Exit the Ekistician

Despite their confident use of statistics, graphs and maps to limn the future, city planners have no claim on prescience. They depend instead on an all too fallible blend of private intuition and public persuasion; theirs is not a profession for the timid. Most persuasive of them all, at least through the 1960s, was Greece's Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, who was buried last week after dying at the age of 62 of multiple sclerosis. Based in Athens, he specialized in drawing up practical housing programs for developing countries and thus directly influenced the lives of tens of millions of poor people. Beyond that, Doxiadis was something of an oracle, the inventor and tireless promoter of ekistics, which he defined as the science of human settlements. His practice and precepts combined to make him the world's best-known planner.

Grayhaired Doxiadis was dapper, shrewd and brisk--a silver fox of a man who was equally at home designing mud-brick houses for Zambian peasants or diagramming his thoughts (with multicolored felt-tip pens) for Western intellectuals. He was born in 1913 of Greek parents in Bulgaria, was bred and educated in Athens, and earned a graduate degree in Berlin. His talent shone early: at 23 he became Athens' top town planner; at 25 he was chief of regional planning for all Greece. Then came World War II (Doxiadis was a Resistance hero) and after it the job of supervising the reconstruction of 3,000 ravaged Greek villages.

In 1953 he founded his own firm, Doxiadis Associates, which eventually opened branches in eleven countries, including one in Washington, D.C., and employed a huge staff of 700 people. Plans churned off his drafting tables. Among them: the design of Pakistan's new capital of Islamabad, housing studies for Iraq, Ghana, Brazil and a regional scheme of new towns and transportation corridors in South America's five-nation River Plate Basin. In the U.S., he laid out a 2,500-acre urban-renewal project in Philadelphia. As part of a 1965 projection of greater Detroit's future growth--commissioned by the Detroit Edison Co.--he warned that middle-class families were abandoning the center city "at a rate of two yards a day, including weekends."

As "Dinos" grew more famous in the 1960s, he began holding his annual Delos symposium, a week-long Aegean cruise to which he would invite 30 or so distinguished thinkers. A typical guest list would include the likes of Inventor Buckminster Fuller, Historian Arnold Toynbee, Industrialist Robert O. Anderson, Economist Barbara Ward and Media Guru Marshall McLuhan. It was, Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, the closest thing to the great English house parties of the turn of the century--stimulating talk in an informal atmosphere.

On to Ecumenopolis. Doxiadis invariably supplied the framework for those discussions: ekistics. He felt that the world was rushing toward increasingly disorderly urbanization and sprawl. Conceding that the trend was inexorable, he insisted that growth could be guided and made rational--but only if all elements of city building were treated together. He therefore urged architects, planners and engineers to get into ekistical harness with geographers, meteorologists, sociologists and economists. By the year 2100, Doxiadis said, such a collaboration could create "Ecumenopolis," an orderly, beautiful city of perhaps 25 billion people that would virtually cover the continents.

Other planners scoffed, arguing that with runaway population growth, man might not survive the next century, let alone reach Ecumenopolis. But even if his fondest dream seems unattainable, Doxiadis at the very least was responsible for taking city planning for the first time into developing countries and convincing world leaders of its importance. He was in effect the profession's supersalesman.

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