Ekistics
Encyclopedia
The term Ekistics applies to the science of human settlements. It includes regional, city, community planning and dwelling design. It involves the study of all kinds of human settlements, with a view to geography and ecology - the physical environment- , and human psychology and anthropology, and cultural, political, and occasionally aesthetics.
As a scientific mode of study is currently found to rely on statistics and description, organized in five ekistic elements: nature, anthropos, society, shells, and networks. It is generally a more academic field than "urban planning
", and has considerable overlap with some of the less restrained fields of architectural theory
.
In application, conclusions are drawn aimed at achieving harmony between the inhabitants of a settlement and their physical and socio-cultural environments.
As Doxiadis put it “Ekistics is a science, even if in our times it is usually considered a technology and an art, without the foundations of a science. This is a mistake for which we pay very heavily.” Having recorded very successfully the destructions of the ekistic wealth in Greece during WWII, Doxiadis became convinced that human settlements are susceptible of systematic investigation. Doxiadis being aware of the unifying power of systems thinking and particularly of the biological and evolutionary reference models as used by many famous biologists-philosophers of his generation, especially Sir Julian Huxley (1887–1975), Theodosius Dobzhansky
(1900–75), Dennis Gabor
(1900–79), René Dubos
(1901–82), George G. Simpson (1902–84), and Conrad Waddington (1905–75), used the biological model to describe the "Ekistic behavior" of Anthropos (the five principles) and the evolutionary model to explain the morphogenesis of human settlements (the eleven forces, the hierarchical structure of human settlements, dynapolis, ecumenopolis
). Finally, he formulated a general theory which considers human settlements as living organisms capable of evolution, an evolution that might be guided by Man using "Ekistic knowledge".
adjective οἰκιστικός more particularly from the neuter plural οἰκιστικά (as physics is derived from φυσικά, Aristotle). The ancient Greek adjective οἰκιστικός meant: "concerning the foundation of a house, a habitation, a city or colony; contributing to the settling." It was derived from οἰκιστής, an ancient Greek noun meaning "the person who installs settlers in place". This may be regarded as deriving indirectly from another ancient Greek noun, οἶκισις, meaning "building", "housing", "habitation", and especially "establishment of a colony, a settlement , or a town" (already in Plato), or "filling with new settlers", settling", "being settled". All these words grew from the verb οἰκίζω, to settle and were ultimately derived from the noun οἶκος, "house", "home" or "habitat.
The shorter Oxford English Dictionary
contains a reference to an oecist, oekist or oikist, defining him as: "the founder of an ancient Greek ... colony". The English equivalent of oikistikh is ekistics (a noun). In addition, the adjectives ekistic and ekistical, the adverb ekistically, and the noun ekistician are now also in current use. The French equivalent is ékistique, the German oekistik, the Italian echistica (all feminine).
Names of Units and Population Scale
(final version, from C.A.Doxiadis' last book, ACTION for Human Settlements, p. 186, Athens Center of Ekistics, 1976):
Note: The population figures below are for Doxiadis' ideal future ekistic units for the year 2100 at which time he estimated (in 1968) that Earth
would achieve zero population growth
at a population of 50,000,000,000 with human civilization being powered by fusion energy.
Ekistics is also an academic periodical, overlaping the fields of human geography, environmental psychology, and the sciences of the built environment
, published monthly from Greece since the mid 1960s, in English.
As a scientific mode of study is currently found to rely on statistics and description, organized in five ekistic elements: nature, anthropos, society, shells, and networks. It is generally a more academic field than "urban planning
Urban planning
Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
", and has considerable overlap with some of the less restrained fields of architectural theory
Architectural theory
Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, or most importantly writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in most architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are the lecture or dialogue, the...
.
In application, conclusions are drawn aimed at achieving harmony between the inhabitants of a settlement and their physical and socio-cultural environments.
The scope of ekistics
The notion of ekistics implies that understanding the interaction between and within human groups—infrastructure, agriculture, shelter, function (job) -- in conjunction with their environment directly affects their well-being (individual and collective). The subject begins to elucidate the ways in which collective settlements form and how they inter-relate. By doing so, humans begin to understand how they 'fit' into a species, i.e. homo sapiens, and how homo sapiens 'should' be living in order to manifest our potential—at least as far as this species is concerned (as the text stands now). Ekistics in some cases argues that in order for human settlements to expand efficiently and economically we must reorganize the way in which the villages, towns, cities, metropoli are formed.As Doxiadis put it “Ekistics is a science, even if in our times it is usually considered a technology and an art, without the foundations of a science. This is a mistake for which we pay very heavily.” Having recorded very successfully the destructions of the ekistic wealth in Greece during WWII, Doxiadis became convinced that human settlements are susceptible of systematic investigation. Doxiadis being aware of the unifying power of systems thinking and particularly of the biological and evolutionary reference models as used by many famous biologists-philosophers of his generation, especially Sir Julian Huxley (1887–1975), Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky ForMemRS was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis...
(1900–75), Dennis Gabor
Dennis Gabor
Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics....
(1900–79), René Dubos
René Dubos
René Jules Dubos was a French-born American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal. He is credited as an author of a maxim "Think globally, act locally"...
(1901–82), George G. Simpson (1902–84), and Conrad Waddington (1905–75), used the biological model to describe the "Ekistic behavior" of Anthropos (the five principles) and the evolutionary model to explain the morphogenesis of human settlements (the eleven forces, the hierarchical structure of human settlements, dynapolis, ecumenopolis
Ecumenopolis
Ecumenopolis is a word invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous worldwide city as a...
). Finally, he formulated a general theory which considers human settlements as living organisms capable of evolution, an evolution that might be guided by Man using "Ekistic knowledge".
Etymology
Ekistics is derived from the GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
adjective οἰκιστικός more particularly from the neuter plural οἰκιστικά (as physics is derived from φυσικά, Aristotle). The ancient Greek adjective οἰκιστικός meant: "concerning the foundation of a house, a habitation, a city or colony; contributing to the settling." It was derived from οἰκιστής, an ancient Greek noun meaning "the person who installs settlers in place". This may be regarded as deriving indirectly from another ancient Greek noun, οἶκισις, meaning "building", "housing", "habitation", and especially "establishment of a colony, a settlement , or a town" (already in Plato), or "filling with new settlers", settling", "being settled". All these words grew from the verb οἰκίζω, to settle and were ultimately derived from the noun οἶκος, "house", "home" or "habitat.
The shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
contains a reference to an oecist, oekist or oikist, defining him as: "the founder of an ancient Greek ... colony". The English equivalent of oikistikh is ekistics (a noun). In addition, the adjectives ekistic and ekistical, the adverb ekistically, and the noun ekistician are now also in current use. The French equivalent is ékistique, the German oekistik, the Italian echistica (all feminine).
Ekistic Units
Doxiadis believed that the conclusion from biological and social experience was clear: to avoid chaos we must organize our system of life from Anthropos (individual) to Ecumenopolis (global city) in hierarchical levels, represented by human settlements. So he articulated a general hierarchical scale with fifteen levels of Ekistic Units :Names of Units and Population Scale
(final version, from C.A.Doxiadis' last book, ACTION for Human Settlements, p. 186, Athens Center of Ekistics, 1976):
Note: The population figures below are for Doxiadis' ideal future ekistic units for the year 2100 at which time he estimated (in 1968) that Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
would achieve zero population growth
Zero population growth
Zero population growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG , is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim....
at a population of 50,000,000,000 with human civilization being powered by fusion energy.
- Anthropos – 1
- room – 2
- house – 5
- housegroup (hamletHamlet (place)A hamlet is usually a rural settlement which is too small to be considered a village, though sometimes the word is used for a different sort of community. Historically, when a hamlet became large enough to justify building a church, it was then classified as a village...
) – 40 - small neighborhood (village) – 250
- neighborhood – 1,500
- small polis (town) – 10,000
- polisPolisPolis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...
(city) – 75,000 - small metropolis – 500,000
- metropolisMetropolisA metropolis is a very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications...
– 4 million - small megalopolis – 25 million
- megalopolisMegalopolis (term)A megalopolis is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term was used by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and...
– 150 million - small eperopolis – 750 million
- eperopolis – 7,500 million
- EcumenopolisEcumenopolisEcumenopolis is a word invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous worldwide city as a...
– 50,000 million
Details of the study of human settlement
One of the primary tenets of Ekistics is the development of human settlements based on hexagonal infrastructures. Rectilinear urban planning is shown to fail miserably in the ability to efficiently handle the various zones (residential, commercial, and industrial) in ways that support people that are collectively and demonstrably well and fit (integrated and balanced spirit, mind, and body). That the horrendus traffic in such places as Washington, DC and Los Angeles exist as a result of this type of 'methodology', or more aptly phrased a lack of foresight and control in urban design, is testament to the inability of rectilinear planning to adequately provide the means to effectively handle the growth of metropolitan settlements. Noded and hierarchical hexagons (think of a structured bi-directional tree, or map, in computer science, a more geometric neural network, or the refinement (not the Baroque adornment) of the Academie des beaux-arts d'architecture evolved into a hexagonal infrastructure), or weighted hexagons and connected based on their proximity (think of a circulatory system), relative importance to the central function of the settlement, e.g. a commercial center or an industrial sector, or 'neural center' (if you will), and flow of human bodies or material resources, not only provides for free-flowing circulation, but enables the expansion and promotion of hexagonal sectors to higher weights of arrangement as the settlements increases in population and/or importance. It is important to remember though that the ekistical planning and development of human settlements based on such a scientific approach need not be considered a conversion into a collective machine. Rather, Ekistics provides the means by which individual settlements based on their ethnic background and geographic location to incorporate their heritage while arranging it in a manner that supports their collective intent. Literally, much of the wasted time and resources can be significantly reduced so that the duty of the individual can be smoothly performed in order to allow ample time for the creative quality-of-life (story-telling, the arts - martial, applied, and fine -, cultivation of one's relationship with nature, relaxation time, and conversation, etc.), to emerge by means of the interpersonal relationships within and between settlement(s). Essentially, the structure of Ekistics enables humans to synergize their cultural heritage with technological evolution.Publications
Ekistics is a book by Konstantinos Doxiadis, published 1968. (often titled "Introduction to Ekistics" ISBN 0-09-080300-0)Ekistics is also an academic periodical, overlaping the fields of human geography, environmental psychology, and the sciences of the built environment
Built environment
The term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter and buildings to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks.The built...
, published monthly from Greece since the mid 1960s, in English.
See also
- ArcologyArcologyArcology, a portmanteau of the words "architecture" and "ecology", is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures would contain a variety of residential, commercial, and...
- ConurbationConurbationA conurbation is a region comprising a number of cities, large towns, and other urban areas that, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban and industrially developed area...
- Consolidated city-countyConsolidated city-countyIn United States local government, a consolidated city–county is a city and county that have been merged into one unified jurisdiction. As such it is simultaneously a city, which is a municipal corporation, and a county, which is an administrative division of a state...
- Global cityGlobal cityA global city is a city that is deemed to be an important node in the global economic system...
- MegacityMegacityA megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million people. Some definitions also set a minimum level for population density . A megacity can be a single metropolitan area or two or more metropolitan areas that converge. The terms conurbation,...
- Megalopolis (term)Megalopolis (term)A megalopolis is typically defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. The term was used by Oswald Spengler in his 1918 book, The Decline of the West, and Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and...
- Metroplex
- Metropolitan areaMetropolitan areaThe term metropolitan area refers to a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing. A metropolitan area usually encompasses multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships,...
- PermaculturePermaculturePermaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that is modeled on the relationships found in nature. It is based on the ecology of how things interrelate rather than on the strictly biological concerns that form the foundation of modern agriculture...
- Principles of Intelligent UrbanismPrinciples of Intelligent UrbanismPrinciples of Intelligent Urbanism is a theory of urban planning composed of a set of ten axioms intended to guide the formulation of city plans and urban designs. They are intended to reconcile and integrate diverse urban planning and management concerns...
- Human ecosystemHuman ecosystemHuman ecosystems are complex cybernetic systems that are increasingly being used by ecological anthropologists and other scholars to examine the ecological aspects of human communities in a way that integrates multiple factors as economics, socio-political organization, psychological factors, and...
External links
- World Society for Ekistics
- Ekistics Summary
- Ekistics, Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 11 Nov 2006
- Ekistic Units
- City of the Future