Abstract
Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913-1975) was an important figure in the realm of postwar urbanism, and yet his contribution has been largely neglected. This study reviews his trajectory and analyzes key projects related to different phases of his career: the housing programs of the Ministry of Reconstruction developed during the Greek Civil War and with Marshall Plan funds; the National Housing Program of Iraq in the context of the Third World modernization; and the Urban Detroit Area project developed against the suburbanization of the American city and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Each one of these episodes is examined against the background of the opposing but interacting “processes” that characterized the forging of the postwar world: the efforts to internationalism and the schism of the Cold War. The first two projects reveal Doxiadis’ persistence on the importance of housing as a motor of economic development and his seminal contribution to aided self-help programs. In parallel, I examine his ideas on urban-regional development in relation to the modernization theory, namely the doctrine that advanced the development of Third World countries according to the paradigm of the West. Finally, his connections with the Ford Foundation and his participation in events organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom offer an opportunity to examine his oeuvre in relation to the Cold War cultural policies. The second half of the thesis broadly coincides with the period 1960-1975 and focuses on ekistics, an action-oriented interdisciplinary approach to global urbanization problems that Doxiadis coined the science of human settlements. It examines the emergence of the ekistic movement, the establishment of the Athens Center of Ekistics as a hub in the European periphery “operating” between East and West, the intellectual forum of the Delos Symposia, and the journal Ekistics. In a parallel line, the analysis of the ekistic research programs aims to assess Doxiadis’ efforts to unite two different cultures of planning, that is, the sociological perspective with the calculative spirit of mathematics and statistics. The study of Doxiadis’ plan for Detroit reveals the flaws of his comprehensive approach and discusses the ekistic methodologies in reference to the systems approach to planning. Altogether, Doxiadis and ekistics epitomize the transition from the heroic modernism to the visionary approaches that explored the consequences of a world turning into a global village. Doxiadis, however, sought to plan the city of the future as part of a global urban system. In his eyes, facing the urban crisis was an attainable ideal. Eventually, the contradictions between his work and theory were the outcome of his commitment to plan an inevitable development and his anxiety to put order in the urban chaos.
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