Ekistics

The Delos Symposia (1963-75) were a groundbreaking series of events created by architect–planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, dedicated to re-thinking and re-shaping the built environment to handle global demographic growth, environmental threats, and infrastructure demands. The Symposia took place yearly aboard a ship in the Aegean Sea and concluded at the ancient island-city of Delos, where influential figures – including Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Arnold Toynbee, Barbara Ward, and Doxiadis’ key collaborator Jaqueline Tyrwhitt – would convene in the theatre to deliberate on world issues.

The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis offers the first comprehensive appraisal of the history and legacy of these meetings. It explores their ideals, how they fed into Doxiadis’s urban planning projects, as well as their relevance for contemporary debates on ecology and design. Staying true to the multidisciplinary nature of the Symposia, the book bridges archaeology, classics, architecture, sociology, geography, psychology, anthropology, as well as postcolonial and environmental studies.

One of the most compelling portraits of the activities of the international planning firm Doxiadis Associates in Nigeria is included in The Lagos Handbook, a massive master's thesis prepared by the Harvard Project of the City in 2000, supervised by Rem Koolhaas. This paper will seek to understand how, in The Lagos Handbook, the Doxiadis initiatives in Nigeria were characterized as a flawed yet influential forerunner of the Handbook's own analyses. In such fashion, the text drew a lineage between postmodern interpreters of the global condition with their modernist forebears.

The International Journal of Ekistics and the New Habitat is an online double-blind, internationally peer reviewed research journal. The journal publishes scholarly insights and reflective practice of studies and critical writing concerning the problems and science of human settlements. The field of Ekistics is mapped against a classification of settlement scale, from the remote village and rural township to global systems of dense smart cities, and increasingly the challenges of on-and-off world sustainable habitats.

The present issue is the second of a three-part special issue of Ekistics and the New Habitat addressing 'Ekistics Related Research in Greece'. Drawing on a growing community of researchers, academics, and scholars, regularly involved with the problems and solutions in the field of human settlements, the present issue explores the planning principles at issue in current discussions about ekistics theory and ekistics related work in Greece and abroad. It includes scholarly articles by scholars and researchers operating locally in Greece and transnationally around the world. Contributors are academics, researchers, practitioners or government officials with previous academic experience. They are writing from positions in the US, Colombia, UAE, China, and Greece. As mentioned in the first part of this triple issue, Ekistics-related research in Greece-A Critical Approach to the Ekistics Legacy (Part 1 or 3), this collection of research essays and papers are dedicated to my dear godfather Panayis Psomopoulos, an architect and planner who collaborated closely with C. A. Doxiadis. Panayis' continuous efforts and total commitment to the continuation of the ekistics legacy kept the ekistics flame alive and growing worldwide for almost 35 years. It is to him that we owe the current journal's predecessor, Ekistics: the science of the problems of human settlements, a longstanding journal which reflected the preservation and further development of his lifelong work and that of C. A. Doxiadis' legacy; the details of which are outlined in the Editorial to the first part of the issue (Exacoustou, 2022).

There are numerous ways to define consciousness. In this essay, consciousness is defined as "the operational interface between body movement and the body's surroundings." Neurophenomenology - the empirical marriage between cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of subjective, first-person experience - is introduced as fecund methodology for fine-tuning this operational interface, thus setting the stage for a new field of practice: Designing for Consciousness.

There are manifold ways to define consciousness. This essay surveys the literature drawing on key insights that illumine the ways consciousness is attuned to the built environment. The findings contained herein are for the benefit of designers and planners seeking to expand their practice beyond typical mechanistic applications.

In the Autumn of 1992, I participated in a class entitled "Design Languages" in my Whole Systems Design program at Antioch University Seattle. As a Final Project for the class, I convened a series of Design Charrettes to engage interested associates in contributing further to the construction of "A Pattern Language for EcoVillages." Provided here is documentation of the results of that Charrette, including preparatory papers produced in the class. All told, this publication will assist other designers in designing a full-featured class for the topic, most well-suited for graduate programs in Ekistics and EcoVillage Design.

This keynote will focus on the role of urban governance and rural-urban fringe in in the postwar reconstruction agenda of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti. Doxiadis believed in the necessity of centralized state coordination. Adriano Olivetti considered a government of decentralized authority as the true expression of democracy. In 1945, Doxiadis, upon invitation by Prime Minister Nikolaos Plastiras, worked on the creation of a centralized state agency in charge of reconstruction. Centralized control and planning had, for Doxiadis a theoretical justification, which can be found in The March of the Peoples. Olivetti, as becomes evident in The Political Order of the Communities, supported political decentralization, which, for him, referred to the implementation of urban and economic plans by the territorial communities and their organic coordination.

This paper is a proto-dissertation in the sense that it is an initial attempt to begin pulling together the various streams of literature that would help me prove that we can, in fact, "design for consciousness." There is an interesting opening section in this paper that did not appear in the dissertation: Exposing "Modernism" as the entropic mechanistic paradigm that resulted in the current disaster of the built environment for which "design for consciousness" is a transcendent remedy. This paper is surely a draft of what would grow into my full dissertation; as such, I had to cut it short of the several more chapters I could envision for the developing argument. For that reason, I am thankful there is a category for Drafts on Academia.

Megalopolis in Ancient Greek Arcadia, in Constantinos Doxiadis and in Francis Ford Coppola. A Blissful Ecumene?

This paper in preparation explores and compares three modes of creating urban imagery as well as real urban space as a promise of human bliss. It focuses on Megalopolis of Ancient Arcadia in the Peloponnese as constant reference of ancient urbanism plus as a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature throughout early modernity. Thereafter, it moves on to the grandiose visions of urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis, and the decades-long-standing imaginary of Francis Ford Coppola, a self-described “builder” of cities, as seen in his forthcoming film of the same title.

It is demonstrated here that a typical person living in Kansas is embedded and contained in no less than eight layers of gridded orthogonal reality. My question is: How does such squarish phenomenological situationing condition thoughts, emotions, and overall worldview?

The vital significance of settlement morphology is typically overlooked in the design professions, often resorting to abstract configurations lacking any conceivable relationship with the site's underlying morphology. As the introduction to a chapter in my dissertation, this essay redresses this oversight in principle.

The Classical Egyptians are a venerable example of a celestial culture superstructure mounted on top of an organic village-based infrastructure. The Classical Maya are perhaps the most comparable of this model. This model is presented as a premier archetype in the quest for long term sustainability in human settlement patterning.

Bidang pendidikan merupakan salah satu bidang yang terkena dampak pandemi COVID-19. Sistem pembelajaran online pun menjadi satu-satunya pilihan di daerah terdampak COVID-19. Salah satu aplikasi media pembelajaran yang digunakan di masa pandemi ini adalah Google Meet dan Google Classroom. Namun, belum semua sekolah menengah di Sumba Timur menggunakan media pembelajaran online tersebut karena keterbatasan pemahaman teknologi para tenaga pendidik. Oleh karena itu, pelatihan pemanfaatan aplikasi media pembelajaran online seperti Google Meet dan Google Classroom akan membantu para guru untuk dapat melaksanakan pembelajaran yang efektif dan efisien. Metode yang digunakan dalam kegiatan ini adalah metode tutorial dan praktik langsung. Kegiatan PKM ini dilaksanakan di SMPN 2 Kanatang. Adapun hasil dari pelaksanaan kegiatan ini adalah seluruh peserta pelatihan yang berjumlah 16 orang guru di SMP Negeri 2 Kanatang merasa puas dan dapat memahami materi pelatihan dengan baik yang dapat mereka a...

The EcoVillage Concept, as currently employed, is a promising initial step towards envisioning sustainable human settlements. As an initial step, however, there is still room for much improvement. This paper argues that expanding the ecovillage concept to include a comprehensive Village Design will provide the necessary context to begin envisioning truly sustainable human settlements for the 21st century.

In this essay we are discussing a turning point in the urban thinking of the 20th century related to the transition from a static view of the city to a view of the city as an evolving living organism. We are exploring the paradigm shift from the urban grid of the 7th C.I.A.M. to the urban grid of the last phase of the science of Ekistics (C. A. Doxiadis) by focusing on the contribution of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. First, we analyze the urban grid as a result of the considerations of the post war functionalist urbanism of the 7th C.I.A.M. Then we present the basic characteristics of the science of the human settlements called Ekistics and analyze its grid accordingly. Comparing the two grids, we highlight the introduction of the concepts of ‘change’ and ‘system’ as distinctive of the above-mentioned paradigm shift. Third, we explain Jaqueline Tyrwhitt’s contribution in this paradigm shift. Finally, we explain how Tyrwhitt formulated her own humanistic and ecological conception of urban planning having been influenced by the biologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes and his conception of the city as a living organism, which was part of the wider interaction between concepts in biology and the social sciences.

The term “Urban Village” is currently being used by developers, governments, and the planning profession to describe a new patterning of human settlement. This book will review the manner in which the concept “Urban Village” is being employed, will come to suggest that developers, governments, and planners are moving in the right direction but are not going far enough, and will finally propose the characteristics and qualities of a version of “Urban Village” that is a genuine synergy of ecology and urbanism.
The whole discussion will be framed within the concerns of an increasingly relevant issue of our times – the goals of long-term “sustainability” – and will pay particular attention to the prospects and challenges of a “reduced-carbon” future in conditions of “energy descent.” The synergistic “Urban Village” will be proposed as a comprehensive retrofit solution for this anticipated scenario.
        The book itself, its format and content, will be an example of the use of “Ekistics” – the scientific, multi-disciplinary study of human settlements. As such, “Urban Village” will be explored from the interdependent, interpenetrating perspectives of diverse fields, including: human geography, human ecology, urban planning, sociology, psychology, economics, energetics, cultural anthropology, topology, architecture, evolutionary biology, and the meaning of ‘place,’ etc.
        I am writing from the West Coast of the North American continent in the bioregion of Cascadia in the opening decade of the 21st century, and this vantage point greatly influences my perspectives and my personal experience with the unfortunate consequences of careless, haphazard, uninformed settlement design and planning. From this vantage point, I can see a tremendous need for the full and open development of this vital concept “Urban Village.”

C. A. Doxiadis (1913-1975), the creator of ekistics and founder of the eponymous journal, was one of the major architects and city planners of the twentieth century. In recent decades, however, the architect’s body of work has perhaps not been examined
in many architectural and planning histories to the extent warranted by his firm’s global scope and impact. In 2011, his monumental house at Porto Rafti was demolished, exposing some of the consequences of such obscurity. Though over the years
several volumes have appeared that document Doxiadis’ life and contributions, I aim to contribute to this research with my ongoing English-language biography project on Doxiadis’ life and legacy tentatively titled, The World Planner. In this short essay, I discuss the fate of the Porto Rafti house, sketch Doxiadis’ life story, explain the origins of my project, and solicit further collaboration from interested readers.

General Systems Theory (GST) has been an innovative, developing science for the past fifty years, offering application to almost every field of inquiry. GST has been successfully applied to the physical, chemical, sociological, ecological, psychological, industrial – and especially biological fields. Here I want to demonstrate how GST can be used as a meaningful model in the field of Ekistics – the multi-disciplinary, scientific approach to the design of human settlements.

The paper is developed around the following axes: firstly, it focuses on the examination of Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's respective understanding of democracy; secondly, it presents their respective reconstruction models; thirdly, it analyses their respective stance vis-à-vis centralised and decentralised models of governing; finally, it examines their respective involvement in the European Recovery Program (ERP). The objective of the paper is to shed light on how Doxiadis and Olivetti contributed to societal transformation, on the one hand, and the formation of national identity within the Greek and Italian postwar

Towards a New Vernacular: Introducing the work of Asha & Prabhakar Baste.

In India two factors override others by their sheer magnitude:
• a building is the outcome of a handmade craft tradition and not industrial production &
• the majority of the population lives in small towns and villages and builds without architects.
The architecture of Asha & Prabhakar Baste is relevant because it addresses itself to both these issues. Their process of construction forges links with the craftsmen; and their buildings are designed to be prototypes. Their style has a simplicity, rigor, and deductive logic that paves the way for a new vernacular.

(This essay was commissioned for the architects' 1997 monograph Sheltering Angle. It argued for Design/Build at a time when its acceptance was frowned upon by the Indian Institute of Architects. The essay has been republished to coincide with the publication of The Sheltering Angle 2022)

Manifestos, Building Design, Village, Ratnagiri, Minimal Housing, Small Towns, Module, Skidmore Owens and Merril

The author is associate professor of geography at the Università degli Studi del Molise, Italy; and teaches at the GIS Masteřs Program of the Università di Roma La Sapienza. He holds a doctorate in political geography from the Università di Trieste (1998) and is dottore in lettere at the Università di Venezia (1985). He was a visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles (2000, 2001) and is a member of the editorial board of Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, based in Paris, and co-editor of Sistema Terra. He focused his research on the life and work of Jean Gottmann and is writing a book on the subject.

Las ciudades no se están encogiendo, sino que están adquiriendo una nueva dimensión escalar cuya tendencia apunta hacia lo planetario de un modo heterogéneo. A lo largo de este vector, la arquitectura como disciplina no da un paso al costado. Por el contrario, comprende la necesidad de encarar esta escala contemplando la ecología, la cartografía y los flujos materiales, de modo de sintetizarlos en assemblages territoriales capaces de articular funciones paisajísticas, socioeconómicas e infraestructurales. En este sentido, el presente ensayo apuntará a establecer una tríada entre el concepto de Brenner y Katsikis de urbanización planetaria, el de bigness de Koolhaas y el de archipiélago de Ungers. Al final de este ensayo, y luego de identificar agendas latentes dentro de esta tríada, una serie de estrategias proyectuales y metodológicas serán propuestas en base a los proyectos de los mencionados autores.

The district heating sector in Sweden is today facing several challenges due to competition from other heating alternatives as well as decreasing heat demand in buildings. To increase its competitiveness, the district heating companies have to find ways to keep their production costs at a more or less constant level. One way of doing this is to increase the efficiency of the district heating systems. To be able to do this, the district heating companies need to identify substations which have a negative effect on the overall efficiency of the system. An example of these substations are substations with poor cooling performance which means that they do not extract as much heat from the district heating system as they are supposed to do. To compensate for this, more hot water needs to pass through the poorly performing substations. As a result, the district heating system will be inefficient and this leads to increased production costs. To be able to find the substations with poor coo...

The Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis belonged to the group of professionals and thinkers who challenged the quality of urban environment and living, as it had been evolved up to the mid of the 20th century. Doxiadis identified the need for revisiting policies in modern urban planning and he mobilized any available means –theory, practice, education and communication- towards this end. Providing his services as a government’s consultant in several countries of the under-development world during the fifties and sixties, having established solid liaisons with distinguished Institutions in the U.S.A., having a remarkable portfolio of materialized projects with global impact and respectively a remarkable volume of written work, research and publications, having even created an Institute for postgraduate studies on the field, he went further beyond. He declared the necessity for a radical change in urban planning, by means of introducing a new scientific domain in t...

Village Design is a celebration of organic settlement morphology. Any authentic perennial Village may be considered a 4-dimensional, anthropomorphic outgrowth of a particular Ecology, embodying the morphological characteristics of a specific Topology. The perennial Village is the archetype of sustainable settlement patterning. This is because the Village, by definition, is symbiotically integrated into its local Ecology. Within this localized sphere of influence, it is imperative that the Village maintain the long-term health and vitality of its encompassing Ecology as an ontological matter of perdurance. That’s what enables the Village-Ecology-Topology habitation system to become “sustainable,” that is, capable of being continued into the indefinite future. Sustainability ultimately means knowledgeable and informed micro-management at this scale.
When considering the prospect of sustainable human settlements for the 21st century, it will become apparent that current settlements need to be re-organized according to fundamental village patterning. This is the same as saying that existing settlements need to be retrofitted so that they may have a chance of becoming integrated into their local ecologies – anything else is an abstraction, and therefore perpetuates conditions of unsustainability. From this perspective, the scientific, multidisciplinary, emerging practice of Village Design is the concerted effort to envision this re-organization in preparation for the praxis of retrofit.
As conceived by Village Design Institute, there are currently four essential typologies to the concept of Village Design: 1) Eco-Village, 2) Urban Village, 3) Suburban Village Retrofit, and 4) Traditional Village Upgrade. These typologies—each one embodying in essential ways the archetypal patterning of the perennial Village—will now be explicated. These cursory descriptions, intended to articulate distinctions among the four typologies, are an introduction. Further embellishment can be found at: www.villagedesign.org

Το αντικείμενο αυτής της εργασίας είναι η μελέτη, ο σχεδιασμός και η τελική κατασκευή ενός πρωτότυπου αμαξιδίου συγκεκριμένων (μικρών) διαστάσεων τύπου Formula 1. Προς τον σκοπό αυτό, έπρεπε να μελετήσουμε και να εξοικειωθούμε με ποικίλα φυσικά φαινόμενα που σχετίζονται κυρίως με την Αεροδυναμική. Η Αεροδυναμική είναι κλάδος της Μηχανικής που έχει ως αντικείμενο έρευνας και μελέτης τους νόμους που διέπουν τη ροή του αέρα ή άλλων αερίων γύρω από σώματα διαφορετικής μορφής. Ο σύγχρονος τρόπος σχεδιασμού και μελέτης απλών ή σύνθετων κατασκευών γίνεται με εξειδικευμένα προγράμματα σε υπολογιστή. Το αντικείμενο μελέτης σχεδιάζεται σε τρισδιάστατη απεικόνιση, η συμπεριφορά του ερευνάται με προγράμματα προσομοίωσης, ανάλογα με τα αποτελέσματα γίνονται διορθώσεις και το τελικό μοντέλο προχωρά στο στάδιο της κατασκευής. Έτσι χρειάστηκε να μάθουμε να χρησιμοποιούμε προγράμματα CAD/CAM, δηλαδή λογισμικά τρισδιάστατου σχεδιασμού και κατασκευής αντικειμένων, καθώς και CFD, δηλαδή λογισμικά που ε...

While most Australian human settlements are large, densely networked urban systems located on the eastsouth- eastern seaboard and the coastal footholds of Perth and Adelaide, a particular class of settlements have long maintained occupancy in the interior of the country enduring the arid and semi-arid localities that make up the vast majority of the continent's land mass. How this interior class of settlements is perceived plays a significant role in policy formulation processes, including constructing assumptions about their value. This paper brings together two bodies of literature that influence the understanding of the role of remote desert settlements in Australia, namely the 'mutuality of influence' and 'scale-free networks', arguing for the need for policy transformation. The first part introduces the proposition of mutual influence between community, ecology and built system pressures; the second explores how the systemic view of human settlements evolved...

While most Australian human settlements are large, densely networked urban systems located on the eastsouth- eastern seaboard and the coastal footholds of Perth and Adelaide, a particular class of settlements have long maintained occupancy in the interior of the country enduring the arid and semi-arid localities that make up the vast majority of the continent's land mass. How this interior class of settlements is perceived plays a significant role in policy formulation processes, including constructing assumptions about their value. This paper brings together two bodies of literature that influence the understanding of the role of remote desert settlements in Australia, namely the 'mutuality of influence' and 'scale-free networks', arguing for the need for policy transformation. The first part introduces the proposition of mutual influence between community, ecology and built system pressures; the second explores how the systemic view of human settlements evolved...

While most Australian human settlements are large, densely networked urban systems located on the east-south-eastern seaboard and the coastal footholds of Perth and Adelaide, a particular class of settlements have long maintained occupancy in the interior of the country ...

While most Australian human settlements are large, densely networked urban systems located on the east-south-eastern seaboard and the coastal footholds of Perth and Adelaide, a particular class of settlements have long maintained occupancy in the interior of the country ...

While most Australian human settlements are large, densely networked urban systems located on the east-south-eastern seaboard and the coastal footholds of Perth and Adelaide, a particular class of settlements have long maintained occupancy in the interior of the country ...

Abstract: Research on human settlements has traditionally focussed on one or a few descriptive or functional aspects, such as geographical characteristics of the locality, the economy, housing, transport, infrastructure, education or health, or created models with varying ...

Το καλοκαίρι του 1968 ο συνθέτης Γιάννης Χρήστου λαμβάνει πρόσκληση του Αθηναϊκού Κέντρου Οικιστικής, του Αθηναϊκού Τεχνολογικού Ομίλου του Κωνσταντίνου Α. Δοξιάδη, προκειμένου να συνεισφέρει με μια ομιλία στις εκδηλώσεις του Athens Ekistics Month. Είναι η ίδια περίοδος μιας έντονης και ιδιαίτερα παραγωγικής φάσης του Έλληνα συνθέτη, όσον αφορά τη μουσική δημιουργία αλλά και τη φιλοσοφική πλευρά του που αποτυπώνεται σε μια σειρά κειμένων και σημειώσεων (Η Σεληνιακή Εμπειρία, Πρωτοεκτελέσεις κ.ά.). Παρά το γεγονός ότι η ομιλία δεν έγινε ποτέ, λόγω φόρτου εργασίας που επικαλέστηκε ο Χρήστου, υπάρχει στα πρακτικά της συνεδριακής εκδήλωσης ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον κείμενο το οποίο έστειλε ο συνθέτης στον Γ.Γ.Παπαϊωάννου προκειμένου να διαβαστεί αντί ανακοίνωσης. Το κείμενο αυτό απηχεί την στοχαστική προβληματική του Χρήστου εκείνη την εποχή, αλλά και συμπληρώνει καίρια τις φιλοσοφικές αγωνίες και αρχές που καταγράφονται στα παραπάνω κείμενα που συνέταξε την ίδια χρονιά.