment of advanced architectural
research with general systems theory as one of ekistics most valuable contributions.
Doxiadis also explicitly drew the connections between Ecumenopolis and a systems
approach in a 1967 article, C.A. Doxiadis, Energy and the New Civilization: A Systems
Approach to the Cities, DA Review 3 no. 29 (May 1967): 14.
63. The Biosphere Conference, an intergovernmental conference of experts on rational
use and conservation of the biosphere held in Paris in 1968, was an earlier international conference that aimed to assess the problems of the global environment, but it focused mainly on
the scientific aspects of environmental problems, and did not have as wide a political impact.
33
64. See John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 9192.
65. Sachs, One World, 108.
66. As Ward observed, Before Stockholm, people usually saw the environment as something totally divorced from humanity. . . . Stockholm recorded a fundamental shift in the
emphasis of our environmental thinking. Erik Eckholm, Down to Earth (New York: W.W.
Norton 1982), xii.
67. Ren Dubos (19011983) was a French-born American biologist. His books, Man Adapting
(1965) and So Human an Animal (1968), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, warned that
humanity and nature may be damaged in adjusting to an extremely polluted environment.
68. Public attention to earths vulnerability was exponentially increasing in the 1970s, as
was media coverage on environmental issues in the United States and many European countries. See, for example, The Ravaged Environment, Newsweek, 26 January 1970. Debates in
scientific circles also attracted public interest, taking the debate in diverse directions. See,
for example, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Paul Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); and E.F. Schumacher, Small Is
Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
69. United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations 1972 (New York: Office of Public
Information, United Nations, 1972), 319; and United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment, Information Letter no. 2, Doxiadis Archives.
70. The World Society for Ekistics (WSE) was conceived at the 1965 Delos Symposion. The
society was inaugurated in 1967, and its members included Margaret Mead (who was the
official representative of WSE at the UN conference), Buckminster Fuller, Jean Gottman,
Eiichi Isorura, Sir Robert Matthew, Juliusz Gorynski, Barbara Ward, and Panayis Psomopoulos.
71. United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Information Letter no. 2.
72. For an overview of the connections between Doxiadiss thought and modernization
theory, see Panayiota Pyla, Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourses on Science,
Development, and Vernacular Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education 60, no. 3
(February 2007): 2839. For a more general discussion of this theory, see Nils Gilman,
Mandarins of the Future (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
73. Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Romes Project
on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Edward Goldsmith et
al., Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
74. Barbara Ward, Exercising Stewardship over Global Resources, Ekistics 34, no. 203
(October 1972), 235.
75. Declaration of Delos Ten, Ekistics 34, no. 203 (October 1972): 230233. The declaration resounded with many Stockholm themes.
76. Dubos, quoted in Ward, Exercising Stewardship, 235.
77. Ren Dubos, Man and Nature (speech presented at Delos Ten, Athens, July 1972).
The speech was reprinted in Ekistics 34, no. 203 (October 1972): 236239.
78. Dubos, quoted in Ward, Exercising Stewardship, 236.
79. Doxiadis, Water and the Human Environment, G3.
80. Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics, 27.
81. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment, G1G2.
82. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment, G1G2.
83. Declaration of Delos Ten, 230233.
34
Grey Room 36

85. Ren Dubos, Man and Nature, 236239.
86. All about Stockholm, World Environment Newsletter, August 1972, 40.
87. Ekistics 200, Ekistics 34, no. 200 (July 1972): 2.
88. The term ecology, coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1873, has its etymological sources in the Greek oikos (house) and logos (knowledge). Economics comes
from oikos and nomos (law).
89. This interpretation draws on Mark Wigleys argument that the perception of the globe
as a home had a particular significance to architecture because it led to the conceptualization of the globe as a colossal domestic space and introduced new alignments between ecology and architecture. See Mark Wigley, Recycling Recycling, in Eco-Tech: Architecture of
the In-Between, ed. Amerigo Marras (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 4748.
90. C.A. Doxiadis, Action For Human Settlements (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 123.
91. Wigley, Recycling Recycling.
92. Nongovernmental organizations exposed, among other things, the ecocidal activities of the United States in Asia. China capitalized on the plunder, aggression, and war by
the colonialists, imperialists, and neocolonialists. The USSR and East European countries
boycotted the event to protest the fact that the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
was not invited. For the positions of nongovernmental groups that opposed government
policies on environment, see Mary Jean Haley, ed., Open Options: A Guide to Stockholms
Alternative Environmental Conferences (Stockholm: N.p., 1972), 3. Chinas reactions were
reported in Stockholm Conference Eco, no. 14 (June 1972): 1. For more details on the reaction of the Chinese delegation, see McCormick, 99100.
93. These four books were C.A. Doxiadis, Anthropopolis: City for Human Development
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); Doxiadis and Papaioannou, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable
City of the Future; C.A. Doxiadis, Building Entopia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976); and
Doxiadis, Action for Human Settlements.
94. Gwen Bell and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt prepared a package of material outlining the connection between ekistics and the UN conference in Vancouver. Margaret Mead, Habitat:
Building a Global Constituency, Habitat International 3, nos. 34 (1978): 283286. Meads
article, which reflected on the impact of the Habitat conference, emphasized the pioneering
role Doxiadis played in demanding a UN body in its own right to deal with the crisis of
human settlements.
95. Transcript of Bucky Fuller at Habitat, file 7313, Doxiadis Archives; and Panayis
Psomopoulos, interview by author, June 2000, Athens.
96. Fuller argued that humanity was moving from tied down agricultural, mining, or
seaport communities toward a world society. Fuller took this idea further to argue that the
conception of human settlements as nationalistically bound and immobile was obsolete.
This integrated world society was reflected in the phrase human unsettlements. Buckminster
Fuller, Accommodating Human Unsettlement, Town Planning Review 49 (January 1978):
5160.
97. Duboss skepticism was reflected in his overall comments at Delos Ten in 1972. See
Ward, Exercising Stewardship.
98. See Panayiota Pyla, Counter-Histories of Sustainability, Volume 18 (December
2008): 1416.
35

Doxiadis - Entopia Greeting Card

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Doxiadis - Entopia Greeting Card

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Constantinos A. Doxiadis.

Entopia greeting card, 1974.

Planetary Home and Garden:

Top: Doxiadis Associates. Proposals

ernist ambition to coordinate the entire system of knowledge about the

Top: Cover of Ekistics showing

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

environmental considerations of ekistics went well beyond speculating on

invited specialists (including the American housing expert Charles Abrams

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

Bacon, executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission. If the

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

The tensions among competing worldviews were finessed, if not resolved,

Delos meeting, 1963. Opposite,

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

The Delos Symposion attracted international press coveragein the New

Right: Sigfried Giedion signing

was emerging. As photographs from outer space vividly illustrated the

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

Doxiadis Associates. The Twelve

Ecumenokepos was presented in the posthumously published book, Ecology

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

From Stockholm to Delos: Local Varieties in the Global Order

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

Doxiadis Associates. The

Ecumenopolis and Ecumenokepos by arguing that in every continent,

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

threats as long as the universal family remained united. The chairman of

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

about human unsettlements as a more realistic vision of the future.96

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

Meeting Held Tuesday 22 January 1963, UN document symbol E/C.6/SR3.

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

structure of nations could form the basis of a new community life.

46. The influence of Waddingtons notion on other architectural and interdisciplinary

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

84. Doxiadis, Water and Human Environment, H3.

Pyla | Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics

You might also like